I make no secret of the fact that I’m entranced by Bradley Cooper’s Popsicle blue eyes.   Unfortunately, for as long as this fixation continues, you’re going to read every Cooper story I can dig up.

Cooper appeared on Charlie Rose last night, and proved there was a brain behind those baby blues as he talked about Paradise Lost (he implied he was a lock for it and The Crow, though it doesn’t sound like Lost has a greenlight yet), The Elephant Man, and that his newfound popularity has helped open a few doors.   One of those doors is potential screenwriter and director.

Cooper is a huge fan of Dan Simmons’ Hyperion series.   He and a friend wrote a spec script, handed it to GK Films (who currently has the rights — which, happily for Cooper, are still at Warner Bros) and he says he may get a chance to actually write the whole screenplay.

The last news we had about Hyperion was in 2009,when Scott Derrickson was attached to direct, and Trevor Sands was writing the screenplay.   It’s possible someone is simply playing along with Cooper, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s all up for grabs.  How many big sci-fi adaptations have fallen apart and reformed with surprising names shoving them into production?  It wasn’t so long ago that The Dark Tower was in the hands of JJ Abrams and Damon Lindelof.    And Jay Baruchel certainly raised a few eyebrows by deciding he’d like to adapt Random Acts of Violence.  Perhaps it’s just a new thespian trend.

We’ll see what comes of it. But if you asked me what I thought Cooper did in his off-time, I would not have said “Hunches over Dan Simmons, tapping his laptop keys until the wee hours of the morning, sweating over the perfect spec script.”  No one would say that.  Maybe he needs to do more movies where he looks like this:

Now that I do know he sits, hunched over sprawling sci-fi epics, shoving his glasses back up on his nose, chattering its influences from John Keats,  he is so much hotter.  I bet that backpack is full of Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury and…