Mike Fleming

EXCLUSIVE: Jonah Hill is in talks to make his feature directorial debut on The Kitchen Sink, the Oren Uziel script for Sony Pictures 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. Matt Tolmach  is producing, and it was one of the first projects his company acquired after he left his executive job and jumped right in to produce the Spider-Man reboot with Laura Ziskin and Avi Arad.

Hill is hot stuff at Sony, co-writing 21 Jump Street, and co-starring in the transfer of the Fox TV drama alongside Channing Tatum and Ice Cube, with Phil Lord and Chris Miller directing. Hill also co-starred with Brad Pitt in Moneyball, the Bennett Miller-directed adaptation of the Michael Lewis book about Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane. That script was written by Steve Zaillian and gets released September 23 by Sony.

The title The Kitchen Sink is 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. When I first revealed that Tolmach had bought the script, the former Sony co-president of production told me: “I love high school movies, and sparked to the authenticity of these characters. 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.” Hill’s repped by WME and attorney Karl Austen.