I’d imagine that Fry would have done a decent job on the script and he’s absolutely correct that Robbie Coltrane would have made for a plausible Ignatius, circa 1980 that is. Robbie by the way does a very convincing American accent. But we know that the best Iggy would have been Charles Laughton! (in-joke). This said, the impulse to have CoD rendered as a movie is profoundly misconceived. Great literature is great because it’s self-complete in it’s own modality – the written word (second-rate literature can make for a great film). The probability of making a decent film is minimal, the upshot being that fans of CoD are bound to be disappointed and those that haven’t yet read CoD will have the experience tarnished. There is, however, a way to negotiate this: make a bio-pic of Toole. Between the fantastic work Cory MacLauchlin has done with “Butterfly” and Joe Sanford’s John Kennedy Toole: the omega point, the story is already in place. A good example of this would be Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (the full version available on YouTube) that references the literary aspect of Mishima in small stylized chunks interspersed at salient moments within the conventional biographic details.
On another note, I do wish there was some footage of Thelma Toole’s appearance on Tom Snyder.
manwithoutqualities 