Frank Miller to Adapt Raymond Chandler’s Trouble is My Business

In case you haven’t heard, comic book artist/writer and film writer/director Frank Miller is in demand. As in, high demand, and it couldn’t have happened to a more talented guy. Now Universal Pictures and Strike Entertainment has pegged Miller, who is currently working on a movie version of Will Eisner’s “The Spirit”, to adapt the Raymond Chandler novel “Trouble is my Business” as a starring vehicle for Clive Owen. Apparently The Powers That Be like the way Miller writes hardboiled prose (hell, the guy even wrote a graphic novel called “Hard Boiled”!), and they want something similar to what Owen turned in on “Sin City”. Moody, pulpy private dick stuff.

From Variety:

“Trouble Is My Business” was chosen partly because it provides the actor with a similar chance to frame the narrative with a compelling voiceover, using Chandler’s hardboiled prose as hard-drinking private eye Philip Marlowe cracks cases, busts heads and romances femme fatales in 1940s Los Angeles.

While many of Chandler’s novels have been turned into films, “Trouble Is My Business” is virgin territory.

Ooooh, virgins.

Ahem. Both men are pretty busy. Besides “The Spirit”, which has already cast Samuel L. Jackson as the heavy, Miller has his hands in writing and co-directing “Sin City 2″, and then there’s probably some consulting work on the movie adaptation of his “Ronin” graphic novel by that guy who did “Stomp the Yard” (God help us).

Owen, meanwhile, has “The Golden Age” with Cate Blanchett and the actionfest “Shoot-em Up” coming out, and is already getting ready for German filmmaker Tom Tykwer’s “The International”.