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Steven Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner have spent years trying to frame an epic film about President Lincoln and his agonizing decision to prolong the war and crush the South because it was the only way to abolish slavery. But now I've learned that directors Tim Burton and Timur Bekmambetov have found another angle on the Lincoln story: Abe's lifelong mission to kill vampires. They'll produce with Jim Lemley a movie adaptation of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, the Seth Grahame-Smith novel that Grand Central Publishing released today.
Graham-Smith kicks off with the revelation that Lincoln’s mother was killed by a supernatural creature, which fueled his passion to crush vampires and their slave-owning helpers. The novel depicts the 16th U.S. president as an axe-throwing, highly trained vampire killer. The author is making a career of marrying classic tales with a genre bent, and this becomes his second film deal after Lionsgate and Natalie Portman signed on to adapt Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which infuses a familiar Jane Austen tale with an attack of bloodthirsty zombies. David O. Russell is circling that project as director and Portman is producing and playing the feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet.
Burton, whose Alice in Wonderland opens Friday, has long been a fan of macabre subject matter, with an adaptation of Dark Shadows looming for him and Johnny Depp. Bekmambetov, who despite reports continues to work on his Wanted sequel, covered the bloodsucker terrain with his 2004 Russian film ... Read More »
EXCLUSIVE: In this tough marketplace, if you want to make another movie about a complex historical figure like Robert F Kennedy, you'd better bring to the table an actor with chops and bankability to excite a financier. Matt Damon does both those things. I've just heard that a deal closed at New Regency for an RFK film that has Damon attached, with Gary Ross directing and Steven Knight scripting. Damon will wait to see the script before we know whether or not the project will really happen. The film will be based on the Evan Thomas biography His Life, which Landscape Entertainment’s Bob Cooper optioned and will produce with Ross and his Larger Than Life partner Alison Thomas.
While Damon just played South African rugby star Francois Pienaar in Invictus, he has never played a real figure like Kennedy. The film will trace RFK's transformation from the younger brother in the shadow brother President John F Kennedy to a strong national leader in his own right before he was gunned down in 1968. His assassination at the Ambassador Hotel was the backdrop for Emilio Estevez’s Bobby, and Chris Columbus and his 1492 partners are developing The Last Campaign on RFK's presidential run. Ross, too, has long been fascinated with Kennedy and once optioned the Thomas book himself.
DreamWorks Studios announced today it's hired playwright and Academy Award-winning screenwriter Ronald Harwood to write the Martin Luther King, Jr. biopic. Overseeing the film are Mark Sourian and Holly Bario, Co-Presidents of Production for the studio, while, as previously announced, Steven Spielberg, Suzanne de Passe and Madison Jones will produce the film about the renowned civil rights leader. It's the first theatrical motion picture to be authorized by The King Estate to utilize the intellectual property of Dr. King to create the definitive portrait of his life. (Dr. King copyrighted his speeches, books, and famous works during his lifetime.) A native of South Africa, Harwood has long pursued themes surrounding race, conscience and moral choices as for his recreations of history. Among his many films, he wrote the Oscar-winning screenplay for The Pianist and received Oscar nominations for The Dresser and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. 
Zucker, then president of the university's Harvard Crimson daily newspaper, dispatched the police to the Harvard Lampoon office after O'Brien, who was president of the campus humor magazine, organized a prank on his college rival -- stealing an entire print run of the Crimson before it could be distributed. "He only forgave me when I gave him The Tonight Show," Zucker told a Yale gathering back in 2005. The Harvard Crimson described the incident this way in a 2004 article about Conan landing The Tonight Show courtesy of Zucker: "O’Brien cut his teeth in comedy as president of The Harvard Lampoon, a semi-secret Sorrento Square social organization that used to occasionally publish a so-called humor magazine. In fact, O’Brien first met Zucker, his current boss, one day when O’Brien and the Lampoon editors stole all the copies of that morning’s Crimson. Zucker, then Crimson President, called the police and met O’Brien face to face while he was being arrested." In 2001, Conan told The New Yorker this about the incident: "College pranks are supposed to be clever, but our rivalry with the Crimson had degenerated into us stealing something, Jeff calling the police, and the police making us haul it back," said O'Brien. (Other ... 
Warren Beatty is one of Bert Fields' longtime clients. So the pitbull litigator rode in over the weekend to rescue the actor from a Peter Biskind biography. But why? After all, the Simon & Schuster book, Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America, has been getting less than zero publicity in advance of its January 12th publication date. Nevertheless, here is Bert's 
Today's decision is very technical but also very meaningful. "The 9th Circuit is sending a message that authors and their families have these rights, and it's not going to let Big Business Entertainment squash these people," a legal source tells me. The 9th Circuit granted Mewborn's appeal of a U.S. district court judge's grant of summary judgment in favor ... 
