Charlie Kaufman's Frank Or Francis has either fallen apart or we're all living in it right now

By Sean O'Neal | June 26, 2012 | 5:38pm

Aux Features Film

Suggesting that musical satires of Hollywood involving animatronic screenwriting heads and talking Romanian ghost thumbs may be a tougher sell than you'd imagine, Charlie Kaufman's Frank Or Francis appears to have collapsed under the weight of its own ambition even before some critic got to say that. Prospective co-star Elizabeth Banks tells Moviefone that the film—which also had Steve Carell, Jack Black, Kevin Kline, Kate Winslet, Catherine Keener, and Nicolas Cage attached—"fell apart at the last minute," despite being ready to go and most of its principals saying repeatedly that they were excited to begin.

Still, perhaps it's not completely over: Banks was slightly less fatalistic about the film's prospects when she spoke to Ain't It Cool earlier this week, saying only that "it's been pushed" while its surely very complicated scheduling issues are sorted out, adding, "You can’t believe everything on the Internet!" And, given that the film is a commentary on the relationship between movie directors and armchair analysts on the web, it's possible that this whole story is just one more layer in Kaufman's metatextual construct in which we are now participating. We're all in a movie, maybe!