When I first had the idea to assemble a dream cast for a movie about Somali pirates, I envisioned a typical actioner with a dash of tense international politics. The pirates would be played by unknown actors of African descent, with the exception of “the good one,” who would be played by either Djimon Hounsou or Chiwetel Ejiofor. He would realize his folly, then become an integral part of the hero’s harrowing siege of a captured vessel. The hero, of course, would be a white, male, American naval officer, rough around the edges, not afraid to cut the crap and do the right thing. As it turns out, the truth of what’s going on in the Gulf of Aden is much more fascinating.
Enter Michele Ballarin: Virginia socialite, investment banker, weapons dealer. When she’s not breeding horses or fending off allegations of fraud in Austria, she’s running Select Armor, Inc. The company is not your typical private security firm competing for lucrative anti-terror contracts. It’s a small, nimble company, run by a woman, with small town roots, and plenty of murky dealings in places like Somalia.
What does Ballarin have to due with the pirates? More importantly, who should play her in a movie? More after the jump.
I was reading Diablo Cody’s recent article in Entertainment Weekly about her love for Judy Blume, and started wondering why there haven’t been any movies made from anything she’s written. Earlier this summer my friend Jen Jones published a biography of Judy Blume, and when I rang her up about any Judy Blume films, she confirmed my fears: she’d been relegated to the world of made-for-TV movies and development hell.
Blume signed a multi-picture contract with Disney way back in March of 2004 (The New York Times talks about why it took so long), and since then we’ve neither seen nor heard a glimmer about the Deenie movie that was supposedly in development, nor anything about her other books. So in an effort to prime the pump, we’re going to present our top five dream casts for five of our favorite Judy Blume books. Check them out after the break.
Forget about Don Cheadle replacing Terence Howard as James Rhodes / War Machine in Iron Man II, which smells a lot like the “we’ll threaten to replace Tobey Maguire with Jake Gyllenhaal” tactic that Sony used for Spider-Man II –– Hollywood has been doing this for years. It was bad enough back in the days of television with Dick Sargent replacing Dick York in Bewitched, but now it’s becoming pretty commonplace for producers to replace actors in iconic roles. Although now it’s more common due to monetary concerns, which seems to be what has taken Howard out of the War Machine suit, it’s also common to see an actor ankle a role because they don’t like the source material, or the direction the character is taking. We’ve put together several different re-castings, which all happened for a variety of reasons: money, dissatisfaction with the script, test audience reactions, and actors just growing tired of playing the same character. Check them out after the break.
From the Dear God, I Guess It’s Really Happening file: Dennis Quaid and Channing Tatum have been cast in the lead roles in Stephen Sommers’ G.I. Joe movie.
From the Dear God, Why Are You LETTING It Happen file: Starz is turning Paul Haggis’ Crashinto a miniseries. “This deal fits well with Starz’s strategy of making TV series out of presold movie commodities,” says Starz’ VP of programming, although as far as I can tell, this’ll be the movie net’s first original scripted drama as well as their first pillage of a “movie commodity.”
Specialty divisions are expecting this Sunday’s stripped-down Golden Globes to deliver a serious hit in the usual visibility for their Oscar-hopeful product. But one exec quoted in this piece says some of his colleagues are “secretly thrilled” that they don’t have to take their minds off the strike and the election in order to attend one more black-tie schmoozefest. Here’s the kicker: “I had heard that stars weren’t even planning to dress up should the telecast have happened,” he said.
Although film studios have thus far managed to remain fairly active over the course of the strike, Warner Brothers laid off more than 1,000 employees yesterday, citing an impending “decline in production activity.” At other studios, crew members from struck TV shows have been repurposed to work on films, but the stock pile of shootable scripts can only last so long.
Nicole Kidman is pregnant, so Kate Winslet will take the part she was scheduled to play in Stephen Dalry’s The Reader. Winslet was Daldry’s first choice for the role but had been initially unavailable.
Bloody-Disgusting is passing along the rumor that Emily Blunt has signed on to star opposite Benicio DelToro in a remake of the 1930s Universal horror classic, The Wolfman. I guess I should be really upset about this. As I’ve said before, I’ve got a huge weakness for the monster movies of the 1930s, which, for me, hold up as well as they do primarily as star vehicles. I’m the biggest fangirl for Boris Karloff, but Lon Chaney Jr, who played the original Wolfman, is my second favorite. Karloff and Bela Lugosi could be inhumanly creepy, but Chaney had a regular-guy thing which is maybe more interesting in retrospect–– his transformation into the monster is less campy and more legitimately scary, and as a whole, the film feels much more modern than many from the era. I think Benicio will probably bring something very different to the table, which may not be a good thing.
They’re not a trade, but they’ve got the biopic casting news everyone’s talking about: MTV reports that Anna Faris has won the starring role in a film about Deep Throat star Linda Lovelace. The last time I wrote about this project was in March 2005; at that time, Courtney Love was set to star.
Brad Pitt will replace Matt Damon in The Fighter, a drama about an Irish lightweight boxing champion. Damon, according to Variety, “had too many projects on his dance card to make the film on the schedule Par[amount] wanted.”
