A Tinseltown producer/friend emailed me last night with a tip. He said he’d been hearing buzz around a new Coen Brothers movie titled “The Zebra Striped Hearse.”
The film is a detective mystery based on Ross Macdonald‘s 1962 novel, the tenth book featuring his private eye, Lew Archer. The Coens have already completed the screenplay and are currently still in development mode on the project. Joel Silver is set to produce.
The official synopsis reads: Private eye Lew Archer is hired by a young co-ed to find out why her wicked stepmother is draining her trust, when a lunkhead surfer leads him to a dead body.”
Casting hasn’t happened yet and we’re still skeptical given the nature of all the Coen screenplays that have been thrown by the wayside these last few decades, but my source is telling me that Joel and Ethan are “very serious about reuniting for this one.”
Back in 2021, we didn’t really know why brother Ethan wasn’t part of Joel Coen’s “The Tragedy of Macbeth” adaptation. When the project was announced, it was a conspicuous absence, most notably because the Coen Brothers have always worked together (Joel is usually credited as the director, Ethan as the co-writer). In fact, they hadn’t missed a collaboration together since their 1984 debut “Blood Simple.”
Ethan currently has a Lesbian road movie he completed a few months ago. Post-production on that one is almost complete and the aim, I’m told, is possibly a Cannes premiere although nothing is currently set in stone.
The Coens haven’t collaborated on anything since 2018’s “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.” They are one of the great living American directors. To hear that they might very well be back together is joyous news. Their best films, in my opinion, of course, are “No Country For Old Men,” “Fargo,” “Inside Llewyn Davis,” “Barton Fink,” “The Big Lebowski,” and “A Serious Man” (shout out to the ultra-underrated “Burn After Reading”).