I realize that, generally, old car brochures are very rarely used as the basis for major motion pictures. But maybe that’s a mistake? Movies have certainly been made on flimsier pretenses – there’s been multiple movies made based on board games, and I’m pretty sure there’s currently talks to bring some well-known cold cuts to the silver screen, at least if that treatment for Pastrami: the Movie I found in a Kinko’s recycling bin is any clue. Anyway, today I’d like to pitch this 1961 NSU Prinz 4 brochure as a concept for Wes Anderson’s next movie.
Yes, I’m not just pitching this concept to anyone, I’m pitching it to auteur-director Wes Anderson, maker of such films as The Fantastic Mr. Fox and even movies with actual people, like The Royal Tenenbaums. I think his particular aesthetic sense is very compatible with this brochure for this wonderful little rear-engined German car, and I think he could do this justice.
First, of course, we need to handle the casting for the main characters:
So, I think, going from left to right, we’d cast Alexander Skarsgård as Albemarle T. Blond over there, then maybe Aubry Plaza as Clametha Raventresses in the turquoise. Next, let’s say Moustache T. Fumbleforth there could be played by Stephen Yeun (he was great in Beef), and for the kid, let’s call him Chockful Damptrou, how about that Jeremy Maguire kid? And finally, I think Noirina S. Butterscaphe on the end would be played by Emma Stone.
That’s pretty star-studded, isn’t it? I bet Wes can work with these people, even if they’re not quite in his usual company of actors. Tell you what, just to keep Wes happy, let’s say Bill Murray will do the voice of the NSU Prinz 4.
Looking at these pictures, this picture pretty much writes itself, except for the dialogue and plot and characterization and setting and mise-en-scène and some other details. But it has that Wes Andersen look, and that’s what matters here. Is the kid the offspring of Moustache and Noirina? Maybe! Are Albemarle and Clametha an item? Possibly? The sky’s the limit here!
Look! The kid can have an exciting 20-minute scene where he packs and repacks that deep, roomy trunk until he gets it just perfect, which he does, after abandoning that birdcage and possibly setting that canary free, in what will no doubt be a powerful, beautiful scene.
Also, look how well that trunk gets packed!
Hot damn I love a well-packed trunk. Holy crap that’s satisfying. This is the scene I’ll be rewinding.
Wes Anderson loves cutaways, right? You know he does. This brochure offers some fantastic cutawayotunities that a director like Anderson can absolutely take advantage of.
In this scene, Clametha is discussing something with the Prinz, something important. It may have to do with whatever is in that box. The Prinz would have to be a major character here, as the brochure is literally about the car, but I think that’s what’s going to make this whole thing great.
Man, I can’t wait. Does Wes Anderson know how to get ahold of me? He must, right? I want to get this thing greenlit ASAP.
WARNING: minimally/tangentially related comment. Please don’t read if such stuff makes you irate, or even just cranky. Thank you.
I usually find Wes Anderson movies to be enjoyable entertainment, perhaps even charming sometimes, though I don’t expect he’ll ever surpass Rushmore for sheer emotion and verve. All I know of Stephen Yeun is The Walking Dead (of course) but I know he’s done a lot since then. I never heard of Beef (I’ve never heard of a lot of things media-wise) but I’m downloading S01 now based on Jason’s say-so. Though like almost everything I download, chances are extremely high that it’ll just sit on a hard drive unwatched indefinitely, in lieu of my usual diet of short Youtube videos about old/weird cars, science/space, global politics/history, machines/planes/boats/military stuff, and (of course, again) lots of police bodycam videos, which have pretty much spoiled me for most scripted drama.
I’m so predictably middle-aged: I’m shocked there’s not a homebrew setup in my garage, churning out mediocre IPAs that my friends grudgingly imbibe while trying not to wince in front of me.
