RandomCha

I am beyond thrilled to announce that as my next film project, I will be adapting Gary Indiana’s wicked satire Depraved Indifference. This blurb from the publisher Semiotext(e) / Native Agents sums up its story quite effectively: “[The novel] follows Evangeline Slote, a dead ringer for Elizabeth Taylor ‘so compulsive she grifts herself when she runs out of other people’ through the circus of calamity that her compulsions invoke. Evangeline, or Evelyn Carson, or ‘Princess Shah Shah,’ among other pseudonyms, accompanied by her alcoholic husband Warren and fanatically devoted son Devin, moves from Las Vegas to Hawaii to Nassau in a maelstrom of forgery and fraud that constantly threatens to come undone. When Warren dies, Evangeline and her son embark upon an ever more brazen series of grifts, frauds, and crimes. Thriving on chaos, a master of manipulation and seduction, Evangeline concocts the scheme to end all schemes—which may take a murder to complete.”

John Waters has raved about it, saying, “Gary Indiana delves into the minds of his creepy, appalling characters with such probing wit and lip smacking glee that we actually enjoy our time with these amoral monsters.”

Deemed a “huge satirical talent” (New York Times), Gary Indiana is an American writer, actor, artist, and cultural critic. His other works include Horse Crazy, Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story, Do Everything in the Dark, Fire Season: Selected Essays, 1984–2021, I Can Give You Anything But Love, and Gone Tomorrow. Called one of “the most brilliant critics writing in America today” by the London Review of Books, “the punk poet and pillar of lower-Manhattan society” by Jamaica Kincaid, and “one of the most important chroniclers of the modern psyche” by The Guardian, Indiana remains both inimitable and impossible to pin down.

Depraved Indifference is a book that I’ve been slightly obsessed with for years (the original paperback edition of which sports a cover designed by Barbara Kruger!) and so I am super excited to get started. Stay tuned …