Father Geek returning with another issue of our regular weekly rehash of the previous week's Tinseltown news stories... all those bits of interesting info that just may have slipped through the cracks in the floor during your busy work-week. Well, ol' Elson Gunn has, as usual, collected up all those lost tidbits of cine knowledge and put them all together in one easy to find spot...
The Weekly Recap...
TAKEN FROM VARIETY AND HOLLYWOOD REPORTER
CASTING
TAKEN FROM VARIETY AND HOLLYWOOD REPORTER
CASTING
* Meg Ryan is attached to star in Escape Artists' WEDLOCK, written by Thompson Evans, for director Adrian Noble about a married couple who work as divorce lawyers. Having grown distant from each other, they decide to see an unconventional marriage counselor who puts them through a series of unusual exercises to bring them back together.
* Christian Slater will star as supernatural detective Edward Carnby in Artisan's ALONE IN THE DARK, a movie based on the video game franchise. Shooting begins July 14 in Vancouver. Uwe Boll (HOUSE OF THE DEAD) will direct.
* Ron Livingston will star opposite Brittany Murphy in Revolution Studios' romantic comedy LITTLE BLACK BOOK for director Nick Hurran. Kathy Bates, Holly Hunter and Julianne Nicholson also star.
* Salma Hayek is in talks to star, opposite Pierce Brosnan, in AFTER THE SUNSET for director John Stockwell and New Line Cinema.
* Placido Domingo and Cheech Marin will voice characters in what is being billed as the first Hispanic themed and produced major animated film, SIAN KA'AN for director Raul Garcia and MUVI Films. The pic is a musical about a young girl in a small town who has to rescue her father and save the "golden snail" from extinction. The snail is linked to the survival of all species on Earth. During her journey, the girl encounters a large cast of characters that assist her mission and help her discover her true identity.
* Winona Ryder will star opposite Sean Connery and Klaus Maria Brandauer in Milos Forman's EMBERS as well as Robert Altman's THE WIDOW CLAIRE. The Forman project is an adaptation of Sandor Marai's Hungarian novel about two old men, once best friends, who meet again after a 41-year break in their relationship. The friends grew up together in military school; one came from a rich landowning family and subsequently became a colonel, the other is from a more humble background. The pair are separated after the colonel, as a young man, marries the woman they both secretly love. Jean-Claude Carriere is adapting the book for producers Robert and Michael Haggiag. Shooting begins Oct. 8 in Prague. The Altman pic also stars Matthew McConaughey and Jake Gyllenhaal and centers on a young widowed mother of two who is torn between the local playboy and a soldier about to go off to war.
* Matt Davis and Robin Tunney will star in Millennium Films' thriller MAIN LINE for director Rich Cowan. James Spader, Aidan Quinn and Peter Coyote also star in the pic, which begins shooting this week. It's about a man who hires a powerful attorney to help him cover up an accidental death, only to find himself trapped in a deadly blackmailing scheme. Matt Holloway and Art Marcum scripted.
* Matthew McConaughey is in talks to star in TISHOMINGO BLUES, based on Elmore Leonard's novel, for actor/director Don Cheadle, Bull's Eye Entertainment and Section Eight. Production begins Sept. 2. John Richards (NURSE BETTY) adapted the screenplay.
* Liam O'Neill will star in the indie pic LAST GOODBYE for writer/director Jacob Gentry about the lives of a famous television star, a rock 'n' roll band and a deadbeat actor, all caught by fate on a hot Atlanta summer day. Kansas Carradine, Clementine Ford, Dominik Garcia-Lorido, Alejandro Quinn, Sara Stanton, Chris Rydell, Chad McKnight and Maggie Blye also star.
* Kelly Rowland is in final talks to star as the female lead opposite Duane Martin in the indie film THE SEAT FILLER for director Nick Castle. It's about a struggling, unemployed man who is studying for the bar exam. To make ends meet, he works as a seat filler for various awards ceremonies. While occupying the seat of a high-powered entertainment attorney, he meets his dream girl, a gorgeous superstar who is performing at the event. To his amazement, she falls hard for him too, though she is under the mistaken impression that he's a wealthy lawyer.
* Al Pacino is in talks with MGM to star in DON CORNELIUS, written by Nick Guthe, for Feel Good Films and Tollin/Robbins Prods. It's about a repressed suburban accountant who finds out that his biological father is the head of the New York Mafia. When an attempt is made on the father's life, Cornelius ends up taking over the position.