PS: since the door is wide open, there are currently two birds inside my house at the moment (I’m dressed/shaven early on a Sunday only because I’m waiting for a guy to call me about a blue manual ’85 Volvo 245 he’s almost certainly selling to someone else at this exact moment). One of the birds is just pecking at the rug in front of the fireplace per usual, but the other one is noisily demonstrating entanglement theory in the kitchen window blinds. The downstairs door is always open most of the day/all year, with my dog sitting just outside as I drink coffee and peck away (myself) at the internet while listening to The Dylan Hours on KCSN.
I too will rewind the scene of Chockful Damptrou packing and repacking the Prinz’s trunk, though (if I’m being honest) I’ll also likely spend a bit of time rewinding the scene with Clametha Raventresses’ décolletage. I also appreciate Jason doing his part to keep Bill Murray gainfully employed. 😉
Replied just to add the bird in the blinds then confusedly flew into the bedroom and eventually shat all over the bed, so now I’m spending Sunday doing laundry.
And they wonder why “birdbrain” is an insult…
😀 I’m finding other spots where it pooped while it was flailing around in the house. Lots of extra laundry/cleaning. I won’t be so chill when they visit from now on.
I’ve literally had at least one at a time in the house (again: usually just innocently pecking away on the rug about six feet away from where I’m sitting, pecking away on this keyboard) every day for the past few weeks (maybe it’s extra-bird season in LA, I dunno).
As someone who has cats I can only add:
Thank Christ for enzyme cleaner!
They all have such slender legs! And the luggage to fit that way had to bespoke for that car. I don’t know about the casting, but both women in the ad were quite comely.
Am I the only one who finds every single Wes Anderson film to be absolutely insufferable?
You might well be…
That’s fair. I’m used to having unpopular opinions.
Haha, I am a fan, however I also get that his aesthetic is laid on especially thick and I would not be surprised to see a few Wes Anderson hate threads out there 🙂
Fantastic Mr Fox > his other work. His other stuff is basically fodder for taking a graphic designer out for a date to the cinema.
I like his early stuff but at times in the later ones he’s getting close to self-parody.
Meteor City definitely felt like self-parody to me.
No matter the cast, it’ll definitely be a better movie than The French Dispatch.
Lets ignore that Jerry Maguire kid is probably about 35 years old at this point lol
I thought that too, but I expect some kind of spin-off/sequel/series remake is what’s being referred to. Though I could be (and am often) wrong. 🙂
This just reminds me of a dream that I was traveling up 99 through the central valley, over and over, stopping at motels with those weird ass drive under overpasses.
Wow. I remember 99 before I-5 was done. Sometimes in the summer in a car with no a/c. Good times!
Sorry, Jason, but Clametha Raventresses seems way too happy to be played by Aubrey. I’m going with Rachel Brosnahan instead. And I’m getting sick of seeing Emma Stone in everything, so let’s go with a different Emma for Noirina S. Butterscaphe, Watson. She’s been lazing around way too much the past decade anyway.
As for Moustache T. Fumbleforth, Steven Yeun is too yeun, er young, for this obviously graying older gent. Let’s go with a different frequent Anderson collaborator, Jeffrey Wright. Alexander Skarsgard is perfect, so we leave him in. As others have said, the kid from Jerry Maguire is way too old (damn, he’s 35!!!). How about Noah Schnapp from Stranger Things? Well, damn, he’s 21! Oh well, he still looks young.
What is wrong with you, Jason? Alexander Skarsgard!?! Why, it’s so obviously a Michael Fassbender role that I question whether you should even be casting movies at all!
Cripes, you’re so right! 🙂
Oh yeah, Pastrami, that roman à clef about Ken Forkish and Nick Zukin, sort of a hipster babe-in-the-woods Kitchen Confidential set in Portland OR. Writer was trying to ride multiple hype waves but the timing was off, Portland got expensive, Tony Bourdain died, and the zeitgeist moved on.
Some say S2 of The Bear was cribbed from Pastrami.
Ken Gordon. Ken Forkish was the pizza guy. And it was Season 1.
Dang, how could I mix up those names? I still think about all the times I was watching someone slice pastrami at the Stark Street place and wishing I could just ask for a bunch of debris on rye.
