New Films in Production

[Fletch F. Fletch]

So I guess Rendezvous With Rama gets pushed back.....again.

Who knows? Fincher is "attached" to at least a half dozen projects. Once the dust settles on Benjamin Button maybe we'll know what he's going to do next, for sure.

[pianocrash]

They're going to remake Clue?

Hopefully before Lee Ving kicks the bucket.

Does anyone still play Magic: the Gathering?

[Barmy]

I'm still waiting for Peter Jackson to do justice to Dungeons and Dragons. It really needs 6 or 7 four-hour chapters.

[domino harvey]

This is a .com forum thread you guys, stop.

[dx23]

Tyler Perry's Whac-a-mole, Ang Lee's Life, Clint Eastwood's Risk, Brent Rattner's Yahtzee and The Coen Brother's Jenga... Coming Soon to a theater near you!!!!

[Morbii]

Maybe we can go more esoteric with Andrzej Wajda's Squad Leader

[miless]

I'm still waiting for Peter Jackson to do justice to Dungeons and Dragons. It really needs 6 or 7 four-hour chapters.

the last thing Peter Jackson needs is another fantasy film. I think he should have stuck with Meet The Feebles and Dead Alive type trash (that's really what he's best at).

[Grand Illusion]

This is a .com forum thread you guys, stop.

"Don't post silliness in the Monopoly filmic adaptation thread." :: "No fighting in the war room."

[John Cope]

A live action Akira? I'm not sure that's a good idea. The choice of director could make a world of difference here.

[klee13]

The Onion has projected the logical future progression from a Monopoly adaptation.

[miless]

The Onion has projected the logical future progression from a Monopoly adaptation.

I love their nod to one of Altman's worst films, Quintet.

[lady wakasa]

This may be premature since it's pre-production, but I don't see a mention elsewhere. Someone reassure me so I can sleep tonight.

The words I don't want to hear, from Variety:

A "Seven Samurai" remake is now in pre-production

[Cde.]

Stupid idea, Seven Samurai has been remade enough already. It will come off as a stock plot with a samurai twist to the uninformed*.



*elitism

[lady wakasa]

Those weren't remakes, those were adaptations.

I'm also hearing Weinstein Bros attached to this - and they didn't exactly do Hero a service.

It's early yet, and hard to get info, which is why I asked. I also admit Hertzog pulled Nosferatu off. But I don't get a good feeling about this.

[jesus the mexican boi]

I also admit Hertzog pulled Nosferatu off. But I don't get a good feeling about this.

I mistakenly understood that Werner Herzog was directing the Seven Samurai retread. That would have been something.

[Antoine Doinel]

Despite reports to the contrary, Bryan Singer is working on a sequel Superman Returns.

[Fletch F. Fletch]

From Variety:

Paramount puts pedal to 'Metal'
Fincher tests 'Heavy'
By MICHAEL FLEMING

Paramount Pictures will make an animated film inspired by the '70s sci-fi fantasy magazine Heavy Metal, with director David Fincher spearheading the project.

"Heavy Metal" will be stamped by the erotic and violent storylines and images that remain the trademark of a magazine that debuted in the U.S. in 1977. The mag introduced the works of American artists and writers such as Robert Silverberg, Harlan Ellison and H.R. Giger.

The film will consist of eight or nine individual animated segments, each of which will be directed by a different helmer.

Fincher will direct one of the segments; Kevin Eastman, the "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" co-creator who is now owner and publisher of Heavy Metal, will direct another. So will Tim Miller, whose Blur Studios will handle the animation for what is being conceived as an R-rated, adult-themed feature.

Fincher, Eastman and Miller will produce the film. The studio will lock in the other directors shortly. The mag previously spawned a 1981 animated feature and 2000 sequel.

Fincher, who directed "Zodiac" for Par, recently wrapped the Brad Pitt-Cate Blanchett starrer "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," which Par releases Dec. 19. Fincher recently became attached to direct Paramount's adaptation of the Charles Burns graphic novel "Black Hole" and is also developing "Torso" and "The Killer" for the studio.

