Macon Blair Lands Luke Wilson, Tracy Morgan for Road Comedy

It does the heart good to see someone as deserving as Macon Blair meeting with the success that’s been coming to him. He was such a gnarly treat in Jeremy Saulnier’s Blue Ruin and Green Room (portraying an ill-prepared vengeance-seeker in the former, a neo-Nazi flunky in the latter) and then made waves of his own this past January when his directorial debut I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore took home the Grand Jury Prize for U.S. Dramatic Competition at the Sundance Film Festival. A new announcement today indicates that he’s getting bumped up to the major leagues, with a bigger budget and name-brand stars at his disposal.

Deadline has the down-low on Blair‘s next big project, a road comedy magnificently titled The S---heads. Luke Wilson and Tracy Morgan have signed on to star in the film that Deadline’s item describes as “The Last Detail by way of Bret Easton Ellis,” with the classically Blair-ian premise of “a pair of deeply unqualified bozos who’ve been hired to transport a troubled teenage millionaire to rehab.” Deeply unqualified bozos are to Macon Blair as icy blondes are to Hitchcock, or moody high-schoolers are to John Hughes — they’re pretty much his artistic medium. (The question of who will play the moneyed youth has yet to be resolved.)

At times like this, Hollywood seems like such a simple industry: Take note of an indie director with lots of talent, give him some money and well-known actors, and let him do his thing. Blair’s a fine filmmaker, but there’s no telling whether his blackly comic sensibility will translate into a broad appeal when placed on this wider stage. Here’s hoping it works!