Mike Fleming

screenplay_pileThough the material market is summer sluggish, WME has managed the neat trick of closing in on three script deals this week, with another on the brink.

The spec in play is Ion, a Will Dunn scifi script that has Channing Tatum attached, with Scott Free producing. Fox 2000 (Scott Free’s home studio) has made an offer, but other studios are circling. A man travels to different dimensions in an effort to find his reincarnated love. It would be the first sale for Dunn, a British scribe., who has spent the past half year honing the material with input from Scott Free and Tatum. WME is selling with The Safran Co.

Mandate Pictures is closing in on a deal to acquire Hell to Pay, a script by Vlas and Charley Parlapanides, who wrote the Tarsem-directed Immortals, which Relativity and Universal are shooting right now.  The spec is  a revenge thriller about a man who returns home from the Air Force stint and becomes the fall guy to settle his father’s gambling debt to the head of a Miami mob. He takes the rap for the mobster’s son. While serving the jail stretch, the man’s father is murdered by the mob boss. He seeks to square things when he is released. WME sold that script with Underground.

Morgan Creek bought Step Dawg, a comic script by Jeff Tetreault about a 30-ish man who returns home to discover that his single mom plans to marry his former high school stoner best friend. WME sold the script with Energy Entertainment. It’s the second script, but first sale for Tetreault. His first effort was widely admired, but didn’t sell because of obvious complications. Called Me and My Penis, the comedy focused on a womanizing man who awakens to discover his penis has gone AWOL and refuses to return until he reforms his callous ways. Tetreault found a more deal-friendly premise in Step Dawg.