Why The End of the Tour isn't really about my friend David Foster Wallace

It’s not just that Wallace’s literary estate objected to the film, though there is that. The script, the angle, Segel’s performance – it gets everything wrong

In the late fall of 1997 I got a phone call from David Foster Wallace. Wallace had been a model of gentlemanly calm throughout the editing process on his essay about David Lynch for Premiere magazine, where I worked at the time. (It wasn’t until our third session that he stopped calling me “Mr Kenny.”) But now he sounded close to panic. A friend of his, Wallace said, had been listening to an NPR segment about the Noah Baumbach film Mr Jealousy and had heard one of the actors name-check Wallace as an inspiration for the character he played. Wallace was freaked. And he didn’t live near a cinema where the indie film was playing. So he asked me to do him a favour and investigate the situation.

A day or so later, I assuaged his fears by assuring him that Chris Eigeman’s character in the picture was not in any way mimicking Wallace. I even (somehow) checked out the NPR segment, and it turned out the invocation of his name had been pretty generic: Eigeman had described playing a male “voice of his generation” type of writer, mentioning both Wallace and Jay McInerney, the latter a fellow whose public persona is almost the precise inverse of Wallace’s.

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