Miller is writing, directing and producing a feature-length version of "Rockfish." Blur has also been responsible for animating such videogames as "Transformers: The Game," based on the hit pic from DreamWorks and Paramount.

[Cold Bishop]

Jesus, Fincher sure as hell loves his comics.

[Antoine Doinel]

Get ready for a remake of Sympathy For Lady Vengeance starring Charlize Theron.

[Fletch F. Fletch]

According to the L.A. Times, Leonardo DiCaprio and Ridley Scott are going to adapt Huxley's Brave New World:

A prophet returns

With a "Brave New World" movie coming from the team of Ridley Scott and Leonardo DiCaprio, and reissue orders climbing, Aldous Huxley is making a comeback.

By Susan Salter Reynolds. March 16, 2008

A writer's ideas are his legacy. After he dies, it's up to executors, heirs, lawyers, agents and colleagues to keep them alive -- and perhaps especially up to us, the readers, to thread those ideas through the weave of history, the passage of time, our own lives. Writers are the most potent of ghosts. Their spirits lodge in our quotidian decisions; we turn to them in times of change and times of terror. When their wisdom is unavailable, our choices get harder.

Aldous Huxley -- born in England in 1894, visionary author of 11 novels (most famously "Brave New World," in 1932), seven short-story collections, seven books of poetry, three plays, two books for children and countless essays -- is there for us when we need him most. All his life, Huxley concerned himself with the most pressing issues facing humanity: environmental degradation, capitalist greed, totalitarian oppression, scarcity of resources, war, human cruelty and human potential. After his death -- on Nov. 22, 1963, the day JFK died -- his widow, Laura, tried to keep his memory and his work alive, but a perfect storm of factors -- personalities, family politics -- kept most of the work from getting the wide distribution and range of media it deserved.

In the last two years, all this has changed. With his estate finally in some kind of order, a movie of "Brave New World" is in the works, produced by George DiCaprio and starring his son, Leonardo, directed by Ridley Scott with a screenplay by Andrew Nicholls. The respected New York agent Georges Borchardt is shepherding new editions of his books and selling foreign rights to a world market hungry for Huxley's work (especially those countries of the former Soviet bloc). We are, it is safe to say, on the eve of a Huxley revival.

Huxley was deliciously educated, prolific and prescient -- heir himself to a great torrent of ideas. His paternal grandfather was the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, defender of Charles Darwin when he needed it most. His mother was the niece of poet Matthew Arnold. Aldous was a member of the elite, educated at Eton and Oxford (Balliol). But he left the cocoon to become a true citizen of the world, keenly aware of its beauty and folly and fascinated by humankind's self-destructive impulses. In 1937, five years after the publication of "Brave New World," Huxley came to live in Southern California, like so many others for a combination of practical and spiritual reasons: the light (his eyesight was flawed from age 16), the desert air (his lungs were testy) and something unknowable as well. He lived in the Hollywood Hills -- with time spent at Llano in the Mojave Desert -- until his death. And what a beautiful death it was, as recorded in Laura Huxley's book "This Timeless Moment." More like a culmination ceremony, complete with LSD.

The house on Mulholland Drive, where both Aldous and Laura died (she late last year, at 96), is redolent of ideas, laughter and literature. Huge arched windows frame olive trees. Windows on the north face the Hollywood sign. Closets reveal stacks of translations of Huxley's work. A safe holds tapes made in the days before his death. A room with windows on three sides (the "space room") contains Laura's inversion machine; one imagines such visitors as Daniel Berrigan hanging upside down. ("Did Laura ever hang you?" old friends ask each other.) Bedrooms with sleeping porches still contain the books, paintings and photographs Aldous and Laura enjoyed.

Piero Ferrucci, Laura's nephew and one of three executors of the Laura and Aldous Huxley estate, is here from Italy to go through the alarming number of photographs and documents. He remembers Huxley walking around the grounds, looking, with his absurdly long legs, like a praying mantis. There is a photo of Piero as a baby; there is a photo of psychotherapist Roberto Assagioli (with whom both Piero and Laura studied) and Allen Ginsberg; there is a group photo with Linus Pauling, Richard Neutra, Christopher Isherwood, Gerald Heard, Aldous and his brother Julian on the terrace; there is a box containing an unpublished manuscript by Aldous.