Brett Ratner is going to make a movie about Frank Sinatra’s long-suffering valet, and guess which Rush Hour veteran is set to star? It’s going to be based on a book by William Stadiem, who says of Ratner, “I think he’s channeling Frank sometimes.”
Magnolia’s recently-announced genre label has made two new acquisitions, both starring martial arts star Marko Zaror: Kiltro and Mirageman.
Dan Fogler, who won a Tony for his work in The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee and who will soon star in ping pong/FBI spoof Balls of Fury, tells MTV he’s currently preparing to play Alfred Hitchcock in a movie about the early life of the famed director. From MTV’s movie blog:
You see Hitchcock for two weeks out of his life in [his] early 20s. He just finished his first movie, which is supposed to be a comedy, but it’s not. So he’s freaking out about it and realizes that if he just switches a few things, it can become a thriller. [And] that’s how he finds his niche… give away your trade secrets. [The movie is] cool if you’re a Hitchcock fan. Just like Shakespeare in Love, you see how he comes up with certain ideas [for future films] from events that happened during the course of the movie.
Fogler’s film is titled after Number Thirteen, Hitchcock’s actual first, never-finished film. Only a few scenes of the original were shot before the production was shut down, and those have apparently never been seen by anybody and are thought to have been melted. Hitchcock rarely spoke of this point in his career, and there’s only one brief mention of the film in Donald Spoto’s definitive Hitchcock biography, The Dark Side of the Genius:
A comedy script was prepared, called alternately Mrs. Peabody or Number Thirteen, and Clare Greet and Ernest Thesiger were singed to play the leads. Alfred Hitchcock undertook the direction, on assignment from the chief of production, but by this time the studio’s dwindling funds were being diverted from production to pay debts and salaries, and the unfinished film was shelved. To this day, nothing else is known about this aborted project apart from Hitchcock’s assertion that it wasn’t very interesting.
So it seems safe to say that, like Shakespeare, this new Number 13 is going to be a work of extremely speculative fiction. I couldn’t find an image of a 20-something Hitchcock, but based solely on my lazy Photoshop composite above, wouldn’t Fogler make a good young Orson Welles?
Sun Tzu-fan Paris Hilton will star (!) as Paul Sorvino’s daughter (!!) in Repo! The Genetic Opera, a “musical thriller” from Saw III director Darren Lynn Bousman (!!!). Sometimes the jokes just write themselves, and in this case, I can’t top Variety’s logline: “Hilton will sing in a futuristic thriller framed around musical numbers that range from opera to rock. The setting is 2056, when a plague nearly destroys the human race and survival is dependent upon being able to finance a pricey organ transplant.”
Speaking of celebutantes that were thought to be unemployable, a Reuters story picked up by The Hollywood Reporter warns us not to write off Lindsay Lohan, because “no actor is uninsurable.” An expert quoted in the story says something along the lines of, “I got insurance for Robert Downey Jr. I could insure Lindsay Lohan barefoot with somebody else’s coke in my pants.”
Johnny Depp is re-attached to The Rum Diary, an adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson’s novel, now to be directed by Bruce Robinson. But don’t put a lot of weight in this announcement: the project has fallen in and out of development since 2000, and at one point, Benicio Del Toro was on board to direct.
***Director Kathryn Bigelow has cemented a cast for The Hurt Locker, which is, as far as I can tell, the first film by a major Hollywood director to be set in present day Iraq. The film was scripted by journalist Mark Boal, who spent time embedded with a bomb squad. He tells The Hollywood Reporter: “We wanted to show the kinds of things that soldiers go through that you can’t see on CNN, and I don’t mean that in a censorship-conspiracy way. I just mean the news doesn’t actually put photographers in with units that are this elite.”
***Variety’s Brain Lowry watched I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry so that you never, ever have to. And though he concedes that “Sandler’s fans should enjoy hearing him toss off lines about being ‘big-time fruits’ or having ‘boarded the dude train’,” ultimately “it will be slightly depressing if a barrage of schoolyard gay jokes passes for ‘edgy’ a quarter-century after Victor/Victoria.”
***After the massive critical success of her feature directorial debut Away From Her, Sarah Polley will return to the other side of the camera to star opposite Jared Leto in Mr. Nobody. It’s the first English-language feature for Belgian director Jaco Van Dormael, and THR’s Borys Kit says the script is “a multilayered love story inspired by the ‘butterfly effect, the chaos-theory notion that the beat of a butterfly’s wings can cause a storm thousands of miles away.”
I had the amazing opportunity to interview the director and the two stars of the film Steel Toes. I must say I was a little intimidated interviewing these guys after watching their amazingly gritty and powerful performance. I asked David Gow about the process of adapting his stage production, Cherry Docks, into a film, and how Andrew Walker and David Strathairn connected in such a powerful way on screen.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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From the Dear God, I Guess It’s Really Happening file: Dennis Quaid and Channing Tatum 
Specialty divisions are expecting this Sunday’s stripped-down Golden Globes to deliver a serious hit in the usual visibility for their Oscar-hopeful product. But one exec quoted in 
***Director Kathryn Bigelow has cemented a cast for The Hurt Locker, which is, as far as I can tell, the first film by a major Hollywood director to be set in present day Iraq. The film was scripted by journalist Mark Boal, who spent time embedded with a bomb squad. He 
