DreamWorks will give screen treatment to The Help, Kathryn Stockett’s bestselling novel about the relationship between African-American domestics and their wealthy white employers in pre-Civil Rights Mississippi. The deal creates an extraordinary opportunity for Tate Taylor, who wrote the script and will direct. An actor who appeared in the Sundance Grand Jury Prize winning film Winter’s Bone, Taylor has only directed one feature. But he is completely intertwined with the author and her first novel, a relationship that goes back long before The Help became a phenomenon after being published by the Putnam imprint Amy Einhorn Books.
Taylor and Stockett grew up in Mississippi, close enough that his mother inspired one of the white characters. His reward for serving as a sounding board was an early read. He optioned film rights at a time when Stockett couldn't find an agent, much less a publisher. I first wrote about the book last year, when Taylor made a deal for the book with Chris Columbus and his 1492 cohorts Michael Barnathan and Mark Radcliffe. They will produce with Brunson Green.
An HBO movie about the 2008 financial meltdown is finally moving. HBO has acquired rights to Too Big to Fail, the bestselling book by New York Times reporter Andrew Sorkin. Peter Gould has been hired to write the drama, and Spring Creek’s Paula Weinstein and Jeffrey Levine are executive producers.
The project has been slow going because it was first set up with a book co-written by Sorkin’s Times colleague Joe Nocera and Vanity Fair writer Bethany McLean, and they haven't turned in their manuscript. HBO execs say they will marry the source materials to chronicle the financial crisis the same way that Recount dissected the disputed Florida results in the 2000 presidential election.
For his part, Sorkin says his book lends itself well to that task. He focused specifically on players like Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and his successor Timothy Geitner, Lehman Bros CEO Richard Fuld, and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, in boardrooms, private planes and bedrooms as the financial system teetered on the brink of collapse. “You see their human sides, the hubris, the ego,” Sorkin said. “You see Hank Paulsen literally vomiting and Dick Fuld crying with his wife as their world fell apart."
Documentary filmmaker RJ Cutler, who directed the Anna Wintour/Vogue profile The September Issue, is heading from high fashion to the Hamptons social swirl. Cutler successfully pitched Warner Bros on the feature film Au Pairs, an adaptation of the Melissa de la Cruz novel about three teenage girls from different socioeconomic backgrounds who work as nannies for a wealthy family in the Hamptons one summer. The girls balance their domestic duties with their suddenly interesting social lives. The pic is being produced by Drew Barrymore and Nancy Juvonen of Flower Films and Les Morgenstein and Bob Levy of Alloy. Liz Garcia wrote the first draft and another writer will be brought in to execute Cutler’s vision for the film. The intention is to shoot this summer in East Hampton where I'm sure residents will be thrilled. This sounds like The Nanny Diaries but with 3 strong roles for teenage actresses. Cutler also produced such documentaries as The War Room. He’s repped by WME.
The spec script market continues to show green shoots in 2010. ICM just told me that writers Sonny Lee and Patrick Walsh, who left CAA for ICM last week, preemptively sold a spec script to Paramount with Montecito and Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg producing. Sonny and Pat have spent the last three years on It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia and have sold pilots to FBC and ABC. This is the duo’s first spec script. Based on an idea by Hurwitz and Schlossberg, 21 Shots centers around a guy who, on his 21st birthday, loses his I.D. and needs to track it down over over the course of one day. Montecito bought the spec preemptively through their Paramount discretionary fund. Hurwitz & Schlossberg are managed by Paul Young and repped by CAA.
EXCLUSIVE: The Trade, a film that tells the true tale of 2 New York Yankees pitchers who caused a national scandal by swapping wives in the sexually-free 1970s, has finally hit the big leagues. Ben Affleck has become attached to direct and potentially star in the Warner Bros film. (Let me say that for a Yankees fan like myself, it would be worth it just to see Ben Affleck, and possibly Matt Damon, forced to wear the New York pinstripes. That has always been considered a potential obstacle for two die-hard Boston Red Sox fans and renowned Yankees haters.) Teammates Fritz Peterson and Mike Kekich stunned the country when they disclosed in spring training 1973 that they were trading wives. Peterson had fallen in love with Susanne Kekich and his teammate fell in love with Marilyn Peterson. Fritz and Susanne remain a couple till this day, while Mike and Marilyn drifted apart. Affleck and his former Live Planet partners Matt Damon and Sean Bailey have long been intrigued with the project, with Affleck eyeing the role of Peterson and Damon the role of Kekich.
So why has The Trade suddenly become such a hot property? I’m told a lot of it is the writing of Dave Mandel, best known for Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm. Mandel agreed to pen the project years ago, but it got stalled over life rights and other issues. By the time those things were cleared, Mandel was well paid and in high demand. He agreed to ... Read More »
By MIKE FLEMING | Tuesday February 16, 2010 @ 6:05am PST
UPDATES Studios Battle Over Another Taylor Lautner Project
UPDATES Will Studios Catch Soderbergh Virus Thriller?
