Father Geek once more with the latest edition of Elston's regular weekly "Catch-up-on-the-latest-movie-news" column...
The Weekly Recap...
TAKEN FROM VARIETY AND HOLLYWOOD REPORTER
CASTING
TAKEN FROM VARIETY AND HOLLYWOOD REPORTER
CASTING
* Jennifer Lopez is in negotations to star in New Line's comedy MONSTER-IN-LAW about a girl who's set to marry the perfect guy until she meets his mother, the world's worst mother-in-law.
* Chad Michael Murray will star opposite Hilary Duff in Warner Bros. Pictures/Gaylord Films' CINDERELLA STORY for director Mark Rosman. Shooting begins June 30. The story centers on a young and slightly dorky high school student who goes through a transformation, becoming one of the hottest girls in school. Anya Kochoff wrote the script.
* Scarlett Johansson will to star with John Travolta in A LOVE SONG FOR BOBBY LONG for Screen Gems, El Camino Pictures and writer/director Shainee Gabel. It's about a headstrong young woman who returns to New Orleans after the death of her estranged mother.
* Halle Berry, Ewan McGregor, Mel Brooks, Drew Carey, Jim Broadbent, Stanley Tucci, Dianne Wiest, Jennifer Coolidge, Paul Giamatti, Dan Hedaya, D.L. Hughley, Jamie Kennedy, Harland Williams, Sofia Vergara and Amanda Bynes are lending their vocal talents to the CGI project ROBOTS for director Chris Wedge (ICE AGE), 20th Century Fox and Blue Sky Studios. The movie is set for release March 11, 2005. Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel wrote the script based on a story by playwright/author David Lindsay-Abaire, about a young genius who wants his robots to make the world a better place. He falls in love with a sexy executive robot and must face down a corporate tyrant and aid a master inventor.
* Robin Tunney, Philip Baker Hall and Justin Chambers will star in the indie pic IN CONTROL OF ALL THINGS for director Alexander Bulkley. Set amid the case of the Zodiac Killer in the late 1960s, the story follows a police detective and his son who both grow obsessed with the murders and endanger their family in the process. Bulkley co-scripted the project with Kelly Bulkley.
* Chi McBride will star opposte Tom Hanks and Catherine Zeta-Jones in TERMINAL for director Steven Spielberg and DreamWorks Pictures. Shooting is scheduled to start in September in Los Angeles. The film will center on a Balkan immigrant in the U.S. who makes an airport transit lounge his home after he learns that the borders of his war-torn nation have been blurred, voiding his passport and leaving him without a country. Making friends among the airport employees, including a baggage handler, he falls in love with a flight attendant, which prompts his escape a year later. Sacha Gervasi and Jeff Nathanson scripted.
* Naomi Watts will star opposite Ewan McGregor in the supernatural thriller STAY for Regency Enterprises and director Marc Forster. Shooting begins in late September. David Benioff wrote the script about a psychologist at an Ivy League university who tries to prevent one of his students from committing suicide.
* Richard E Grant will star in the feature adaptation of THE STORY OF AN AFRICAN FARM, the classic 19th-century novel by Olive Schreiner, for director David Lister and Rodini Films. Bonnie Rodini wrote the screenplay. Production begins in September. Published in 1884 amid much controversy about its feminist slant, the tome tells the story of three children who live on a farm until a stranger from England turns their lives upside-down.
* George Carlin and Ja Rule join the large cast of SCARY MOVIE 3, starring Charlie Sheen and Denise Richards, for Dimension Films and director David Zucker. Shooting will wrap at the end of this month in Vancouver, with domestic release set for Oct. 3.
* Lena Headey, Peter Stormare, Jonathan Pryce, Richard Ridings and Mackenzie Cook will star alongside Matt Damon and Heath Ledger in THE BROTHERS GRIMM. Terry Gilliam directs the Dimension/MGM pic which begins shooting June 30 in Prague. Ehren Kruger wrote the action/adventure fantasy about the legendary German fairytale scribes battling against a real magical curse after a history of trading in hoaxes.
* Cameron Diaz and Catherine Zeta-Jones are strong candidates to play the female lead opposite Jim Carrey in FUN WITH DICK AND JANE for Columbia Pictures and director Barry Sonnenfeld. The studio has been talking with writer Peter Tolan, but will likely first bring in Judd Apatow to work on the comedy.
* Til Schweiger and Stellan Skarsgard join Clive Owen in KING ARTHUR for director Antoine Fuqua, Disney and producer Jerry Bruckheimer. The film is said to offer a more historical take on the medieval legend.
