Variety is reporting that Jon Heder (Napoleon Dynamite, Woke Up Dead) is set to star in Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede (the novel won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best SF Novel in 1992). The film is an adaptation of the Bradley Denton novel (and may actually be called simply Alive and Well), with a script by Robert Rugan (Alice’s Misadventures in Wonderland), who will direct the film.
Variety says that Heder will shoot the film “when he has time off from the untitled sitcom he stars in,” which will air on Comedy Central. Molly Mayeux (Homeland, I Shot a Man in Vegas) is producing the film with her producer partner Michael Hennessy (Trailer Park of Terror). Brian Bullock of Caspian Pictures is the executive producer.
Variety describes the story thus: “In the film, Heder will play Oliver Vale, an average geek whose uneventful life changes when Buddy Holly turns up on every TV channel and declares that Vale is the only one who understands why this is happening—which causes Vale to be pursued by a mob of disguised aliens.”
Cory Doctorow, who first alerted us to the news on Boing Boing, gives the book a much fuller description: “Buddy Holly is the story of Oliver Vale, whose mother was obsessed with Buddy Holly, and who one day discovers that Buddy Holly is on the TV, on every TV, on every station, with a guitar around his neck, standing in a bubble on the surface of Ganymede, disoriented, musical, and periodically reading out a sign saying that further information is available from Oliver, and supplying his home address.
“The entire world chases Oliver at this point: cops, radio cops, televangelists and their flocks, aliens—you name it. And Oliver begins a road-trip across America to Lubbock, Texas, there to exhume Buddy Holly’s corpse and verify for himself that the famous musician is not on a distant, airless moon.”
Doctorow goes on to say of the book’s author, “Bradley Denton is a stone comic genius and no two of his books are alike, but this is the one I love—I worship—as the apotheosis of a certain kind of gonzo, brilliant, marvellous thing that is to American science fiction comedy what Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers series is to British sf comedy.”
Doctorow also reports that Denton is offering free pdf copies of the book from his web site, but at press time, his web site is moving very slowly.
In addition to the Campbell, Denton won the World Fantasy Award for Best Collection for The Calvin Coolidge Home for Dead Comedians in 1995, and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for Best SF Story for “Sergeant Chip” in 2005.