Noah Baumbach’s White Noise will open the 60th New York Film Festival.
Break out the gas masks and dust off your Hitler Studies textbooks, Gothamites, because the second most anticipated literary adaptation of the fall (the first being Andrew Dominik’s NC-17 take on Joyce Carol Oates’ Blonde) is headed to NYC.
Yes, it was announced earlier today that Noah Baumbach’s White Noise will also open the 60th New York Film Festival on September 30.
Based on Don DeLillo’s National Book Award-winning 1985 novel, White Noise stars Adam Driver (Star Wars, Patterson) as Jack Gladney, a professor of the aforementioned Führer studies and father-of-four, “whose comfortable suburban college town life and marriage to the secretive Babette (Greta Gerwig) are upended after a horrifying nearby accident creates an airborne toxic event of frightening and unknowable proportions.”
In a statement following the announcement, Baumbach—a born and raised New Yorker who attended several incarnations of the festival as a teenager with his author/film critic father Jonathan Baumbach—seemed particularly delighted by the announcement:
In 1985 my father and I drove from Brooklyn to see Kurosawa’s Ran open the 23rd NYFF, the same year that he brought home the hardback of Don DeLillo’s White Noise … Opening the 60th NYFF with White Noise is truly special for me. This festival was part of my film education and has been a home for me and many of my movies over the years. I couldn’t be more excited and honored to return.
At this point I would normally share a snippet of footage from the literary adaptation in question, but, alas, despite the fact that we’re less than a month out from its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, the world is still waiting on the release of the first White Noise trailer.
In lieu of that absent footage, please enjoy this 2018 SNL sketch of Adam Driver being an oil man.
