The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’s Internet trail

David Fincher has long been my favorite director. (That link will take you to one of the coolest blog posts about him.) Fight Club has long been my favorite movie. (And I loved reading Chuck Palahniuk books until recently when they almost became a test of who can get through them.) Anyway, Fincher doesn’t put out a whole lot of movies (that’s effectively six, not including the subject of this post), so when he does something, it’s always big news for me.

He got the reins to direct The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, an F. Scott Fitzgerald story about a dude who was born old and decrepid but then aged backward to his youth. I can only imagine how awesome this is going to be. First, check out the trailer:

(Larger HD versions available on Apple’s Web site.)

Did I also mention that Brad Pitt is my favorite actor? The movie’s just going to be outstanding; I’ve got high hopes. Anyway, that’s not all. Jonathan McNicol over at Never Mind That Now is reading the book in preparation for the movie (it’s a fairly short piece; don’t feel intimidated). But he’s not only reading it, he’s re-formatting it and posting it on his blog, chapter-by-chapter, day-by-day:

I’d love to read the short story in anticipation (six months’ worth of anticipation, I might add) of Fincher’s film, but I don’t want to read it in crappy, typo-riddled HTML on the UVA site. And I bet I’m not the only one who doesn’t, either. (The whole text is available on-line at the University of Virgina, but it’s in Times New Roman and looks like it’s from the ’80s. —David)

So I’ve decided to answer this (imagined) call to duty and have a little fun with it here on the site in the process. Over the next eleven weekdays, I’ll be whipping up proofread* and nicely (hopefully) typeset PDFs of each of the eleven chapters of “Benjamin Button” and posting them here for your reading/printing/downloading pleasure, kind of as a little serialized version of Fitzgerald’s work. That sounds like fun, right?

Anyway, I’ve decided to read it with him. The chapters are short and sweet and there are only 11, so go get started! Just read one a day and it makes it real easy.