UPDATED: Last week, I told you about two big films being shopped: the Taylor Lautner-attached spec Abducted, and the Steven Soderbergh-directed Contagion. Both are still in the marketplace.
-- On the Lautner front, a deal for Shawn Christensen's spec script hasn't been wrapped up yet, but I hear that's because the buyers and sellers took a President Weekend break. As of today, the bidding is back on. Sure, the Lautner camp has been steadfast on getting at least the $7.5 million quote established by Skydance for Northern Lights. I’m told Sony Pictures' Columbia is in the mix (though the studio is out of development money through the first quarter of 2010 and is looking for creative ways around that dilemma). I also hear that Lionsgate, and Universal are still in it (after DreamWorks passed last week), with the latter trying to get Relativity Media to co-finance. Granted, the executives are grumbling about how it's a lot of money for an 18-year old who hasn’t yet proven he can carry a film by himself, yet is on a salary trajectory rarely seen especially for someone so young. But the studios are still in hot pursuit.
-- On the Soderbergh front, I hear that Gwyneth Paltrow now is joining his cast that already includes Kate Winslet, Matt Damon, Marion Cotillard and Jude Law. The Scott Z. ... Read More »
I have this from several sources, and it's definitive. Filming on the back-to-back movies would begin in mid-October, and Summit Entertainment is looking at "high end" directors. Breaking Dawn is the longest in Stephenie Meyer's 4-book series lengthwise and it's the most graphic -- presenting birth, attempted murder, death, and of course vampire bites. Published on August 2, 2008, it has a happy ending for most of the characters. Divided into 3 parts, the 1st and 3rd sections are told from the point of view of Bella (Kristen Stewart), and the second section from the perspective of Jacob (Taylor Lautner). It prominently features all 3 favorite characters including Edward (Robert Pattinson). Summit Entertainment no doubt will save money by making these Twilight Saga movies #4 and #5 back to back. Screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg (who's written all the Twilight Saga films) is currently adapting Breaking Dawn. Eclipse, the 3rd movie, will be released on June 30th. Meanwhile, Yen Press, the graphic novel imprint of Hachette Book Group, announced last month that it will publish the first volume in the graphic novel adaptation of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight on March 16th. Due to the length of the prose novel, the book will be divided into 2 volumes and the release date for the second volume is forthcoming. Containing selected text from Meyer's original novel with illustrations by Korean artist Young Kim, it's a fusion of Asian and Western comic techniques in mostly black-and-white with color interspersed throughout. Novelist Meyer consulted throughout the artistic process and had input on every ... Read More »
UPDATES Judge Upholds 'Terminator' Sale; Sony & Lionsgate Get Exclusive Negotiation
EXCLUSIVE: Now that Pacificor has pulled the Terminator franchise out of bankruptcy, the question becomes: How to wrap up one of the great sci-fi franchises for hardcore fans who feel neither of the last two installments measured up to the first two that James Cameron directed? Cameron seems unlikely to return to the fold (even though Terminator would fit nicely into the portfolio of 3D films like Fantastic Voyage he’s producing.) But what if I told you his writing partner on the first two films, William Wisher, has scripted a detailed 24-page treatment for Terminator 5, and a 4-page concept outline for Terminator 6? And that I’ve read both?
As a Terminator fanboy myself, I think Wisher has done a terrific job with a plot that accepts the storylines from Jonathan Mostow’s Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines and McG’s Terminator: Salvation. Most interestingly, he turns the story back to the core characters and time travel storyline of the first two films that Wisher crafted with Cameron. Gale Anne Hurd shared writing credit with Cameron on the original film while Wisher got an “additional dialogue by” credit, but I’m told he was plenty involved. He and Cameron shared screenwriting credit on Terminator 2: Judgment Day. But Wisher walked away from the 3rd film out of loyalty to Cameron and had no ... Read More »
Hollywood studios finished 2009 with their wallets shut tight for spec scripts and new development. But maybe they'll open for Steven Soderbergh's latest: Contagion, an action-thriller that takes place in a worst case scenario of a deadly virus. He’s got Kate Winslet, Matt Damon, Marion Cotillard, and Jude Law ready to star in it this fall, with Participant Media aboard as co-financier. Greg Jacobs will produce with Double Feature Films' Michael Shamberg and Stacey Sher.
