On the heels of his tiny debut as a Marvel superhero in the first trailer for director Peyton Reed’s Ant-Man, Paul Rudd has, according to a story at Variety, signed on to headline an upcoming adaptation of Jonathan Evison’s 2012 bestseller The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving. The book is described on the author’s official site as follows:
For Ben Benjamin, all has been lost—his wife, his family, his home, his livelihood. Hoping to find a new direction, he has enrolled in a night class called the Fundamentals of Caregiving. There he learns the basics of the art of inserting catheters while avoiding liability, and he is instructed about professionalism and how to keep an emotional distance between client and provider
But when Ben is assigned his first client—a tyrannical nineteen-year-old boy named Trevor who is in the advanced stages of Duchenne muscular dystrophy—he soon discovers that the endless service checklists have done nothing to prepare him for the reality of caring for a fiercely stubborn, sexually frustrated teenager who has an ax to grind with the whole world.
Over time, the relationship between Ben and Trev, which had begun with mutual misgivings, evolves into a close friendship, and the traditional boundaries between patient and caregiver begin to blur. The bond between them strengthens while on a road trip to visit Trev’s ailing father—a journey diverted by a series of bizarre must-see roadside attractions that propels them into an impulsive adventure disrupted by one birth, two arrests, a freakish dust storm, and a six-hundred-mile cat-and-mouse pursuit by a mysterious brown Buick Skylark. By the end of that journey, Trev has had his first taste of love, and Ben has found a new reason to love life.
The big screen version, which is set to begin production later this month in Atlanta, Georgia, will be both written and directed by Rob Burnett, who is best known for his Emmy Award-winning work as Executive Producer on “The Late Show with David Letterman.” Donna Gigliotti and James Spies are both set to produce the Levantine Films and Worldwide Pants production.