Huxley arrived in Los Angeles with his first wife, Maria, who died of cancer in 1955; early friends included Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo, Anita Loos and the astronomer Edwin Hubble. That first house, also in the Hollywood Hills, burned down in 1961, along with Huxley's letters from Bertrand Russell, D.H. Lawrence and others; running from the blaze, Laura and Aldous carried only her old violin and the manuscript of Huxley's last novel, "Island." By then, a new crop of unique intellectuals, fascinated by the human species and the planet -- John C. Lilly, Buckminster Fuller, Alan Watts and R.D. Laing, to name a few -- had found lively discussion in the Huxley home.

Daniel Hirsch, another executor of the estate, has spent several years trying to organize the papers and negotiate their sale to either the Huntington Library in San Marino or UCLA. He hopes those negotiations will be completed in the next few months. Aldous had a long-standing relationship with UCLA (which David Zeidberg, director of the Huntington Library, graciously has admitted) and a close friendship with Lawrence Clark Powell, longtime head of the UCLA libraries. Victoria Steele, head of special collections at UCLA, met with Laura before her death. She hopes the papers come to UCLA but is keenly aware of the work needed to organize and catalog the books, papers, tapes and ephemera. Steele has been in this business for many years, giving her a kind of equanimity, even when she wants something badly for UCLA. "Books have their own fate," she tells me.

Hirsch is passionate about the Huxleys. " 'Island' changed my life," he says. "It's the most important book I've ever read." He plays me a tape of Aldous speaking at UC Santa Cruz about what the human race has done to the planet, about the beautiful cedars of Lebanon and the forests that preceded civilization. Huxley's rich, deep voice fills the room. Laura Huxley was a concert violinist, a lay therapist and the author of several self-help books. Hirsch first met her in 1968, at a support group on anger she led in a public park in Beverly Hills. Participants would form a circle around one person and encourage him or her to let his anger out -- to scream. This attracted the attention of a policeman, who was invited to participate and declined, Hirsch explains, because he felt he had too much rage in him to be contained by a bunch of young hippies. Hirsch, who founded the Committee to Bridge the Gap (CBG), a nuclear watchdog group that monitors government radiation policy, was increasingly helpful to Laura as she grew older (though, he says, "she was running on all cylinders up until her last days"). She gave him responsibility for organizing the acquisition of the papers, and because its mission was so important to Aldous and Laura both, the proceeds of the sale will go among people who have taken his work to heart. Borchardt too, when asked about the specifics of his dealings with Laura before she died, speaks of the closeness he felt to her, the lack of need to spell out their common hopes for Huxley's work.

And yet it has not been easy for all players in the Huxley estate to reach agreement over either the printed work or the films. Both grandchildren live on the East Coast. They did not grow up with Laura, but enjoyed cordial relations with her until a few years ago, when they began to express disappointment in the terms of Huxley's will, which left Laura 80% of the proceeds of all copyright sales of Huxley's work and Matthew the remaining 20% -- that portion went to Tessa and Trevenen after Matthew's death in 2005. Under copyright law, the grandchildren had potential termination rights for some projects, including the movie, which meant that those contracts had to be agreed upon by all parties regardless of the percentage they were allotted in the will.

Filmmakers, burned in what is known as the "Rear Window" case (in which a literary agent who, for $650, bought the rights to the short story on which Alfred Hitchcock based his 1954 film, showed up to claim his share of the gross), insist in most deals that all parties with termination rights sign off on a project. Huxley had sold the film rights for "Brave New World" to now-defunct RKO; Universal Studios, which owns the British rights to the RKO library, needed the family to relinquish its termination rights. Tessa and Trevenen were reluctant to do so. With the help of Kirsch, Hirsch and film attorney Jay Dougherty, Laura secured their consent, allowing the movie to go forward. Royalty shares have been readjusted, and decision making streamlined and centralized in the Laura Huxley Trust. Borchardt, exuberant, has negotiated some 33 contracts around the world since, including a Canadian edition of "Brave New World" with an introduction by Margaret Atwood. ("I hope Laura is looking down on us and thinking good things," he told me by phone from his New York office.)

