With the success of The 40-Year-Old Virgin and now Knocked Up, the Judd Apatow imprimatur is safely established, and now the further comedic branding is really began to pop and sizzle, with the writer-director putting his stamp of namesake approval on projects as a producer. First it was Seth Rogen who rode this Apatow-inspired wave from costar to leading man, and now Jonah Hill is charting the same trajectory, with this August's Superbad and next year's Forgetting Sarah Marshall among the titles on his busy schedule.

Now, per MTV's Movie Blog site, Hill is having a fit of Pure Imagination, headlining the second of two scripts he's also written. This one — still shopping for a director, but described as marrying the sort of improvisational guy's guy comedy of Knocked Up with the flight-of-fancy of Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry — will star Hill as a traumatized twentysomething oaf whose only pal is of his own creation. When he strikes up a relationship with a girl, but starts to in turn wonder if she's real, he has only this imaginary friend to fall back on for advice. Presumably the friend won't be named Tyler Durden... but it'd be a lot cooler if he was. Filming looks to start in early 2008, for a possible release the same year.

It's been a while since we've had a crop of screen comedians with such an active hand in writing (rather than just "developing") their own material. It would be interesting if Rogen, Hill and fellow Apatow disciple Jason Segel could all hone their own popular voices and score big, but the long odds are against it.

        

 

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