TRENT REZNOR’S YEAR ZERO HBO MINISERIES GETS A WRITER

Trent Reznor has been talking about doing a Year Zero television series on HBO for so long that, frankly, I had pretty much given up on the thing ever happening. But I guess Trent is a persistent dude — and that Oscar win probably didn’t hurt his ability to get shit done — so now the proposed series is taking a serious step towards becoming a reality: Jim Uhls, who was credited with writing the screenplay for the film version of Fight Club, has been hired to script the show, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

And that news makes me feel, well… eh. Note that I said above that Uhls was “credited” with writing Fight Club — and that’s because other writers, like director David Fincher’s go-to script doctor, Andrew Kevin Walker (Se7en, Sleepy Hollow, the most recent version of The Wolfman), did uncredited work on the screenplay. And Uhls’ only other produced feature credit is the movie Jumper, which, frankly, was a steaming pile of dogshit. Now, in all fairness, other screenwriters worked on that movie, too, so there’s no way to know what Uhls’ actual contributions were, the same way we don’t quite know how much of the heavy lifting Uhls actually did on Fight Club. My point simply being, we can’t say yet that Uhls is awesome or that Uhls sucks.

But presumably he gave good meeting, and may have even come with a recommendation from Fincher, who helmed Fight Club, and hired Reznor and his current creative partner, Atticus Ross, to score The Social Network and the upcoming The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. So maybe Uhls is an amazing talent after all.

Meanwhile, there’s still no proposed air date, or even production start date, which means this thing could still not happen. Companies hire writers to pen shit that never actually gets made all the time. In fact, it’s worth noting that just this past September, Reznor said that a different writer, Daniel Knauf (Carnivalé), was working on the series, which means that Uhls may technically already be the second writer on the project. So I guess we still need to wait and see how this plays out.

-AR

Additional reporting by Corey Mitchell.