* Renee Zellweger will star with Russell Crowe in the Ron Howard-directed CINDERELLA MAN for Miramax/Universal and Imagine. Crowe will play Jim Braddock, a Depression-era boxer who became a folk hero by winning a brutal 15-round match with heavyweight champion Max Baer in 1935. Zellweger will play his wife.
* Kirsten Dunst and Ashton Kutcher are attached to star in Cameron Crowe's ELIZABETHTOWN for DreamWorks/Paramount, C/W Prods. and Vinyl Films. Shooting is slated to begin in October and then again in the first-quarter of 2004 in Oregon and Kentucky. It's a rich ensemble comedy with two central leads. The project is intended to be a love letter to the resilience of the life force and is a story of an unexpected romance that develops against the backdrop of a Southern patriarch's hilariously elaborate memorial.
* Keira Knightley is in talks to join Jude Law in TULIP FEVER for director John Madden, DreamWorks and Miramax. Production begins in April. Set in the mid-1600s in Amsterdam, the story centers on a young woman who weds a wealthy merchant to escape poverty. However, she meets up with a penniless artist hired to paint her portrait, and the two fall in love. Their only hope of escape from her current situation is by raising money from the all-important tulip market. Tom Stoppard wrote the screenplay based on Deborah Moggach's novel.
* Robert Redford is attached to star in the feature adaptation of Alan Tennant's nonfiction book ALOFT for National Geographic Films. Erik Jendresen is writing the screenplay. Redford, Jake Eberts, Terrence Malick and Ed Pressman will produce along with Karen Tenkhoff and Christine Whitaker. It's the true story of Tennant's adventures with an irascible down-on-his-luck pilot as they resort to unconventional means to track the international flight path of the North American peregrine falcon in a plane equipped with Army high-tech listening devices.
* Queen Latifah and Jada Pinkett Smith are in talks to portray police detectives and friends in an untitled actioner for Paramount Pictures and producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura.
* Laura Linney, Chris O'Donnell and Ian McKellen will join Liam Neeson in KINSEY, Bill Condon's biopic of seminal sexologist Alfred Kinsey. Neeson will play the Indiana U. professor whose research in the 1940s and '50s blew the lid off America's bedroom habits and helped usher in the sexual revolution. Despite his own strict Methodist upbringing, Kinsey and his wife experimented with many of the activities he chronicled in his pioneering studies. Fox Searchlight and Qwerty Films are in advanced talks to co-finance the project.
* William Hurt joins Joaquin Phoenix and Bryce Dallas Howard in M. Night Shyamalan's THE WOODS for Disney. Set in 1897, the story revolves around a close-knit community that lives with the frightening knowledge that a mythical race of creatures resides in the woods around them.
* Clifton Collins Jr. will take one of the title roles in the indie thriller THE HILLSIDE STRANGLER for director Chris Fisher. The project is loosely based on the events surrounding serial killers Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi, two cousins who were pimps and hustlers and who murdered 10 women in Los Angeles during a four-month period from 1977-78. Brittany Daniel, Lake Bell, Tom Wright and Michael Haggerty also star.
* Michael Wincott joins the cast of THE ASSASSINATION OF RICHARD NIXON for director Niels Mueller. Set during the 1970s, the moviecenters on the true story of Philadelphia furniture salesman Sam Byck, played by Sean Penn, who hatches a plot to kill Richard Nixon after Byck's attempts to live out the American dream are dashed. Byck had planned to hijack a commuter flight in Atlanta and crash the airliner into the White House. Naomi Watts and Don Cheadle round out the cast. Mueller and Kevin Kennedy wrote the script.
* Debra Messing will voice the role of Arlene opposite Bill Murray in GARFIELD for 20th Century Fox and director Peter Hewitt. Messing will play Garfield's pink, sarcastic girlfriend, who has a gap in her teeth, opposite Murray's overweight Garfield. Alec Sokolow and Joel Cohen (TOY STORY) wrote the script.
* Richard Branson will play a hot air balloon operator in a cameo role in AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS alongside Luke and Owen Wilson, who will play the Wright brothers. Jackie Chan, Steve Coogan, Jim and Daniel Wu star in the pic, whose cast includes Kathy Bates, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Johnny Knoxville, Rob Schneider, John Cleese and Belgian thesp Cecile de France. Frank Coraci directs.
* Tara Reid will star opposite Christian Slater in Uwe Boll's low-horror feature ALONE IN THE DARK, based on the vidgame franchise, for Artisan Pictures, Boll KG and Brightlight Pictures.
