Mike Fleming

EXCLUSIVE: Matt Tolmach, the former Columbia Pictures co-president of production who transitioned to a producing deal, has acquired rights to The Kitchen Sink. That’s an Oren Uziel script about the unlikely alliance between a high school-aged vampire, zombie and human as they try to save their town from invading aliens. The script was a top choice on the recently released 2010 Black List. While Tolmach left his executive job and jumped right in to produce the Spider-Man reboot with Laura Ziskin and Avi Arad, he hoped to find the time to discover new voices. “I’d hoped one of the luxuries would be having time between Spider-Man setups to read scripts and rediscover writers,” Tolmach said. “I’d asked friends to send me scripts and when I read this, I was surprised nobody had bought it.”

The title’s a self-aware reference to the fact that the scribe has thrown every known and currently popular movie menace into a story that is at its core a coming of age tale. “I love high school movies, and sparked to the authenticity of these characters,” Tolmach told me. “It’s more in the spirit of The Breakfast Club than anything, but you get an idea of the title in an early scene where two kids are running from zombies. Those zombies suddenly are attacked by vampires. Just when they are all facing off, there’s a bright light overhead. You realize the aliens have landed and these groups have to band together, suppress the urge to kill each other, and it becomes thematically the enemy of my enemy is my friend. That makes it different than your usual zombie, vampire, or alien movie. I know from experience how quickly scripts either get bought or not, and it often has no bearing on whether they’re good or not. This  one is like the talented kid passed over in the first round of the draft. Thank goodness for the Black List.”