Of course, this is familiar movie territory, from The Andromeda Strain to Outbreak, which beat out Ridley Scott's The Hot Zone on the same topic. But both were hot properties, and given the subject matter, and Soderbergh's involvement, and that cast, Contagion ought to spark a bidding battle. Several studio execs have read it, and the project will be be shopped shortly by the producers and Soderbergh’s Anonymous Content rep Michael Sugar. The script is supposed to be Traffic meets Bourne and was written by Scott Z. Burns, best known for co-writing The Bourne Ultimatum, and who most recently collaborated with Soderbergh on The Informant!, as did Participant, Damon and Jacobs.
After Che, the maverick writer-director has moved in a more commercial direction. And after Moneyball fell apart for him, he's proactively going the indie route. He began production last week on Knockout, the Relativity Media-financed espionage thriller he built around mixed martial arts fighter Gina Carano, surrounding the newcomer with Channing Tatum, Ewan McGregor, Michael Douglas, and Michael Fassbender.
Sarah Polley came to Sundance to promote the thriller Splice. Michelle Williams was there to launch Blue Valentine. But now they’ve got a reason to get together this summer. I've learned that Polley has secured the financing to direct her script Take This Waltz. Williams will star with Seth Rogen in the romantic triangle. The script made the most recent Black List of 2009's best unproduced screenplays. Polley will set another actor shortly to round out the cast. The producer is Susan Cavan. Read More »
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.
This has been making the rounds of the Internet:
EXCLUSIVE: Taylor Lautner Now Hollywood's Highest Paid Teenage Actor
The Internet is in a frenzy about what is purported to be the full script of the 3rd installment of the Twilight Saga leaked as a downloadable .pdf file. It appears to belong to Jackson Rathbone who plays Jasper in the film franchise. Now I can confirm that it is an early version of the Eclipse script (not the shooting script) and it is Rathbone's (who probably left it behind at a blood bank). Does it matter? Of course not. Like duh, the script is based on Stephenie Meyer's bestselling book. Judging from New Moon's worldwide grosses of $682M so far, I say not even this copyright infringement can stop the Twilight Saga juggernaut.
This is a story I've been working on ever since I saw this December 11th email that went out to the Spider-Man 4 special effects crew that day:
Hey there--
We were just notified that our schedule is pushing. We will NOT be starting as planned. I’m terribly sorry for this news, and I hope this email reaches you in time to find other options. We do not know how long we are pushing, and we will not know until mid-January. By mid-January, we will be told how long the push is, whether it be 2 weeks, 2 months, or something else. The studio has every intention of making the movie, but we no longer have a confirmed start date.
Again, I’m terribly sorry, but Sam Raimi has story issues [that] need to be resolved before we are ready to shoot.
Feel free to call me if you have any questions.
VFX Team
At that point, it wasn't well known that the Spider-Man franchise director who also is helming the 4th installment had huge problems with the script that has run through screenwriters Jamie Vanderbilt, David Lindsay-Abaire, and Gary Ross. I'm even told Sam Raimi had been very vocal inside Sony that he "hated" it. Now Raimi and Sony are anxiously waiting for still another version from screenwriter Alvin Sargent, who wrote Spidey 2 & 3 and is married to Spidey franchise producer Laura Ziskind. "It is unlikely that May 11, ... Read More »
Here are some talking points for this weekend’s holiday parties. Jason Scoggins, a partner at the literary management and production company Protocol, has compiled what he readily admits is a "terribly unscientific" but which I find very interesting compilation of the 2009 feature film spec script market based on information culled from public and non-public sources. The numbers do not include pitch sales or the film rights to underlying material. He found that:
• 436 spec scripts came out in 2009, of which 72 sold (17%).
• 373 specs went out wide in 2009, of which 19 sold (5%). Of those 19, only 3 sold after April 30th, out of 178 attempts during the period (1.7%).
• As for spec sals by genre, comedies led with 32% of sales, thrillers 29%, action adventures 21%, while dramas and sci-fi/fantasies tied with 10%.
• Universal and Warner Bros bought the most specs among the major buyers (6 each). But Warner Bros bought only 1 spec script in the second half of the year. Paramount & Sony tied with 5 each not counting ony's Screen Gems which bought another 3. DreamWorks had 4. 20th Century Fox had 3, but adding all its three banners, Fox bought 6 specs. Lionsgate purchased 3. New Line didn’t buy any specs in 2009.
• Relativity and Intrepid bought the most specs among the other buyers (3 each).
