Some days, it seems like every other story on this site is about an adaptation of some kind. Young adult fantasies, mystery thrillers, romantic epics, comic series and video games are an endless river of original stories for filmmakers to swoop in and snatch the rights for. Truthfully, this is a process that is usually as frustrating as it is exciting, seeing as how often the visual medium can destroy the tone and narrative of the source material. But when that source material is the hilarious “children’s book” Go the Fuck to Sleep, one has to wonder how a film could ever exist.
Fox 2000 has certainly raised expectations by hiring one of the funniest guys on the planet to adapt it. Deadline reports Ken Marino (Wanderlust) and his wife Erica Oyama will be adapting Adam Mansbach’s book, whose lovingly illustrated pages by Ricardo Cortes will probably not make it to the storyboards.
The book’s brief narrative is a bedtime story that follows a series of nature scenes balanced with an increasingly frustrated series of demands for a child to follow the titular advice. A frustrated father is seemingly the only take-off point that a feature film could possibly follow.
But Marino, who co-wrote Wanderlust, Role Models, and some episodes of Cartoon Network’s Childrens Hospital, among other things, is just the kind of comedic mind that could do for this book what Phil Lord and Chris Miller did for Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. His current writing and acting can be seen in the webseries-turned-E! comedy Burning Love, and he will soon be back in a few theaters in the indie horror comedy Milo.
It will be hard for Marino to get the book’s fans to do anything other than think about Samuel Jackson’s voiceover for the audiobook, which was altogether more successful than peanut butter meeting jelly. Check it out below, but keep the volume down if you’re anywhere important, as it’s NSFW.
