Hey folks, Harry here... with the latest gift from the Alamo's HIGHBALL. Sunday night may be the HIGHBALL's Grand Opening - but already it has delivered one helluva cool scoop.

Last night, a friend was having her birthday party there - at a pair of bowling lanes. Yoko and I went down and it was to be an evening of friends, drinks, cake and bowling. When who should appear, but Shane Black. He's in town for another function entirely, but he came over to chat a bit with me. Somewhere, the Mighty Joe Hallenbeck was crying.

When I asked him what he was working on, he shocked me with the revelation that he was going to be writing a script for DOC SAVAGE, which Orci & Kurtzman (those STAR TREK, EAGLE EYE, TRANSFORMERS guys) were producing.

If you've been reading the site for the past 14 years - you know that I'm a Doc Savage freak. We've tracked the property as it has been developed and redeveloped and almost made many many times. Even now, AB King is typing up an email to ask me if I asked Shane Black if he was writing this to star Arnie. No AB, that never crossed my mind.

However, I did inquire if they were modernizing the character. I asked this with dread in my belly, and Shane passed the test by saying the character can not be separated from the 30s. This is correct. Right now, he is preparing to write the script. He has decided that Doc needs to have his Fabulous Five. It will be an original DOC SAVAGE story that attempts to encapsulate the feeling of the whole collection of Lester Dent's work.

We then talked quite a bit about George Pal's wildly off-base version. Frankly, I'm absolutely thrilled that Orci & Kurtzman handed this one off to SHANE BLACK - he understands how to write dialogue for MEN in films - and having him pen a new adventure for Clark Savage Jr and his awesome 5 partners in adventure and enterprise... Monk, Ham, Long Tom, Johnny and Renny... well, it just makes me hold my breath for a director announcement. Let's pray this gets handled just right!