Academy Award-winning director Steven Soderbergh has announced his next project: t-shirts.
The director, best known for his work on Erin Brockovich , Ocean’s Eleven , and, most recently, HBO’s Liberace biopic, Behind the Candelabra , has set up an Internet store for selling memorabilia from his film shoots, as well as original photography.
Soderbergh says of his latest venture, “There are some very cool sites that sell film-related T-shirts—and I’ve bought stuff from them—but I feel like in general the design work is kind of inconsistent, and more importantly, the references tend toward the obvious,” Business Week reports.
“So this is our attempt to address these issues, and while some of the references are obvious, I think a few are going to be very, very hard to figure out,” Soderbergh elaborates. “One especially. I mean, there’s one that if you figure it out . . . man, you’re REALLY good.”
Soderbergh’s emphasis on the obscure is evident once you browse the merchandise. The t-shirts reference well-known films such as The French Connection and Psycho , but depict small details of the characters and plot that only a true movie buff would notice. One such shirt advertises “Sam Loomis Hardware”, in reference to Janet Leigh’s boyfriend in the aforementioned Alfred Hitchcock horror film.
When he’s not designing shirts, Soderbergh is continuing work on his novella, which is being published via his Twitter account. The novel has over twenty chapters, and began on April 28, following the tweet, “ ‘All humans are madmen alone’ Francois Mauriac.” The novella is entitled, “GLUE.”
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