Danny DeVito tells SFGATE he wants to adapt Frank Norris's 1899 novel McTeague — set on Polk Street — for the screen. The bar named after the book has hung a gilded tooth above its door at 1237 Polk since 2008. DeVito is in town this weekend to narrate Matilda live with the SF Symphony.

At 1237 Polk Street in San Francisco's Lower Nob Hill, a giant gilded tooth hangs above the entrance to McTeague's Saloon — borrowed not from the bar's owners exactly, but from Frank Norris's 1899 novel McTeague, whose protagonist dreams of mounting just such a tooth outside his Polk Street dental office. The bar opened in 2008, registered under 1237 Polk Street LLC according to California ABC licensing records, and named itself after the novel. (The saloon that actually appears in Norris's text is called Joe Frenna's; the gilt molar on Polk came later, an homage invented whole cloth.)

Danny DeVito, 81, wants to film the whole thing.

In an interview published this week by SFGATE, DeVito — in San Francisco this Saturday and Sunday to host and narrate a live screening of his film Matilda with the San Francisco Symphony — disclosed that he has long been trying to adapt McTeague for the screen. "I've always been trying to make that movie," he told the outlet. "I'm in the middle of trying to put that together." He compared the project's scope to Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood. "We'd have to make the city look like it did at the turn of the century," he said. "…A lot of that would be movie magic. But I would go to San Francisco and try to shoot on Polk Street." He called the source novel a "powerful, powerful book."

Norris's McTeague is a Polk Street story: a dentist, an obsessive wife named Trina, and the grinding dissolution of a marriage and a man, set in the working-class blocks of late-19th-century San Francisco. DeVito directed and co-produced the 1996 Matilda, also a Roald Dahl adaptation; he told SFGATE he discovered Dahl's novel by reading it aloud with his family. He plans to wear the same hat at Davies Symphony Hall this weekend that he wore in the original film.

Graffiti depicting DeVito has been appearing on walls and sidewalks around the city — SFGATE reports he was pleased when asked about it.

Polk Street itself is mid-renovation in multiple spots. A $175,000 alterations permit (202607145009) was filed July 14 at 2139 Polk; a $400,000 addition-and-alteration permit (202603238071) at 610 Polk was filed July 15 and remains pending; a $46,980 alteration at 1541 Polk (202606102910) was issued in June. Turn-of-the-century Polk Street exists now only in the novel and in whatever movie magic DeVito can conjure. The block at number 1237, at least, still has its gold tooth.