* Gabriel Macht (THE RECRUIT) is in final talks to join John Travolta and Scarlett Johansson in A LOVE SONG FOR BOBBY LONG for Screen Gems and El Camino Pictures.
DIRECTOR/WRITER ATTACHMENTS
* New Line picked up Josh Stolberg's romantic comedy script GOOD LUCK CHUCK about a man who breaks up with his longtime girlfriend only to see her get engaged to the next guy she dates. The same pattern occurs with his next girlfriend and continues to repeat. All of a sudden, he finds himself becoming a lucky charm for women, who all want to date him.
* Marcos Siega will direct Miramax Films' THE UNDERCLASSMAN about a 24-year-old detective who, with his schoolboy looks, doesn't get any respect from his peers, who constantly send him on petty assignments to the mall and such. When he goes undercover at an elite private school, he stumbles upon an international stolen-car ring involving some of the students.
* Joel Zwick is in talks to direct FAT ALBERT, a live-action feature based on the '70s cartoon for 20th Century Fox. Bill Cosby and John Davis are producing the project, which follows Fat Albert and his posse of friends, who come to life when they walk out of the cartoon and into the real world.
* Warner Bros. Pictures snapped up Ebbe Roe Smith's pitch SELF MADE about a loser who loses his memory and, after regaining it, decides to reinvent himself and becomes a winner.
* Mandeville Films (BRINGING DOWN THE HOUSE) has set up two more romantic comedies: PRETTY UGLY, an Andrea King script at Disney about a smooth, good-looking man who wakes up one day ugly and socially inept and must get a kiss from a woman he once scorned in order to get his looks back; and PRINCE CHARMING, to be directed by Charles Shyer (FATHER OF THE BRIDE) at MGM about Snow White, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty competing for the affections of Prince Charming.
* Pupi Avati (THE HEART IS ELSEWHERE) will direct QUANDO ARRIVANO LE RAGAZZE? (WHEN WILL THE GIRLS ARRIVE?), a film focusing on young people's search for creative expression, success and love. The project will begin shooting at the 30th edition of the Umbria Jazz festivalin in the medieval town of Perugia. The story, set around a group of young musicians, focuses on the least talented but most ambitious member of the group and his struggles to overcome his lack of talent.
* Alex Steyermark has signed to direct WEST MEMPHIS THREE, based on the Arkansas murder case that inspired Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky's 1996 doc PARADISE LOST. Curt Johnson wrote the script and produces. Michael Pitt, Jacob Reynolds, Paul Dano, Gina Gershon, Drea de Matteo, John Waters, Donal Logue, Michael Madsen, Giovanni Ribisi, Ricki Lake, Doug Hutchison and J Barton star.
* David Frigerio will write THE UNTITLED REGINA HALL ADVERTISING PROJECT for Dimension Films. It's being developed for Regina Hall (SCARY MOVIE) to topline.
* Phoenix Pictures has picked up the script JUMPED IN from writer Cheryl Guerriero for D-No Entertainment to produce. It's about a teenage girl from a privileged background who crosses over to the wrong side of the tracks in order to infiltrate a hard-core girl gang whose members she believes killed her sister in a botched robbery.
* Donnie Yen will direct THE GATE OF THE DRAGON AND TIGER, based on the long-running comic book series, for Mandarin Films.
* Werner Herzog will direct and produce THE ENIGMA OF LOCH NESS, a documentary that will explore the myth of the Loch Ness monster. Principal photography is set to begin in the Loch Ness area of Scotland in late July for about two months. Screenwriter Zak Penn (X2) is also producing. The film is part education/part expedition with the expedition team led by Herzog, who will set out to discover the real story behind the monster who is said to lurk in one of the world's deepest lakes. Cinematographer and director John Bailey will also be on hand, shooting HERZOG IN WONDERLAND, a doc examining the director's relationship to Hollywood that's already in production. Herzog is also developing LITTLE DIETER NEEDS TO FLY, a feature based on Herzog's 1997 doc of the same name for Media Ventures with Christian Bale attached to star and Penn working on a draft.
* Barry Levinson is in talks to direct HENRY'S LIST OF WRONGS, based on the novel by John Scott Shepherd, at New Line Cinema. It's about a shy boy who summons the courage to ask the girl of his dreams to the prom, only to have her dump him on the big night. He transforms himself into a ruthless corporate shark. When he returns home a decade later to exact revenge, it is revealed that the girl who spurned him, did so because she was dying and didn't want him to suffer through her ordeal. Realizing his entire loathsome persona was built on a mistake, he then tries to patch things up with five people he has screwed over -- with the help of a hotel maid who's a psychology grad student.
