Every single time that I write about the suicide deaths of Jeremy Blake and Theresa Duncan (lovers, companions, and “co-muses”), I almost feel as if I’m disrupting their already restless souls. So, I try not to think about them too much unless something–as in a certain “Law and Order” episode (allegedly based upon the ill-fated couple) or a Vanity Fair article that has simultaneously romanticized and pulverised their lives–has already pissed me off:
In June 2007, Theresa L. Duncan, a filmmaker, blogger, and a kindred soul on all matters related to Kate Moss and Pete Doherty, took her own life by way of a diphenhydramine and alcohol cocktail. A week later, Jeremy Blake followed her into the abyss by drowning himself in the Atlantic Ocean off Rockaway Beach. Within a few months, a random jackass began shopping a script based upon the couple’s imagined sex life around. Vanity Fair magazine waited about six months before painting a paranoid picture of Duncan and Blake in an article entitled, “The Golden Suicides.”
As mentioned above, there’s already been one attempt to make a movie about the Blake and Duncan saga, but the rather juvenile script quickly dropped off the radar. Now, a more serious and already financed attempt shall be made, in part by Bret Easton Ellis (American Psycho, Less Than Zero):
Gus Van Sant and author Bret Easton Ellis will team to write a feature about the double suicide of artists Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake.
PalmStar Entertainment, Celluloid Dreams and K5 Film have acquired screen rights to “The Golden Suicides,” a Vanity Fair article written by Nancy Jo Sales.
Van Sant, who helmed “Milk” and is prepping the Columbia Pictures drama “Restless,” is involved only as writer at this point.
Duncan and Blake formed a popular couple on the downtown New York and Venice, Calif., art scenes. She was one of the first videogame designers for girls, and his “digital paintings” — kaleidoscopic images shown on plasma screens — established him as a rising star on the circuit.
Bret Easton Ellis is an amazing storyteller, but he tends to gravitate towards the seedy underbelly of worlds where characters separate their daily lives from their hidden atrocities. So, I’m not sure where he’ll go with Blake and Duncan’s story, but if his basis is indeed the Vanity Fair article mentioned above, I’ll probably be Less Than Impressed with his portrayal of events.
Thanx to Flea.
8 comments
i understand your concern but unless the movie is being made by a group of scientologists, i don’t see what the problem is. the only way any kind of investigative light can be thrown on their deaths is by telling their story. if others drove them to their deaths, that needs to be uncovered. yes i understand the impulse to allow them to rest in peace and if they were my beloved, i would want this for them as well. but so many were genuinely shocked by her decision to end her life coming on the heels of a period of believing that she was being persecuted by cult members, that perhaps their souls won’t find peace until the truth is set free. just saying.
Admittedly, I hadn’t thought of it that way. I do hope you are correct.
Who and who killed themselves? And anyone else who didn’t know them should care why? Not to seem harsh (well, maybe) but people do themselves in all the time (and it is usually a permanent solution to a temporary problem, suggesting they lack the wits to even conceive that things can often get better as well as get worse)… and to be honest if their only qualification for being noteworthy is being self absorbed, I am very minded to not really care what the hell their ‘story’ was.
Is it just me, or do those two look like characters from The Royal Tenenbaums? And yeah….never heard of em.
“Celluloid and sand, coyote fur and car exhaust, contrail cloud and chlorine, bitter orange and stage blood and one bushel of ghostly, shivery night-blooming jasmine flowers like blown kisses from the phantoms of the ten thousand screen beauties who still haunt our hills every full moon because they think it’s a stage light.”
They look exactly like those characters, that has to be a Halloween pic oor a costume party
There seems to be much 3rd party hearsay about their paranoia surrounding the church of scientology and odd behavior because of this perceived abuse by the church. The strange thing is neither of them seemed to have articulated the exact things going on or their close friends could not articulate these problems to others after their death, or any information about people who were harassing them. No note or answers to these questions from either of them either in suicide notes or conversations the last time they spoke to anyone. Folie aux deux? Will we ever really know? They both left far to many questions and very few answers.
A movie no matter who makes it will simply be conjecture about how these two bright stars flamed out.
…may break my bones…you get the message. Name calling is beyond juvenile, it’s infantile.
Well, Duncan and Blake – the Movie Thriller is back on the radar.
All the scenes are posted on http://sites.google.com/site/duncanandblakemoviesite/home
and the You Tube video can be seen at
http://www.duncan-and-blake.com
Come on see the promo.
Questions: If I’m a random jackass or creep who just wrote a script, and you’re a bully, then what does that make Van Sant and Ellis?
P.S. My script ain’t all about their sex life or ‘Milk’. That was a scene from the First Ten Pages teaser that NYMag printed.
BTW, yep, It’s still for sale to the highest bider
…Major Producers Only! Tah! Tah!