Joaquin Phoenix back as Edgar Allan Poe?

Good news! Joaquin Phoenix will come out of hiding and his “rap career” to be in a movie.

According to Resul Pookutty, the sound recordist for SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE, just got a job working on the adaptation of THE BEAUTIFUL CIGAR GIRL by Daniel Stashower. In the film, Phoenix will play the role of Edgar Allan Poe.

This is what Pookutty had to say, “I couldn’t be happier because I am doing a period film. It is a very special challenge because I have to recreate the sound textures of New York in 1854. It’s an adaptation of The Beautiful Cigar Girl by Daniel Stashower and based on an eerie real-life experience of author Edgar Allen Poe which happened just months before his death. Joaquin plays Edgar Allen Poe.”

Here’s a brief summary of the book’s plot:

“In July 1841, Mary Rogers, a beautiful young New York cigar clerk, was strangled and her body tossed in the Hudson River, a crime so ghastly that it pitted the city’s sensational tabloids against each other in a contest of rumor and speculation. Due to a bungled investigation from start to finish, the murder appealed enough to Edgar Allan Poe that he co-opted it for ”The Mystery of Marie Rogêt.” Knocking back and forth between the unending case and Poe’s utterly depressing life cycle of debt, poverty, and alcoholism, Daniel Stashower’s Cigar Girl takes a solidly comprehensive look at the predecessor to today’s all-too-common media crime frenzies.”

Welcome back non-haggard looking Joaquin. We missed you.