* Disney purchased the feature pitch UNCLE STILTSKIN from TV scribes Bill and Cheri Steinkellner ("Cheers") based on the fairy tale. Having failed to acquire a child by spinning straw into gold, Uncle Stiltskin winds up playing parent to a wild young orphan girl raised by wolves. While he discovers this is considerably harder than he first thought, he also learns the true meaning of family.
* Alexander Payne will direct the ensemble comedy SIDEWAYS, based on the upcoming novel by Rex Pickett, for Fox Searchlight. The main characters are a writer and a washed-up actor who is about to get married. To salute what remains of their youth, they get lost in wine country on a weeklong vacation. Trouble ensues as the pair come to terms with maturity. Paul Giamatti is attached to star, with Sandra Oh on board in a supporting role. Shooting is slated to begin in September in California's Santa Ynez Valley.
* Andrew Wilder has written and is making his directorial debut with the feature THE ORPHAN KING for Cosmic Entertainment. It's a drama about a group of friends growing up in New York City, the first generation of latchkey kids, trying to escape a life of decadence in 1980s Manhattan. Alexis Bledel, Chris Evans, Treach, Bill Pullman, Andrew McCarthy and Jason Van Over star. Wilder is also adapting the novel GAMES OF THE HANGMAN, written by Victor O'Reilly, about a soldier and war photographer who discovers a student suicide is really a murder by a sadistic killer.
* Swedish director Reza Bagher will direct POPULAR MUSIC FROM VITTULA for Happy End. Based on Finnish author Mikael Niemi's best-selling novel, the story follows the friendship between two boys in the 1960s.
* Brett C. Leonard will direct JAILBAIT from his own play about the power dynamic between two long-term cellmates. Shooting begins July 21 for Belladonna Prods. Stephen Adly Guirgis will reprise the role of the murderer and Michael Pitt will play the cellmate. Laila Robins also stars.
* Mark S. Waters (FREAKY FRIDAY) will direct the teen comedy MEAN GIRLS for Paramount and producer Lorne Michaels. The story centers on a teenage girl who has been on safari with her zoologist parents but must navigate new terrain when she moves to an Illinois public school and falls in love with the ex-boyfriend of one of the most popular girls. It's based on Rosalind Wiseman's nonfiction book QUEEN BEES AND WANNABEES: HELPING YOUR DAUGHTER SURVIVE CLIQUES, GOSSIP, BOYFRIENDS AND OTHER REALITIES OF ADOLESCENCE. Tina Fey adapted the book and will play a co-starring role.
* Mike Werb and Michael Colleary (FACE/OFF) will write the sci-fi drama ALIEN PRISON for Columbia Pictures and Red Wagon. It will be a big-budget film about a gang that plots an escape from their alien captors. The prisoners then hope to prevent a full-scale invasion of Earth.
* Mike Barker and Matt Weitzman will write GDI for New Line and producers Paul and Chris Weitz. Based on an original idea from the writers, the project centers on a popular college senior who gets kicked out of his fraternity and is forced to move into the international dorm.
* Terry Kinney will direct FOUND IN THE STREET, based on Patricia Highsmith's novel, for Senator International and Mr. Mudd producing. A fall start is being planned. Adapted by Phillip Leven and Phyllis Nagy, the project is a psychological suspense thriller about a chance encounter between several people in New York's Greenwich Village, including a middle-aged security guard, an artist, his bisexual wife and a lesbian waitress/model. A series of events leads to murder and blame.
* Vidhu Vinod Chopra will direct the psychological thriller MOVE 5 for Outlaw Prods. from a script he wrote with Abhijit Joshi and Suketu Mehta. It centers on a friendship between a master chess player and a detective, both of whom have suffered the death of a daughter. When the chess player is killed, the detective plunges into a quest to find out who did it. The answer lies in an unfinished game between the dead and the living. Shooting begins this fall.
* Kevin Lima (Disney's TARZAN) will direct CAT AND MOUSE at 20th Century Fox about a cartoon mouse zapped into the human world to become a flesh-and-blood man. Things go awry when his nemesis, a cat from the cartoon world, appears and threatens to disrupt his new life. Karey Kirkpatrick (CHICKEN RUN) is rewriting a script by Neil Tolkin (THE EMPEROR'S CLUB).