I love anything dealing with Hollywood history, so I enjoy Tom Rothman's historical monologue Fox Legacy on the Fox Film Channel. But, surprisingly, today's New York Times 
So does that mean Rothman uses the film research library, too? If so, sad that it won't be there much longer. Meanwhile, I've heard it costs between $750,000 to $1 million a year to keep the library open. Now let's get creative. Fox Legacy could embrace the facility and maybe even shoot the show there to help underwrite it. That's a win-win situation for all concerned.
Los Angeles super-lawyer Pierce O'Donnell, whom Forbes once called the Perry Mason Of Hollywood, used to go after the sleazy practices of Big Media companies. He represented Art Buchwald in the Coming To America case against Paramount (described in his book Fatal Subtraction about phony studio accounting), me against Disney and News Corp (because I did my 
Its client Derrick Rose (pictured above), the freshman point guard for the Memphis Tigers, was the No. 1 pick and went to the Chicago Bulls, his hometown team. The others were Russell Westbrook, sophomore guard UCLA (4th pick; Seattle Supersonics); Danilo Gallinari, forward Italy (6th pick; New York Knicks); D.J. Augustin, sophomore guard University of Texas (9th pick; Charlotte Bobcats); Brook Lopez, sophomore center Stanford Cardinal (10th pick; New Jersey Nets); Anthony Randolph, freshman forward Louisiana State University (14th pick; Golden State Warriors); and Robin Lopez, sophomore forward Stanford Cardinal (15th pick; Phoenix Suns). 
With Comic-Con fast approaching (July 24-27) and all the Hollywood studios getting ready, I understand that Warner Bros has been nervously monitoring the deteriorating situation at its subsidiary DC Comics. There could be a major shake-up -- especially if Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes keeps cleaning house inside the Big Media corp. There's a lot of chatter, from comic book circles like 
The problem isn't just that, under DiDio's leadership, fanboys are disappointed with the directions of Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman and other characters. (How dopey of DiDio to come out with a new series Decisions this September where the superheroes take political stands timed to the election.) Little wonder that fanboys are selling "Dan DiDio Must Die" t-shirts. But also average sales of the DCU line are down more than 20% from a year ago, and DiDio has lost a big chunk of existing readers in a year while deliberately failing to reach out to new ones.
But the biggest bad news is that DC's much hyped Summer 2008 release Final Crisis, the 7-issue miniseries, isn't the huge hit it was supposed to be. Comic Book Resources 
I've learned that Fox Atomic owns the rights to Grand Theft Auto. But to the movie title, not the game. It was, of course, Ron Howard who wrote and directed and starred in the little pic Grand Theft Auto back in 1977 for Roger Corman. So Fox optioned the rights for the Howard/Corman movie title a while back. A studio insider clarifies for me: "Yes, Fox owns the Corman movie. Yes, it has been one of 400 development projects for several years. But they are nowhere on the script. It has certainly not been a front-burner project." Strangely, the success of the video game hasn't put any new impetus on the studio to formulate a plan. And it doesn't matter that a supposed legal settlement over the game/movie/title dictates that Rockstar can't make a Grand Theft Auto movie or Corman/Howard/Fox a video game out of the title. C'mon, the movie can still shrewdly piggyback off the game's global branding. Here's my idea: Fox for old times sake should offer the project to Ron Howard since GTA jump-started his directorial career. Then let him incubate as a producer a new ... 
I keep forgetting to report that the old CAA building designed by I.M. Pei, complete with its Roy Lichtenstein mural, is back in the hands of Michael Ovitz. Both his ex-partners Ron Meyer and Bill Haber recently sold to him their financial interests in the Beverly Hills landmark at the corner of Little Santa Monica and Wilshire Blvds about the same time that CAA stopped paying on the old lease. (Remember, I posted way back when that CAA moved to Century City despite still owing rent on the Pei digs. Talk about cash flow problems...) Ovitz, who personally brown-nosed Pei to design the monument to agency power, was desperate to gain sole custody. Now that Ovitz has the edifice back, I hear he's probably leasing office space to Sony BMG Music. My favorite story about the building is when Ovitz had a time-lapse camera mounted in the parking lot of Budget Rent-a-Car directly across the street from the construction site to film the step-by-step progress of the headquarters and make a movie of the building’s birth. One of CAA’s star directors, Joel Schumacher, even agreed to direct with famed Billy Weber to edit and no less than John Williams to score. When news of the film project swept through the entertainment community shortly before CAA was to move into the building on July 28th, 1989, the jokes came fast and furious. So did the jibes, the most brutal of which was that I.M. Pei had unwittingly become “the Albert Speer of Hollywood.” The movie idea was dropped. 
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