PT Anderson prepping his next film, wants Robert Downey, Jr. to star?

Back in September, Jeremy Renner confirmed what most of us suspected: Paul Thomas Anderson’s planned follow-up to THERE WILL BE BLOOD, an untitled dissection on Scientology, isn’t happening. As Renner told it, during rehearsals he, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Anderson couldn’t “overcome” unnamed obstacles. With that project gathering dust on a shelf somewhere, Anderson has now turned his attention elsewhere, namely Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 novel “Inherent Vice.”

New York magazine is reporting that Anderson has written a treatment based on the novel and may already be working on the script. His agents are reportedly working to get Robert Downey, Jr. attached to star.

The story takes place through the summer of 1969 through to 1970 during when the arrest and trial of the Manson family was the big news. It follows Larry ‘Doc’ Sportello, a pothead private investigator who “finds himself drawn into a bizarre tangle of motives and passions whose cast of characters includes surfers, hustlers, dopers and rockers, a murderous loan shark, a tenor sax player working undercover, an ex-con with a swastika tattoo and a fondness for Ethel Merman, and a mysterious entity known as the Golden Fang, which may only be a tax dodge set up by some dentists.”

It’s been described as BIG LEBOWSKI meets FLETCH meets film noir but Anderson will certainly put his own spin on Pynchon’s material.