* Ilmar Taska will direct WE WON'T SLEEP TONIGHT, a psychological thriller about two men and two women's whirlwind experiences during a long summer's night. Taska's son Kristian will produce.
* Focus Features has snapped up the script TANGLED UP IN BLUE by Lou Berney about a tough female bank robber from the big city. When a hit is put out on her, she is forced to hide out in an idyllic small town, but the town's effect on her is in some ways more dramatic than the death threat.
* New Line Cinema picked up the comedy pitch ON THE HOMEFRONT from writers Analisa Labianco and Tempest Edwards about a special-forces commando who finds himself on the toughest mission of his military career: After mouthing off to his female C.O. about how women have it easy at home, he's kept out of the action as an on-base family liaison, navigating the minefields of his buddies' wives, unruly kids and neglected chores.
* Mike Samonek will rewrite SMART AND SMARTER (aka THINK TANK) for New Line about a pair of socially backward geniuses who venture out of the splendid isolation of the think tank in which they've spent most of their adult lives to attempt to derail the wedding of a childhood girlfriend one of them still loves.
* New Line has purchased the sci-fi action-comedy pitch PLANET TERRY by comic creator Rob Liefeld about a middle-aged family man in extraordinary circumstances in the vein of pics like LIAR LIAR and BRUCE ALMIGHTY.
* George Tillman Jr. (MEN OF HONOR) is attached to direct a remakie of Korea's 1999 detective thriller TELL ME SOMETHING for Fox 2000 and producer Bob Teitel. The original film centered on a killer who deposited bags of his victims' mixed-up body parts leaving cops with the gruesome task of reassembling victims piece by piece in an effort to discern a pattern to the killings and the identity of the killer.
* David Leland (MONA LISA) is adapting THE DECAMERON for producer Dino De Laurentiis. Giovanni Boccaccio's 14th century story centers on 10 young Florentines who take refuge in the Italian countryside in 1348 as the black plague ravages the city, amusing each other with earthy stories about love and adventure.
* John Whitesell is in talks to direct Warner Bros. Pictures/Village Roadshow Pictures' live-action/CGI feature CATS & DOGS 2: TINKLES' REVENGE for Mad Chance Prods. John Requa and Glenn Ficarra scripted with a revision by Tab Murphy.
* Paige Cameron is set to direct THE EMPRESS KING, based on the life of the first woman to become king. Penned by Simon Rawlinson wrote the script based on a true story set in the year 1100 centering on the English Empress Maude, whose father, King Henry I of England and Normandy, created an empire the likes of which had not been seen since Alexander the Great. When Henry's only son, William, dies in a ship accident, Henry shockingly declares his daughter, the Empress Maude, to be his successor. Firecracker Films will produce.
* Phil Wen is in final talks to write a remake of the Swedish comedy KOPPS for Columbia and Happy Madison. The original film centers on a small-town police force that is on the verge of being shut down because of a lack of crime in the area.
* Alan McElroy (SPAWN) sold an untitled action pitch to WWE Films who is keeping the pitch's plot under wraps.
* Ruy Guerra will direct IN EVIL HOUR for United Intl. Pictures. Based on the 1962 novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the film depicts life in a small Colombian town threatened by political oppression.
* April Blair will adapt the Janet Evanovich novel ONE FOR THE MONEY at Columbia Pictures. It's about an unemployed lingerie buyer whose only chance out of her financial pickle is to work for her cousin's bail-bond business. Her first assignment is to collect the $10,000 bond forfeited on a murder suspect, who turns out to be the same rogue who took her virginity in high school.
* Raymond De Felitta (TWO FAMILY HOUSE) will direct MAKE SOMEBODY HAPPY for Echo Lake Prods. from his own script about an Italian-American family whose members all are concealing personal secrets that begin to be revealed with the surprise arrival of the husband's son from a previous relationship.
* Stuart Beattie will adapt the James Siegel novel DERAILED for Miramax Films and producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura. The thriller is the story of a middle-class professional man whose life goes incredibly and criminally awry.
* Ed Neumeier will script the feature adaptation of author Lois Lowry's science fiction novel THE GIVER for Walden Media, AsIs Prods. and RCN Entertainment. It's about a 12-year-old boy living in an idyllic future where all memory of human history has been erased and there is no crime, poverty or sickness -- only joy. However, Jonas' life is thrown into turmoil when he learns some chilling truths about the world in which he lives, and his knowledge sparks rebellion.
