Mar 21, 2007 05:50 PM
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Hollywood, 2:32 PM
Tue Feb 9
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Despite the fact that Studio 60 will eventually return from its indefinite, Haggis-enabling hiatus to triumphantly claim the Nielsen validation it so richly deserves, pragmatic showrunner Aaron Sorkin is nonetheless preparing for a post-60 existence. A recent career brainstorming session that may or may not have involved an unexpected psilocybin flashback induced by listening to his favorite Flaming Lips album seems to have yielded inspiration for a new creative direction in his life, as EW.com reports that Sorkin will be writing the script for a Broadway musical based on the Lips' Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. Even frontman Wayne Coyne, a guy known to cavort with pastel, flashlight-wielding teddy bears, seems a little freaked out by this development:
Sorkin's reps confirmed on Tuesday (March 20) that the West Wing creator has officially signed on to write the musical's script. ''Maybe that means they'll need to build a stage with lots of hallways on it,'' joked Coyne of Sorkin's fondness for walking-and-talking characters. ''It will be a giant tube that's always moving!'' [...]
Coyne compares the proposed concept to Terry Gilliam's dystopian sci-fi movie Brazil. ''There's the real world and then there's this fantastical world,'' explains Coyne. ''This girl, the Yoshimi character, is dying of something. And these two guys are battling to come visit her in the hospital. And as one of the boyfriends envisions trying to save the girl, he enters this other dimension where Yoshimi is this Japanese warrior and the pink robots are an incarnation of her disease. It's almost like the disease has to win in order for her soul to survive. Or something like that.''
While an "Illicit Mushrooms"-Era Sorkin may have connected with the Lips' trippy source material in a satisfying way, in the hands of his current killjoy incarnation, the hallucinatory tale of romantic entanglements and terminally ill Japanese warriors could quickly devolve into a preachy mess, filled with self-righteous monologues delivered by doctors lamenting the mismanagement of the giant, pink automatons who control the health care system.
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