David Foster Wallace’s family is not happy with Hollywood’s plans to turn his life into a movie.
Funnyman Jason Segel stars as the famous author in the upcoming film "The End of the Tour." Currently in production, the flick is loosely based on reporter David Lipsky’s (played by Jesse Eisenberg) unpublished 1996 Rolling Stone article, which was later turned into a book, centering around a road trip with Wallace and focusing on Wallace's novel Infinite Jest.
But Wallace’s family and the David Foster Wallace Literary Trust claim he would never have agreed to the film, nor do they support its making.
Wallace’s estate released a statement to the Los Angeles Times on Monday, which reads, in part:
The Trust was given no advance notice that this production was underway and, in fact, first heard of it when it was publicly announced. For the avoidance of doubt, there is no circumstance under which the David Foster Wallace Literary Trust would have consented to the adaptation of this interview into a motion picture, and we do not consider it an homage.
In March, an extra on the film leaked a video from a set in the Mall of America:
Wallace, who suffered from near-crippling anxiety and depression, took his own life in 2008 at the age of 46. Toward the end of his life, he reportedly hadn’t been able to write for over a year, according to Salon.
In the wake of Wallace’s suicide, publisher Michael Pietsch (of publishing house Little, Brown, and Company), who had worked with the author for more than a decade, told Salon, “I hope he’ll be remembered in the way that every writer hopes to be remembered. ... That people will continue to read his books. His mind is there on every page. Infinite Jest, in particular, is one of the great works of a mind in our time.”