Miles believes that one aspect of the Huxley oeuvre inadequately explored since his death is the fascination he felt for his chosen home, Southern California. He hopes that with new arrangements in place, there will be more freedom to explore that relationship -- perhaps with an anthology of Huxley's writings on Southern California. Given the presence of the entertainment industry, Los Angeles might be considered ground zero for the hedonism, self-interest, image-making and greed Huxley believed would be our downfall. In Huxley's alarums, Miles sees the intellectual foundations for later writers such as Neil Postman ("Amusing Ourselves to Death"). He points out that Christopher Hitchens, in his introduction to a recent edition of "Brave New World," betrayed a shallow understanding of Southern California as a true source of inspiration to Huxley, referring to the writer's 26 years here as a mere "Lawrentian sojourn." In Britain, in fact, he was considered an American author.

Hirsch is happy that the negotiations with the family are resolved and Huxley's work will be ever more available: "Aldous would be very pleased with how this has all sorted out. He had the extraordinary good fortune to have a wife who outlived him by 44 years and was dedicated to preserving his legacy. Now Laura has passed that task on -- to the DiCaprios; to Georges Borchardt; to Jonathan Kirsch; and to the team managing the literary trust: Jack Miles, Piero Ferrucci and myself. A major revival of interest in his ideas is coming, at a moment in history when it is critical for the world to hear his warning voice, his insights into and remedies for the human situation."

After a moment, he smiles, perhaps remembering Huxley's sense of "the Fundamental All-Rightness" of the world. "He would have laughed," Hirsch says. "Now, finally, he is free."

[miless]

I hope this means that Ridley has passed Blood Meridian to someone a little... um, better.

[Fletch F. Fletch]

Raimi, Paramount revive Jack Ryan
Director taking on Clancy character after 'Hell'
By MICHAEL FLEMING. Variety.

Paramount Pictures is in negotiations with Sam Raimi to spearhead a franchise revival of Jack Ryan, the Tom Clancy-created CIA analyst character who drove four hit movies for the studio.

Raimi would develop and direct a series of films to be produced by Lorenzo di Bonaventura and Raimi's Buckaroo Entertainment partner Josh Donen.

The intention is to generate several films Raimi would develop and direct, featuring Ryan at a younger, more formative point in his career than previously depicted. One invention the studio is considering is to set the film in the present, with the action triggered by a global threat.

Par will draft a scribe to write a Ryan movie that Raimi would shoot after he completes the Universal horror film "Drag Me to Hell." Paramount wants the Ryan movie ready for release in summer 2010.

Ryan is the cerebral CIA analyst who climbed the political ladder and became an Everyman action hero star in a quartet of films spearheaded by producer Mace Neufeld. Alec Baldwin originated Ryan in 1990's "The Hunt for Red October" and when Baldwin famously jumped ship to do "A Streetcar Named Desire" on Broadway, Harrison Ford replaced him in 1992's "Patriot Games" and 1994's "Clear and Present Danger." Ben Affleck played Ryan in 2002's "The Sum of All Fears." The four films grossed $781.5 million worldwide.

While Clancy is completing another Ryan novel, the studio hasn't read it and so hasn't decided if it will use the new book or come up with an original story. Paramount controls rights to the Ryan character, and gets first look at the new novel.

Raimi was drawn to the project because he loves the character. The studio was attracted by Raimi's skill in navigating a franchise, following a trio of "Spider-Man" blockbusters. Raimi is by no means out of the running to make more "Spider-Man" films, but he would have to direct the first film after "Drag Me to Hell" for the studio to make its 2010 release date.

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

One invention the studio is considering is to set the film in the present, with the action triggered by a global threat.

Whoa whoa whoa! Let's not use all of our great ideas at once.

[Fletch F. Fletch]

EW has a first look at Benicio Del Toro in Rick Baker's Wolfman makeup

[miless]

Benicio's a pretty perfect pick for a wolfman... especially since hes practically a wolfman already