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EXCLUSIVE: The Weinstein Company has won a quiet but fevered bidding battle for worldwide distribution rights to the untitled next film by Paul Thomas Anderson. The film begins production June 13, with Philip Seymour Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix so far set to star. Megan Ellison is financing. It is Anderson’s first trip behind the camera since There Will Be Blood.
Hoffman and Phoenix are locked. As for the actresses, I’m told that Anderson is eyeing such women as Madisen Beaty (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) for a role, with Amy Adams, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo‘s Lena Endre and Laura Dern also mentioned as actresses Anderson is interested in. The auction was held at CAA headquarters late last week, with Fox Searchlight also squarely in the mix.
This is the project that Anderson has worked on for a long time, once under the title The Master. He has greatly overhauled the script and now, Hoffman stars as a man who returns after witnessing the horrors of WWII and tries to rediscover who he is in post-war America. He creates a belief system, something that catches on with other lost souls. The film is fully financed by Ellison’s Annapurna banner. At a time when the implosion of the indie film marketplace made pricey auteur films so hard to finance, Ellison has emerged as something of a godsend to the small group of auteurs she is working with. She’s enabled Anderson to make the movie at or near the $35 million budget the film was going to cost back when Universal stepped away.
The deal gives TWC a big title to bring to the Cannes Film Festival this week. More to come …
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Yes I can’t wait
Universal balked at the 35 million figure. Wats going on there. PT Anderson, Guillermo Del Toro, Ron Howard / Stephen King Denied. What do they want to put there money on. Only cr**** movies like stretch armstrong, battleship…
Universal = scared garbage factory.
They’ll just make FF movies for those with low entertainment standards, replete with ham-fisted dialogue and massive plot holes. And board game dreck like Battleship and Ouija.
That these people can’t find a good script to make is pathetic. You can have taste and still make money. It’s been done before.
Don’t forget the Ouija board movie!
so this is the L Ron Hubbard quasi-pic?
Shhhhh, don’t tell anyone. “They” tried to squash this project before…. of course it was the aliens who told them to.
This is exciting fucking news. And hopefully it won’t take long for Anderson to write the adaptation for Inherent Vice, so that that might be out on the heels of this one, or at least w/in the next year or two.
The “Vice” adaptation has been done for a while. And it’s great!
He’s finished the screenplay? How do you know?
This movie is for freeks like you.
By which you mean. . . people who can spell?
Is this project supposed to be ‘loosely’ based on the birth of Scientology or not?
will this be another film The Weinsteins fail to meet their P&A commitments on?
Finally!
Does anyone know what sort of changes were made to the original script, “The Master”. It was a great work of art that deffo would have the Scientologist community frothing had it actually come to theaters in that incarnation… which is what freedom of SPEECH is all about.
But then again, that notion of freedom went out the window years ago. If you’re not lambasted by the studios, the general public will certainly feed you to lions. The same public that the law was set up to protect.
How do you like your irony? I prefer mine with a slice of cheese, thank you.
Actually, the First Amendment protects citizens against government censorship. Universal not wanting to finance/distribute a movie, and the American public not wanting to pay money to see it in no way violates freedom of speech.
But all wonky, semantic quibbling aside — I am very excited for anything PTA does. I hope he hasn’t watered this down to appease the Dianetics Thumpers in Hollywood.
F yea. LOVE me some PTA.
Awesome! F you Scientologists, make way for the Master…and his name is Paul Thomas Anderson.
If justice is done, this will get PTA his deserved Best Picture Oscar after the masterpiece of There Will Be Blood lost out to No Country.
There is already a 1st draft of Inherent Vice.
Hubbard had a brilliant mind but a damaged soul. His idea of realizing an authentic self serving the widest possible world was undermined by his delusions that you can know and speak for ultimate reality.
Hubbard had a “brilliant mind”? Nonsense – he was a crappy writer, a con artist, a chronic liar and a mentally ill manipulator. His “applied religious philosophy” produces only deluded and powerless slaves, people who believe they can exorcise the souls of dead space aliens.
Even if they cover only half of it this should be an amazing movie, and I can’t think of anyone better than PTA to do it.
Gotta love the bollocks romours saying scientology suppressed this movie… look what it took to get it back on? NOT ALOT!
In my mind, PTA is quite simply the most interesting American film maker currently working.
you’ve obviously never seen the films of Jon Jost
He must not have read that Vanity Fair piece that debunked Hubbard’s supposed military service.
Still want to see the movie. Anderson presumably has final cut?
Sounds like he slapped an intensexwar scene on the top of tge old script and that recontextualized things a bit. CANNOT WAIT FOR THIS
where do you come across the draft of Inherent Vice? I’d love to take a look at that.
Be interesting to see what happens when PTA delivers his first three hour cut and Harvey morphs into his Scissorhands alter-ego. You know that’s going to happen. Doesn’t matter if Anderson has final cut, Harvey always finds a way around contracts. Unlike Tarantino, PTA’s films feel long (like a delicious five course meal), but Harvey is more keen on sushi and junk food. I see storm clouds brewing on the horizon…
It is hard to tell from the article if this is going to be an reflection of Scientology as a confidence racket or a reflection of Scientology as a religion for lost souls following a horrible war. I also wonder if there will be room for cultists to say, “That is not us,” if it turns out to be the former or critics to say, “It’s just a story,” in the case of the latter.
There is no doubting Paul Thomas Anderson is quite possibly the greatest director working today.
I breathe a huge sigh of relief to see him return to the fold, and to put in their place, over hyped imposters like Aronofsky, who are incredibly over rated and have only become so in the absence of truly great filmmakers like Anderson frequently making films to remind us of this.
If only PTA had the ability to get his films out faster, then we’d all realise with much more clarity, what it actually means to be a great filmmaker instead of throwing the label around so easily.
PTA sets the bar by which all others should be measured against.
Yeah, but will the script now include real-life characters like rocket scientist scientist Jack Parsons and artist Marjorie Cameron, LRon’s mad magical partners?
I was so pumped for this but im actually a little worried now. I wanted to see a no holds barred, paper thinly veiled, genital warts and all look at L Ron and his crazy destructive life but now it seems like we might be getting something much more watered down. AFAIK the closest Hubbard came to seeing the horrors of war was when he was briefly given command of an anti submarine vessel. He sailed it into Mexican waters and fired shots at a couple of islands that he believed were uninhabited and belonged to the US government. They were neither an Hubbard was immediately relieved of his command. His friends in the sci-fi community were very familiar with his “poor-wounded-veteran racket”.
Anyway I hope that the script reworking wasnt about softening the L Ron character or story. That would suck.
Fantastic! Can’t wait to see Hollywood turn on its heels and expose the “religion” that captured some of it best known, and now blackmails them with their secrets told in “confessionals” to stay loyal to them. PTA is brilliant, and this could secure a nod or win from the Academy. Fingers crosses for a blockbuster in this one.
I too wonder about the changes in the PTA’s “The Master” script. I am concerned they because of pressure from Scientologists. On the contrary they might have nothing to do with pleasing members of Scientology. Is anyone here curious to know the reason(s) for the altering of the original script?Just know don’t want to presume regarding the altering of the script. I just feel with Paul Thomas Anderson as directer at the helm, Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Joaquin Phoenix in the cast this film looks to me one of high quality to the discerning filmgoer.