A man once hailed as the greatest comedy filmmaker in the world, who gave away almost everything to search his soul, now wants to make a movie about a man who stopped speaking and riding in cars for 17 years. One of them is in Madison, carrying a film script in his backpack. I bought him a cup of coffee last week.
“He asked who I wanted to play me in the movie,” John Francis said. Francis, 65, is an associate visiting professor at the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, and one of the more intriguing characters ever to land on the UW-Madison campus.