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EXCLUSIVE: Media Rights Capital is negotiating to acquire Die in a Gunfight, a script by fresh-from-NYU scribes Andrew Barrer and Gabriel Ferrari that has Zac Efron attached to play a fight-prone and death-obsessed young society man who pursues a romance with the daughter of his father’s enemy. The film will be produced by Mark Gordon Co’s Mark Gordon and Jennifer Todd, with Efron and Jason Barrett executive producers through Efron’s Ninjas Runnin’ Wild banner. Allyson Seeger and Jason Young will be co-producers. The writers are repped by WME and Prolific while Efron’s CAA and Alchemy.
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Efron in this role = bomb. Stick to singing and dancing dude.
Fun script. Nice package.
And the above-the-line team is pretty solid as well!
Yes, yes and yes. There is no way this film will bomb. Creative opinions are a dime a dozen. But you don’t need and MBA to know that this is a wise move. For everyone.
Does the gunfight have anything to do with his dead brother he was playing catch with? Common studios tweens have become bored with untalented High School Musical actors and are still obsessed with untalented Twilight actors
Untalented? Do you know anything about good acting? Zac has potential to be the next Johnny Depp or Leo, as far as High School Musical, everyone has to start somewhere.
Great. Another talentless cover boy who actually listened to the idiots around him who suggested that anyone would care about this. Stick to rom-coms and musicals, bro – because we saw Charlie St. Cloud (well, a few of us anyway) and you have about as much dramatic skill as Bristol Palin.
Who pissed in everyone’s cheerios this morning?
He’s not that bad and better than a lot of other kids his age.
But someone has to find him better projects than this.
You’re joking right? He’s a terrible actor and I think you know it, but you’re trying your best to turn a blind eye because you are one of his tween or former tween fans.I mean, you pretty much said he suck when you used that tire old excuse of he needs better projects.Good actors don’t give bad performances base on the material they are given.You can put someone like Daniel Day Lewis in a shitty Transformer movie and he would still give a good performances.
actually, no. he’s not a terrible actor. if you go watch his movie with a mindset that he’s going to be horrible in it, then he will be. if you actually watch one of his films with an open mind, maybe you’ll see the light. but i guess most people these days are just too narrow-minded to accept newer generation actors. they just want to live in the past…
How do you explain Daniel Day Lewis in Nine then? His performance was off the mark. Was that the material, his acting choices, or some combination of the two? The last is my personal opinion.
I do like Zac, that much is clear from what I wrote. But I daresay that even Wimsatt and Beardsley could not read my three sentences so closely as to glean so much as you think you have. Though they probably would never try to bring my background in, which is maybe what you should have done. That is the joy of the internet, an essentially authorless text. For the record, I am not a tween, nor am I a recent tween, nor am I even really a proponent of New Criticism. So I’m happy to give you more to judge me on. If I am overdoing it on the verbosity here, it is merely to hit you over the head with the idea that maybe I am not so uneducated as you think.
The point of good material was that I think he deserves it (and on a larger scale we, the audience, deserve it). It was not that it is necessarily an excuse for his poor acting. A lot of people are put off by what he is in and they don’t go see it, though when they do, they realize he is not that bad.
To me, Charlie St. Cloud was a mess but I thought he was good in it. However, I am not here to convince or change anyone’s judgment of him on my words alone. Especially when people are so quick to judge anyone who does like him as being underage and stupid. And to that point, does your cursory and specious assessment of me has any implications for whether I (or anyone) should buy into your assessment of Zac? Is it equally cursory and specious?
So though I am happy to defend my position, I am mostly here to state my view and maybe open doors for a few people to the mere possibility that he deserves a chance. I will leave the actual convincing to Zac.
He’s not a perfect actor and I can see weaknesses but I see too that every role he does, he improves. That tells me more about the direction of his career than evaluating any one performance, especially at such a young age. And as my Nine example shows, even one of the best actors in the world, one who has years and years on Zac, can screw up. Shall we judge him on that alone?
So Michaela – what was your last success? And if you think you have such good advising skills, what exactly would you suggest? You’re passing judgement on a project on which I can only assume your knowledge is limited. Who exactly are you advising anyway? You are really that confident in your statement? I’ll be smiling when you words are eaten and the box office receipts are in.
When I say better projects, I am not talking about box office receipts. This could do fine at the box office but if it is devoid of much (if any) artistic merit then what is the point? This is my personal view of course but people need to be meaningful now more than ever. Also, poor quality projects won’t help Zac’s long-term career at all since he is already obviously struggling with how people perceive his talent.
You are correct that I don’t know the status of the project right now. I do know the draft I read was only so-so and that was what I based my opinion on. There were things I liked in the draft, but what a shame if all of the good material is ruined by the nonsensical elements and the stubbornness of a creative team that doesn’t want to hear valid criticism.