* Mira Sorvino will play the female lead, opposite Robin Williams and Jim Caviezel in the sci-fi thriller FINAL CUT for Lions Gate, Industry Entertainment and writer/director Omar Naim. Production begins later this month. Sorvino plays the girlfriend of a man who edits footage recorded in microchips implanted in people, removing the violence and bad moments. When he must edit the life of the technology's creator, he becomes targeted by radicals.
* Greg Grunberg ("Felicity") joins the Coen brothers-directed LADYKILLERS for Touchstone Pictures and the indie pic POKER NIGHT for director Cassidy Harrison. The latter movie centers on a group of friends, all of whom run scams, who gather for a weekly poker game. Dennis Farina also stars.
* Queen Latifah will star and Tim Story is in talks to direct TAXI for 20th Century Fox. Shooting begins Sept. 15. The project, an English-language remake of the 1998 French pic of the same name, is being produced by Luc Besson, who also produced the original. The story centers on a speedy cab driver who teams up with a young cop to solve a series of bank robberies. Jim Kouf wrote the original draft with Tina Chisolm, Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant turning in a rewrite.
* Cara Buono (HULK) and Isaach de Bankole (GHOST DOG) will star in the sci-fi comedy FROM OTHER WORLDS for Belladonna Prods. and Exit Five Entertainment. Barry Strugatz directs the story of a depressed Brooklyn housewife sleepwalking through life until she encounters a UFO in her backyard.
DIRECTOR/WRITER ATTACHMENTS
* David Dorfman (ANGER MANAGEMENT) is in talks to write THE RETREAT for Guy Walks Into A Bar and New Line. It's about a newly hired exec who goes to his first company retreat on his second day at the job. During the weekend, odd occurrences befall him until he finds he's the target of sabotage by a disgruntled employee who wanted the post.
* Tom Laughlin is prepping BILLY JACK LAUGHLIN FOR PRESIDENT as a doc-fiction combo to shoot between August and November. Laughlin, who briefly ran for president in 1992, plans to portray the process of exploring a presidential campaign in half a dozen states. Written by Laughlin, Dolores Taylor and Robin Hutton, the project aims to blend campaigning, backroom politics, romance and drama.
* David Guion and Michael Handelman will rewrite the DreamWorks pic USED GUYS for Jay Roach to direct, with Ben Stiller and Vince Vaughn starring. Set in a world where women run the Earth, the story centers on two guys who are rendered obsolete by a new clone and go on the run hoping to regain manhood by reaching a guy heaven known as "Mantopia."
* John Waters will direct Johnny Knoxville, Selma Blair and Paul Giamatti in A DIRTY SHAME from his own script for This is That and Killer Films. Johnny Knoxville, Selma Blair and Paul Giamatti are attached to star. It's about a blue-collar convenience store owner-turned-sex addict, suffering from a concussion and uncontrollable sexual urges. Shooting is expected to begin in the fall in Baltimore.
* Michael LeSieur will script the high-concept comedy TWINS (aka IT WASN'T ME) for Warner Bros. about a man who creates an imaginary twin brother.
* Director Peter Dalle is shooting APPARENTLY for Fladen Film and Swedish Film Institute about passengers on a train between Stockholm and Berlin in 1945.
* Cynthia Mort will write the ensemble comedy MISS CAPTIVITY for Universal, producer Barry Mendel, based on an idea Tea Leoni who will take a role in the project. It's inspired by a true story in which reality TV producers looking for a ratings coup held a beauty pageant in a women's prison Lithuania, thinking it would lead to trashy catfight footage. Instead, the pageant ended up being beneficial for the prisoners.
* James L. Brooks will direct and produce his romantic comedy script SPANGLISH for Columbia Pictures. Adam Sandler and Tea Leoni are in talks to star in the pic, which will shoot at the end of the year.
* Twentieth Century Fox has optioned the feature film rights to Deborah Scroggins' novel EMMA'S WAR: AN AID WORKER, A WARLORD, RADICAL ISLAM, AND THE POLITICS OF OIL -- A TRUE STORY OF LOVE AND DEATH IN SUDAN for Scott Free to produce along with Kennedy/Marshall. Steve Knight will adapt the novel for the screen for Tony Scott to direct and Nicole Kidman to star. It centers on the real-life story of a young British woman who moves to the Sudan to become an aid worker. She then falls in love with a Sudanese warlord in the midst of civil war.
* Warner Bros. Pictures is developing THE FALL GUY, based on the 1980s action/adventure series, which Management 360 will produce. Tristan Patterson is attached to write the script. Series creator Glen Larson will exec produce.
* Rob Marshall is in talks to direct Columbia Pictures/Red Wagon Entertainment's MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA, based on Arthur Golden's best-selling novel.
