Whit Stillman was never what you’d call a prolific filmmaker, but this is getting ridiculous. Stillman was something of a late bloomer in the first place; he started work on the Barcelona screenplay in the early 80s while working as a foreign sales agent in Spain, then set it aside when he returned to New York to run an illustration agency. He then spent four years working on the script for Metropolitan, which eventually became his debut feature in 1990, when Stillman was 38 years old. He received an Oscar nomination for the screenplay and was able to secure studio funding for Barcelona, which reached screens four years later.
Another four years passed before The Last Days of Disco was released in 1998, but Stillman couldn’t keep up the breakneck pace. It has now been a decade with no new Stillman, at least as far as the movies are concerned. Not that he’s been totally idle in the meantime; you may recall his peculiar decision to write a sort of post-modern novelization of The Last Days of Disco, which was published in 2000. (The book was written from the point of view of one the movie’s characters, who has been hired by Castle Rock Entertainment to adapt the film based on his own experiences.)
Two years ago, Stillman wrote an essay for The Guardian called “Confessions of a Serial Drifter,” in which he attempts to explain his protracted vanishing act. His first attempt at following up Last Days involved the Jamaican music he fell in love with while making that movie, but he put that aside when “a producer friend called to apologise for having claimed I was ‘attached’ to a project he was trying to get a studio to buy, which turned out to be Anchee Min's memoir of the Chinese cultural revolution, Red Azalea.” Stillman read Min’s book and decided he actually would like to be attached to the project. “I was a bit worried - I had liked the idea of doing the small, difficult Jamaican production before the enormous, frightening Chinese one, but the option on the Red Azalea book rights was ticking.”
That ticking sound turned out to be a time bomb. “Someone with a special interest in the subject returned to Los Angeles and interested a far more important director in the book, who then started a long behind-the-scenes campaign to get it for himself - or so rumour has it…Our project for Red Azalea came apart in early 2002. I still had the beloved Jamaican project to return to, and was lucky soon to find backers for that script.”
While that may be the case, the project has yet to surface. But Stillman’s name has since been attached to another novel adaptation. In May of 2006, Variety reported that Stillman had signed on to direct Little Green Men, based on the book by Christopher Buckley. All the project lacked was a leading man. “Whenever Mr. Comedy Star wants to do it, that's when we will," said the helmer. “If he wants, we can do it in his backyard, and there's even a part for his girlfriend.” Apparently Mr. Comedy Star has yet to find a hole in his schedule, because we’re still waiting.