Paramount Pictures has bought David Grann's manuscript, The Lost City of Z, for Brad Pitt's Plan B production company, with the actor possibly starring as explorer Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett.

Fawcett (in)famously vanished in the 1920s on one of his expeditions to the Amazon with his son Jack and friends. How believable is it for anyone who looks like Brad Pitt to disappear into anonymity, I don't know. I'm pretty sure blind hermit howler monkeys would notice. But putting aside that slight sense of disbelief, this is a role I'm actually interested in seeing him try to pull off.

In the film industry, there are a few choice paths for the devastatingly pretty or the stunningly handsome to take. You can coast on your looks, or you can try to be taken seriously by taking on roles that require you to be fat, foreign, fugly, or crazy. Pitt's tried in the past for fugly with his role as Early Grayce in 1993's Kalifornia, hit it big with crazy a couple of years later in Twelve Monkeys, and tries his best to do an impression of "Brad Pitt as an Austrian mountain climber" in Seven Years in Tibet. With Fawcett, he might get to tackle at least two of those characteristics, as the good Colonel was British and something of a "creative thinker." According to published reports, he was planning to found an Amazonian cult/secret community based on the tenets of theosophy and the worship of his own son. Fawcett was also an older gentleman at the time of his disappearance, although it remains to be seen whether Pitt will age himself enough to be the father of a grown man, or if that aspect of the Colonel's life will be lost like so many wayward explorers in the jungle.