* Gwyn Lurie sold the pitch HITCHED to Revolution Studios for Lorenzo Di Bonaventura. It's described as a romantic comedy about a soon-to-be-divorced English professor who puts literature's great romances to the test when he masquerades as being unavailable to attract the woman of his dreams.
* Steven Shainberg (SECRETARY) will develop and direct Warner Bros. Pictures' URBAN TOWNIES as a potential starring vehicle for Tobey Maguire, who is producing through his Maguire Entertainment along with Spring Creek Prods. Jesse Wigutow wrote the script about a man living in the Midwest who comes back to New York for his estranged father's funeral only to discover that his old flame is now involved with his best friend.
* Disney picked up the script BOOMERANG by Dennis Osborne for Reese Witherspoon's Type A Films to produce the pic for the studio. The dark comedy concerns a young woman's very unorthodox journey into adulthood.
* Frank Darabont will direct the story of Iva Toguri, who did hard time after being vilified as Tokyo Rose, with Christopher Hampton (THE QUIET AMERICAN) in negotiations to script. Born in L.A., Toguri had earned a UCLA degree when she rushed to Japan to help an ailing aunt. Denied reentry after Pearl Harbor, Toguri's pro-American views got her ostracized in Japan, and she nearly starved before her bilingual skills landed her work typing scripts for English-language broadcasts on Radio Tokyo. She snuck food to the POWs and read benign on-air messages. Post-WWII, a Cosmo writer promised Toguri $2,000 for an interview, but the mag refused to pay, and she eventually was arrested for treason. Toguri returned to the U.S. as a villain who would serve time and get deported before receiving a presidential pardon 30 years later.
* Writer Robert Harling (FIRST WIVES CLUB) will work on DALLAS, based on the popular TV soap, for New Regency.
* Merriwether Williams ("SpongeBob SquarePants") is writing WONDER TWINS, a live-action film version of the series for Warner Bros. Pictures, to be directed by Shawn Levy. Williams is also penning the edgy comedy JONESTOWN SUCKERNUTS for Senator Films about two high school friends who start a cult in their parents' garage.
MISCELLANEOUS PRODUCTION TIDBITS
* Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner's C/W Prods. optioned Bill Minutaglio's book CITY ON FIRE: THE FORGOTTEN DISASTER THAT DEVASTATED A TOWN AND IGNITED A LANDMARK LEGAL BATTLE, a detailed portrait of Texas City, Texas, which was virtually leveled by the explosion of two ships carrying a huge cargo of ammonium nitrate in 1947. Close to 700 people died. The catastrophe's survivors successfully sued the government for negligence -- the first civil class action suit against the U.S. government.
* Sony/Revolution Studios' Western suspense thriller THE MISSING, directed by Ron Howard, was scheduled for a wide release Jan. 16, but will now receive a platform release beginning Dec. 10 in New York and L.A. By Christmas, the film will be in the top 12-15 markets and will have a wide national release on Jan. 9.
* Rob Minkoff's Sprocketdyne Entertainment is teaming with Bullwinkle Studios to develop and produce the live-action/CGI-animated feature MR. PEABODY AND SHERMAN. The story of a brilliant dog and his pet boy who time travel via their "wayback machine," debuted in 1959 as part of Jay Ward's beloved animated series "Rocky and His Friends."
* Angry Films and writer/producer Tom DeSanto have teamed to produce THE TRANSFORMERS, a feature-length, live-action movie based on the popular Hasbro toy line.
* MGM has picked up film rights to Steve Niles' comic book miniseries CRIMINAL MACABRE from Dark Horse Entertainment. The series centers on the life and career of supernatural private eye Cal MacDonald, who doubles as a hit man, ridding contemporary L.A. of its underbelly of monsters, ghouls and vampires who live among the humans and come out at night.
* Paramount has stepped away from a May opening for MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE 3, which is now expected to begin shooting in January and would likely open during the 2004 holiday season or in May 2005. Joe Carnahan (NARC) will direct.
GUNN SHOTS
(NOT from the trades)
* X-Filme, Berlin (RUN, LOLA, RUN) will produce Tomi Streiff's (THE WEDDING COW) next film LOVE & ECSTASY. It's described as "a romantic thriller about an undercover cop's enchantment by the world he set out to bust. The drug movie with a happy ending." The film is currently seeking financing.
* WINFEMME FILM FESTIVAL FIVE - The NEW FESTIVAL DATES October 30-November 2nd, 2003. The NEW ENTRY DEADLINE is (postmarked), July 31, 2003. For more info, visit http://www.winfemme.com
