After learning that Forbes magazine had once considered Jennifer Aniston to be the most bankable female lead in a movie, I became a little interested in knowing what she’d be doing next. And don’t you love it when the universe delivers?
According to Variety, Aniston’s next film is Goree Girls, which is based on the true story about an inmates in a 1940s women’s prison who formed one of the first all-female popular country-western bands.
The movie, which starts production in January, will be directed by feature film neophyte Michael Sucsy (HBO’s Grey Gardens) and rewritten by him as well from drafts by John Lee Hancock (2004’s The Alamo) and Margaret Nagel (“Side Order of Life”).
The most interesting part about Michael Fleming’s article is his reveal that this was once a DreamWorks production and that Overnight Productions is rescuing it from turnaround, because from there he talks some more about the risks studios take when they decide to let a project go:
No studio wants to let go of a project that can be turned into a hit elsewhere and come back to haunt its original owner, as the Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire did to Warner Bros. and Twilight did to Paramount. In picking up material from turnaround, Overnight is trying to remove some of the risk of such regret by paying back most of the overhead and interest charges spent to develop the project and by giving the studio first crack at distribution.
Aniston has a fine indie film resume (The Good Girl, Friends with Money) and I’m really looking forward to seeing which other actresses they’ll cast her with for this project. I guess the only major question I have is: Can she sing?