Alert Janeite Elizabeth found an interview with filmmaker Lloyd Kaufman (maker of The Toxic Avenger among other unabashed B-movies) at the Onion’s A.V. Club during which he reveals plans to make the anti-Becoming Jane. (fair warning: unladylike language in the article.)

I’ve hired a guy to write the script for a Jane Austen movie that stars Jane Austen called Schlock And Schlockability: The Revenge Of Jane Austen, where Jane Austen and Shakespeare and Thomas Hardy and Mark Twain and others are up in heaven, and they look down and see the baby food that is being made of their revolutionary work. Pride And Prejudice was very hot stuff in its day, and the stuff that’s being made now is absolute pap. So, they’re upset about it, and they draw straws, and Jane Austen is sent down to earth. She’s transformed into a Tromette on the way down with some Jackie Chan powers—gotta have the Hong Kong flavor—and she kicks cultural ass.

Elizabeth seemed a bit taken aback by the idea of this movie, but not only would we pay to see this, we want a role as Jane’s snarky sidekick, or maybe the geek who sits in the support truck and sends messages via headphone and gives her cool gadgets to blow things up. We’ve already got a Cluebat of Janeite Righteousness and a Treo like Jack Bauer (and ours has Jane’s picture on it!).

Unfortunately Mr. Kaufman blows a really brilliant idea by attempting to recruit Victoria Beckham, of all people, to play Jane Austen. May we suggest Rose McGowan, who already has action-heroine cred and also has expressed interest in doing the Austen movie thang?

P.S. Pray note the date of the A.V. Club article: August 1997. The Sun article is from 2003. Of course, in The Year of Jane Austen, who knows what might happen?

P.P.S. Calling out AustenBlog’s resident screenwriter, Cub Reporter Heather L., for some proposed scenes…

An Alert Janeite pointed us to an article in Canada’s National Post that started out to be about the sale/non-sale of the Rice Portrait and ended up as a diatribe about beauty vs. intelligence, not to mention: isn’t it lucky that Jane Austen was plain so that she didn’t marry and could write her books?

While plain women like Austen are disadvantaged in the mating game, they find compensation in their unfettered access to whatever creativity it is in their gift to exploit. But extraordinary beauty in a woman usually turns her attention away from objective self-expression, condemning her to a life of relentless self-consciousness and an obsession with loving mirrors — real ones, and those contained in other peoples’ eyes.

As in Austen’s time, most of us know our place in this unfair but unchangeable aesthetic scheme. But sometimes, awkwardness arises when beauties flout duties: that is to say, when public symbols mistake reverence for their beauty as validation of their inner worth, and think they should be looked to for inspiration as well as being looked at. Think, for instance, of elegant Princess Diana and Margaret Trudeau in her ravishing young womanhood.

As a princess or political consort, Austen wouldn’t have driven men ga-ga. But since it is far more terrible to imagine an aesthetic world without Elizabeth Bennet than the tabloids without their princesses and trophy wives, how lucky that my favourite literary character’s creator was just plain Jane.

When it comes to reasons for Jane Austen’s failure to marry (and why it should be portrayed as a “failure” escapes our understanding), it’s likely that “she wasn’t pretty enough” ranked way, way under “she had no fortune.”