• In the spec market scrum among agencies, CAA made 14 spec script sales out of
... Read More »
The Black List 2009: Manager Score Card
The Black List 2009: Agency Score Card
2ND UPDATE: I'm the first to post the entire roster after EW premiered the Top 10 (here as they wrote it, plus I added in some production details) because of a pre-arrangement. That's right, it's time for Universal film executive Franklin Leonard's THE BLACK LIST begun back in 2004. Compiled every year from the suggestions of 311 film executives, each contributes the names of up to ten of their favorite scripts that were written in, or are somehow uniquely associated with, 2009 and will not be released in theaters during this calendar year. This year, scripts had to receive at least five mentions to be included on THE BLACK LIST. It has been said many times, but it’s worth repeating: THE BLACK LIST is not a 'best of' list. It is, at best, a 'most liked' list." But it does catapult dozens of scripts into production and screenwriters out of oblivion. Diablo Cody's Juno, Nancy Oliver's Lars And The Real Girl, Scott Neustader's and Michael Weber's 500 Days Of Summer, are just some of the screenplays which appeared on The Black List and then were made. I've noticed that it's also a "big dick" measuring contest for the Hollywood agencies and their motion picture lit departments. Problem is, some screenwriters think this list ... Read More »
Six writers won the 24th annual Don and Gee Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Each writer or writing team will receive the first installment of a $30,000 prize at a gala dinner in Beverly Hills on November 12. This year's winners are (listed alphabetically by author): Matt Ackley of Los Angeles for Victoria Falls; Vineet Dewan and Angus Fletcher of Los Angeles for Sand Dogs; John Griffin of Los Angeles for Dream Before Waking; Nidhi Anna Verghese of Los Angeles for Jallianwala Bagh; Jeff Williams of Wake Forest, N.C. for Pure. The winners were selected from a record 6,380 scripts submitted for this year's competition open to any individual who has not sold or optioned a screenplay or teleplay for more than $5,000, or received a fellowship or prize that includes a "first look" clause, an option, or any other quid pro quo involving the writer's work. Final judging of the competition was conducted by the Nicholl Committee, chaired by writer and 1992 Nicholl fellow Susannah Grant, and composed of writers Naomi Foner, Daniel Petrie Jr, Tom Rickman and Dana Stevens; actor Eva Marie Saint; cinematographers John Bailey and Steven B. Poster; executive Bill Mechanic; producers Gale Anne Hurd, David Nicksay, Peter Samuelson and Robert W. Shapiro; marketing executive Buffy Shutt; and agent Ronald R. Mardigian. Fellowships are awarded with the understanding that the recipients will each complete a feature-length screenplay during their fellowship year. Since the program's inception in 1985, ... Read More »
Academy Award-, WGA-, and BAFTA-nominated A History of Violence screenwriter Josh Olson has an interesting screed in this week's Village Voice:
I will not read your fucking script.
That's simple enough, isn't it? "I will not read your fucking script." What's not clear about that? There's nothing personal about it, nothing loaded, nothing complicated. I simply have no interest in reading your fucking screenplay. None whatsoever.
If that seems unfair, I'll make you a deal. In return for you not asking me to read your fucking script, I will not ask you to wash my fucking car, or take my fucking picture, or represent me in fucking court, or take out my fucking gall bladder, or whatever the fuck it is that you do for a living.
You're a lovely person. Whatever time we've spent together has, I'm sure, been pleasurable for both of us. I quite enjoyed that conversation we once had about structure and theme, and why Sergio Leone is the greatest director who ever lived. Yes, we bonded, and yes, I wish you luck in all your endeavors, and it would thrill me no end to hear that you had sold your screenplay, and that it had been made into the best movie since Godfather Part II.
But I will not read your fucking script.
At this point, you should walk away, firm in your conviction that I'm a dick. But if you're interested in growing as a human being and recognizing that
... Read More »
UPDATED with comment from sources close to Emmerich. (See below)
EXCLUSIVE: Hollywood is known as feud central, so I have new information about an old feud that briefly resurfaced today in a The New York Times story about New Line -- and that is about to become even more public because of a soon to be released book. Michael Cieply's NYT piece recalls how New Line chief Toby Emmerich wrote the screenplay for Frequency, and "that exercise got him sued by Laurie Perlman, a onetime [CAA] agent now married to the former Time Warner chairman Gerald Levin; Ms. Perlman contended that she hadn’t been properly included as a producer of Frequency. The suit was eventually dismissed, according to court records filed in the Santa Monica branch of Los Angeles Superior Court.)" But there is so much more to this feud as I discovered when I was leaked today a chapter from Perlman's forthcoming memoir God, The Universe, And Where I Fit In.
Chapter 13, entitled "My Last Stand", dumps on Toby Emmerich and Howard Koch Jr because of what she says she endured on the Frequency film. I've been asked not to reprint the chapter but to just paraphrase and excerpt it:
Before she began work on the project Frequency, Perlman hadn’t produced a film in 7 years, "and I was now looked on by many executives as a pesky fly that still manages to buzz and bother you in autumn". So she tried finding "young, promising talent" whose careers were ready to explode. "One of ... Read More »
Carl Icahn Now Wants ALL Of Lionsgate 
Action Comedy TV: Showrunner Matt Nix 
SAG National Board Approves Joint Bargaining … 
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