* David Richard Ellis (FINAL DESTINATION 2) will direct the sci-fi action project CONFRONTATION for Paramount, Mace Neufeld Prods. and Mutual Film Co. It revolves around a hostile alien spacecraft shot down and captured by the U.S. military, setting off a rescue attempt by alien forces and a violent confrontation.
* Mark and Brian Gunn (BRING IT ON AGAIN) will write SUPERSIZE for Disney/Mandeville about the true story of football-playing brothers Dennis and Derrick Johnson who saw their football debut in the second and third grades, respectively, when their dad, a high school football coach, decided to put them into the end of a game with a lopsided score. In 1992, seventh-grader Dennis started for his Harrodsburg, Ky., high school team, inspiring a state law that barred boys younger than the ninth grade from playing ball. Dennis is now on the Arizona Cardinals squad, while Derrick was drafted by the Cincinnati Bengals.
* Renny Harlin is in talks to direct Intermedia Films' action comedy THE KILLER'S GAME (aka GODFORSAKEN) with Mad Chance Prods. producing. Based on Jay Bonansinga's novel, the project is about a burned-out assassin who takes a hit out on himself. But after learning he is about to become a father, the protagonist must evade an assortment of world-class assassins while on the run across Europe with his girlfriend. Rand Ravich adapted the material.
* Sheldon Turner will adapt the Thomas Perry psychological thriller novel PURSUIT for MGM and Overbrook Entertainment to produce. Will Smith will produce with Bob Wunch and may star in the film. The story opens with the discovery of 13 bodies in a Louisville restaurant. A criminologist believes that a professional killer did the murders to cover a contract hit; he advises the father of one victim to call in an unscrupulous consultant who specializes in tracking down murderers, setting off a cat-and-mouse game between the professional killer and the professional hired to hunt him down.
MISCELLANEOUS PRODUCTION TIDBITS
* Bull's Eye Entertainment has optioned Daniel Mason's novel THE PIANO TUNER about a tuner of rare pianos in Victorian England. Commissioned to repair the instrument of an eccentric major, the piano tuner embarks on a journey of self-discovery deep into war-torn Burma.
* Producer Barry Josephson has acquired the rights to THE DIVE, the forthcoming autobiography from world champion freediver Francisco "Pipin" Ferreras. Freediving is a burgeoning extreme sport in which participants zip hundreds of feet undersea after taking only a single breath of air, then race to the surface attached to a sled pulled by an inflated balloon. The pic will revolve around Ferreras' romance and marriage to fellow freediver Audrey Mestre, and her untimely death in October 2002. She died while attempting to break the world record off the coast of the Dominican Republic.
* Richard Belzer will spearhead two comic features for National Lampoon to help restore their edgy comic image. The two pics are: THIS IS AMERICA, a sketch comedy movie, and the Jim Valalee-penned THE LIGHTNING CLUB, about a group of inhabitants in heaven who automatically got there by being struck by lightning. Once there, they are sequestered into one place not unlike a frat house.
* Nicole Kidman's involvement in the Regency Enterprises project MR. AND MRS. SMITH to be directed by Doug Liman is in danger because of a potential scheduling conflict with Paramount Pictures' THE STEPFORD WIVES. Regency wants to move forward with a September start date on the Simon Kinberg-penned project, which centers on a bored married couple who discover that they are enemy assassins hired to kill each other. Brad Pitt is also set to star.
* Artisan Pictures will develop a feature based on C.D. Payne's novel YOUTH IN REVOLT, the story of a precocious 14-year-old's mission to lose his virginity, with David Permut set to produce.
* "The Boondocks" creator Aaron McGruder and partner Reggie Hudlin (HOUSE PARTY) have signed with Sony to take the comicstrip and develop TV and feature projects. The duo has been charged with writing a pilot script and working on an animated feature treatment. The strip revolves around two inner-city kids, Huey and Riley, who move to the suburbs with their slightly-out-of-touch grandfather.
GUNN SHOTS
(NOT from the trades)
* Check out the film SEARCHING EIGHT MILES FOR GOOD WILL FORRESTER at http://homepage.mac.com/mattguy/iMovieTheater34.html
* ANATOMY OF A FIGHT, a new independent feature film which will be premiering next week on Long Island, is a stark yet funny look at New York's suburban life, and the colorful people that live there. More information can be found at http://www.nxflix.net
