Here is some news that fans of late night paranormal radio will surely regale: it is been announced that Golden Globe winner and Academy Award nominee Paul Giamatti will star in a biopic film about legendary Coast to Coast radio host Art Bell, which will be directed by the directing team behind Scream and Ready or Not.
Amazon and Warner Bros. along with other studios have put bids in for a pitch that’s been making rounds in Hollywood.
DJ Art Bell was a pioneering radio broadcaster best known for his late-night paranormal talk show Coast to Coast AM. Bell’s fascination with the unknown led him to create a platform where he explored topics such as UFOs, government conspiracies, time travel, and supernatural phenomena.
Broadcasting from his home in Pahrump, Nevada, he developed a cult following with his deep, hypnotic voice and open-minded approach to discussing bizarre and unexplained mysteries.
I hope the movie manages to capture the importance of late night radio as a conduit for the spread of fringe information and conspiracy theories, in a time before the arrival of widespread computer communications. In a world before the blooming of a million paranormal podcasts and YouTube channels, old Art had the biggest horn on the air, and he used without filters it to promote all sorts of ideas which—for better or worse—have become ingrained in popular culture and have even influenced mainstream thinking in later years: Area 51 as a repository of alien technology recovered from crashed saucers, hybridization experiments conducted by unempathetic entities on hapless civilians all over the world, crop circles, cattle mutilations, secret cabals, and shadowy plans for a New World Order.
As Jacques Vallée (himself a regular guest in the show) described it in his published memoirs, Art Bell was a modern successor of the Old West charlatans peddling snake oil and tall tales at the edges of the frontier. And who better to capture that spirit than Paul Giamatti, not only one of the best actors of his generation but someone who also has a personal interest in strange things—which he regularly explores in his own podcast CHINWAG— and has even had a few experiencial brushes with the Other, such as an unexplainable disappearance of a prop knife right in the middle of a stage play:
I’m a big fan of Giamatti’s work and have even fantasized on watching him play the roles of different characters in paranormal history, like Charles Fort as he was writing The Book of the Damned, or Stanton Friedman as he re-discovered Roswell and tried to uncover the truth behind the MJ-12 papers. So watching him perform as the legendary Art Bell, the godfather of American paranormal radio, will be a special thrill.