(Also: NO WAY! I just discovered that you’re posting pretty photos on Insta/FB. And that reminds me, a few years ago there was this guy selling decent pastrami made in a Big Chief smoker, wonder if I should try that?)
On an unrelated tangent, I’m always getting Wes Anderson and Wes Craven mixed up.
That sounds fun. I love the one where Owen Wilson breaks the fourth wall and brutally murders his brothers on that train in India as Owen Wilson. Very experimental.
Starring Milla Jovovich, directed by Paul W.S. Anderson.
Tilda Swinton as the boy. She can do anything!
I owned the 4-cylinder version of this car, and I can say that that array of luggage would never have fit in the trunk. The fuel tank took up two suitcases worth of space in that frunk. This appears to be a 2-cylinder Prinz, which I’m not so familiar with, but this cutaway shows no fuel tank at all.
It’s a German car, why not try for an all German cast? Michael Fassbender for the blond guy and Christoph Waltz for Mr Moustache. Diane Kruger for black dress lady. And… I think I just expended my well of known german actors.
I also came here specifically to cast Fassbender.
That last image looks like the man (a butcher?) is delivering groceries in the box, though it’s hard to tell what’s in it. Meanwhile, it’s not hard to tell that he’s thinking about delivering another kind of groceries in another kind of box. He could be a doctor, chemist or a mechanic, heck practically anything as Europeans are fond of dressing everyone in work coats.
Wes Anderson movies often centre around a certain type of middle-class failure or decline, the end of an era. He needs to make a movie about the NSU Ro 80, but include this as a little aside, a document of better times.
As a large(ish) person, I’m disturbed by the way car ads often feature small, undersized hominids (no offense) in order to make the cars look roomier. Take up the torch(!) and expose this nefarious manufacture-wide conspiracy of scale-disparity!
The box could push this towards a 7even-esque denouement.
(/Prinz looks inside box, sees battery of his wife Prinzess)
(/Bill Murray voice) Noooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!
Prinz proceeds to run over all the characters, stuffs them into frunk and drives away, his visage now stained with the blood of his victims.
Fin
“Wait, it’s a head? I was due for an engine rebuild, anyway! Man, RockAuto is quick!”
The 1961 NSU Prinz 4 certainly has the charm, grace, and swagger of a star, perhaps too much so. Really asking the cast to take quite the risk of being hopelessly outshined. There are far too few creative geniuses that could have composed this post without being accused of dipping into expired pain meds. Maybe Larry David or Bernie Sanders (they’re related you know)
Jason, I’m surprised you didn’t casually mention your cameo as teletype mechanic #4.
I need such a film, as their are simply too few cutawayotunities in my daily life!
No notes on casting choices. But speaking of Alexander Skarsgård, y’all should be watching Murderbot as he’s in it and it’s good.
I’ll say that I’m not
horizontallyopposed to you air-cooling these casting suggestions.It’s becoming clear to me that the reason old brochures were hand drawn was so they could create Tardis-like trunks and frunks that violate all laws of the physical universe.
Nary a tracksuit in sight, but I guess the bellhop getup with the stripey legs is close enough. Approved.
If I had to cast, the mustached man must be Benicio Del Toro given his prevalence in Anderson films, and in my head Michael Cera is the kid, yes I know he’s a full grown adult with a kid and all that, but it’s Michael Cera, so I think we can all give it a pass.
The actor Torch went for is a little bit old himself. I’m thinking of Charlie, the one white kid in Abbott Elementary, but my Google-fu is lacking and I keep getting hits on the Always Sunny crossover (not a tall wagony thing).
Moustache man needs to be French, to set up a throwaway line about how the cutaway’s rear edge is clean enough to be a rear door shutline if NSU had ever made a 4-door Prinz, to which the Chief Engineer (*this* would be Jason’s cameo, and played as an homage to Josef Ganz) would reply “Ja, if ve vere French!”
But given how Jason found it, it’s been in development hell for a while, since Kinko’s existed and possibly while he was living in LA where you’d expect to find scripts abandoned in every paper recycling bin.