I hope they have done a rewrite. I’d like to see the film and Zac be successful both financially (where, unfortunately, it seems to matter most these days) and artistically (a goal I hope he is not just paying lip service to in interviews).
And no I’m not a scriptwriter, but I can read for effective structure and style.
Zac Efron: Tough Guy.
Move over Charles Bronson.
I guess attachments will get any piece’o sh!te script made, huh?
This script was terrible. The kids who wrote it must have some pretty decent contacts to have got it picked up.
Why do I somehow get vibes of “Cruel Intentions” from this hook?
Dear Some People Who Comment Here,
If you’re going to use this space to cattily and jealously bag on a movie that hasn’t even been filmed yet, you should probably use proper grammar and spelling (especially, but not limited to, any criticism of one’s WRITING).
Sincerely,
Those Who Aren’t Cynical
Didn’t Baz already make Romeo & Juliet with guns?
It’s always a feeding frenzy on the young and popular. Someone who comes out of Disney or some tween phenomenon or musicals or God forbid all those combined and has the luck of becoming a huge star and you hate them. Someone who comes out of indies and you love them. Betcha my last dollar if he had developed some other way you’d have liked him. I think he will go somewhere good in his career.
Most critics’opinions of Efron doesn’t have anything to do with how he was develop, it’s more along the lines of the end product of that development; which is a bad actor.And for the most part, the majority of actors/actresses who come from teen phenomenons or Disney/Nickelodeon factories are bad at acting.They were taught the disney/nickelodeon way, which is good for tweens and young kids, but is bad for adults because adult like real acting.So I think the excuse you are trying to make doesn’t fly.
most critics bag on him because he was a disney kid. have you read their reviews. most start off with “i didn’t expect much…but i was surprised…” have you ever asked yourself, why would they not expect much, and why would they be surprised? because of his background. his disney past.
and your second statement makes no sense. there’s no end product in the development of an actor. every actor, even robert di niro, continues to grow and develop as they age and make new projects. there’s no end to the development. and even if there were, efron’s only at the beginning of his maturing as an actor, so you can’t judge him based on how far he’s developed as the “end product.” he still has a long ways to go.
Who the hell forgot the ketchup for the fries this afternoon? Sure Zac is not a great talent. But it’s the movies and they can work around that. What he needs is better material. That falls on his representatives. They are finding him sour material.
MRC and Efron = bomb – these folks could mess up a wet dream
Charlie St. Cloud taught them nothing?
Got to admit, this sounds boring and like something that has been done to death.
The plot is probably going to be, he gets in a lot of fights, and probably wants to die. Falls for the daughter of his father’s enemy and they sneak around. Either his father or his enemy will forbid them to be together, they ignore it and fall in love. One day he gets his butt whooped and that changes him and he suddenly wants to live because he is in love with the girl.
Prolific is a really interesting new management company. They’re really developing writers over there and doing things right. And no, I don’t work there. Just know some young writers having a great experience…
Replace Zac Efron with Michael Cera or Joseph Gordon Levitt and I might actually watch this frat boy piece of crap.
Rightly or wrongly the bald truth is there are certain types of pretty boy actors that guys just DO NOT want to see in tough guy roles. Jude Law is one of them, and Zac Efron is MOST DEFINITELY one of them.
Girls will eat him up in rom coms and rom drams and they may even be able to drag along their boyfriends to one of those movies, but guys (the core demographic for this type of movie) DO NOT want to see Zac Efron the Tough Guy. End of story. This is DOA.
Give the kid a break, he is getting better all the time. In 17 Again, though the movie has been done a million times, he was pretty decent in it. Charlie St. Cloud was cliche. His representation needs revamping, they are not doing him any favors. Zac, give it your best shot, and see what happens.
The key to this kid’s success is to get him a mix of indie street cred and larger than life movies. Dont fight his talents, play to them. He has a natural knack for comedy. So start him in indie sundance comedies where he’s not the lead (little miss sunshine, etc.) larger studio comedies and drama/comedies. From there, once people see him as more than just a pretty face, venture into heavier stuff. You put him in heavy dramas and big action movies now, one flop, and his career goes down fast. Of course, I’ve never ran an agency before
this is just my random opinion…
I don’t understand this fixation on Disney. Lots of successful actors did Disney movies in their youth.
Efron isn’t a Disney product. He didn’t start at Disney, he was a successful teen actor before High School Musical. He made the franchise the huge success it was. The acting was exactly what was required for the nature and audience of these films.
I don’t know if he is a good actor, but he’s good enough. Me & Orson Welles was well received at film festivals and received many good reviews, including positive words for Efron. I agree that Charlie St. Cloud was a mess, but Efron didn’t make it so. These two examples demonstrate the point already made, he needs good projects. If he gets them, he’ll do just fine.
Zac efron is the hottest man ever! This movie is going to be great because hes in it, hes a good actor and all you haters needa go somewhere.