Alex Ross Perry Is Making a Pavement Movie

This month, the indie director Alex Ross Perry staged an unlikely musical theater show in New York: Slanted! Enchanted!: A Pavement Musical. The production is part of an unorthodox feature film on the beloved indie-rockers, according to a profile in this week’s New Yorker. Though details are thin, the movie will reportedly mix footage from the musical and its creation with elements of biopic and documentary. 

The film is reportedly based on an obscure directive from Stephen Malkmus, who, as profile writer Hannah Seidlitz reports, “said he wasn’t interested in hiring a documentary filmmaker. He wanted to hire a screenwriter. But he didn’t want a screenplay.” Perry, whose résumé includes Pavement’s “Harness Your Hopes” video and an array of beguiling movies starring Elisabeth Moss, decided to write something “legitimate, ridiculous, real, fake, idiotic, cliché, illogical,” he said. “You take the Todd Haynes Bob Dylan movie, the Scorsese documentary, the Pennebaker documentary, and the movie Dylan himself directed that everyone hates [Renaldo and Clara], and put them all in a blender.” For now, no release date has been set.

Read “Elisabeth Moss Is Essentially Courtney Love in the Rock’n’Roll Drama Her Smell,” about Perry’s 2019 film, on the Pitch.