There’s a story going around, thanks to a badly worded article in Variety, that the filmmaker Michael Moore is working on an animated version of his best-selling book, Stupid White Men.

In reality, the film has nothing to do with Michael’s book — Variety actually reported that it will be “similar in tone and content,” which is to say, it’s going to be a film which reflects Michael Moore’s beliefs and outlooks. Unfortunately, a few writers have construed this as meaning that it will be “a film based on Stupid White Men.”

But wait—there’s more!

You see, it can equally be said that the film will be “similar in tone and content to This Modern World by Tom Tomorrow.”

I apologize for not being able to share this news sooner, but I’ve been sworn to secrecy for the past year (and given that we’re still dealing with legal details and other preliminaries, it still feels a bit soon to be talking about it, but Variety has forced my hand).

The real story is that I’ve been collaborating on this screenplay with Michael (along with my partner in the online animation project, Harold Moss) since last October. Right now Michael is in the final stages (we hope) of nailing down financing, and (again, we hope) we should be in pre-production within a few months.

I can’t really give you any more details at this point, except to say that it will be a fictional, satirical narrative film, the look of which will be based on my work (I’ll be art directing this thing once we get rolling). I can say that it’s not going to have any talking penguins, but regular readers of This Modern World will recognize a few familiar elements — one of the central plot points is lifted straight out of one of my cartoons, for instance.

I’d say that you could call me for further details, but the fact is, this is about as much information as I can give you right now.

I’m off for Labor Day. Hope everyone has a good holiday.

Dan Perkins