Christopher Nolan has previously said that The Dark Knight Rises will be his last Batman film, so what comes next?  According to Vulture, Nolan will pursue a biopic about billionaire-filmmaker-engineer-nutjob Howard Hughes that he shelved when Martin Scorsese came out with The Aviator in 2004.  However, while Scorsese's film drew heavily from Charles Higham’s biography Howard Hughes: The Secret Life and focused on the first half of Hughes' life, it didn't really embrace how batshit-loony Hughes went in the latter half of his life.  Nolan's film, will ride Hughes' crazy-pants way-of-the-future and pull from Michael Drosnin’s Citizen Hughes: The Power, the Money and the Madness. Drosnin, a former Washington Post and Wall Street Journal reporter, pulled from over 3,000 pages of Hughes’s own handwritten memoranda, which leaked after the billionaire's office was burglarized in 1975.  I hope the burglars were specifically after the memoranda because as we all know, rich guy madness scribblings are worth their weight in gold.

Hit the jump for more on this exciting project.

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Here are some of the fun highlights of Hughes' nuttier years that Scorsese didn't include in The Aviator:

- Sitting naked in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel in 1948 with only a with only a pink dinner napkin covering his genitals as he screened movies from his studio, RKO Pictures, and running up an $11 million tab.

- Buying every franchise restaurant chain in his home state of Texas out of his concern for food safety.

- Concerned about air quality, he installed an aircraft filtration system in the trunk of his 1954 Chrysler New Yorker.

- Cutting his hair and toenails only once a year.

- An addiction to codeine injections and Baskin Robbins Banana Ripple ice cream.

- And only considering Mormons trustworthy enough to let into his inner circle.  Obviously, this was much to the consternation of non-Mormons who wanted to be in the inner circle of a long-haired, long-fingernailed naked man who was mainlining Banana Ripple ice cream.

Vulture reports that Nolan plans to shoot the film in 2012 and release it in 2014 in the hopes that with ten years distance, there won't be immediate comparisons to Scorsese's Oscar-nominated flick.