Long-Lost Script by Pulitzer-Winning Writer Finally Headed to Screen After 29 Years

A version of this story first appeared in the June 12 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.

Pulitzer winner Jules Feiffer, 86, who penned Mike Nichols‘ Carnal Knowledge and Robert Altman‘s Popeye, will have his 29-year-old script, Bernard and Huey, turned into a feature next year by director Dan Mirvish. (A Kickstarter campaign to help fund it has just launched.) In 1986, Showtime had commissioned the script about the downtown New York pals (characters in Feiffer’s old Village Voice cartoon strips) who in middle age find that women have changed — but they haven’t.

The cabler never bought the script due to a change of ownership, and while Feiffer’s original handwritten copy was housed with his papers at the Library of Congress, “he’d forgotten where it was,” says Mirvish, who says Knowledge was an influence on his last film, 2012’s Between Us, with Julia Stiles and Taye Diggs. “I’d heard about his unproduced screenplays and tracked Jules down. Then I set out to find it.” It eventually dawned on Feiffer, after Mirvish searched for months, that Michael Brandman, a previous producer on the project, had a copy of Bernard and Huey. Says Mirvish: “Luckily, it’s timeless, pure Jules, and it holds up.”

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