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The good thing about being Australian director George Miller right now is that when one project stalls, he’s got another to fall back on.

The project of his that has supposedly been stalled is Justice League due to Warner Bros. moving up production on the Ryan Reynolds-starring Green Lantern which—according to a bit in the New Orleans’ Times-Picayune that got run all over the blogosphere—is setting up production offices and stages there and not in Australia due to the exchange rate.

This economic factor and reporter Mike Scott’s assertion that Lantern and the Flash and Wonder Woman films will be a lead-up to League means that Miller’s going to have some time on his hands—which he is choosing to fill by going back to work on the third Mad Max sequel, now called Mad Max: Fury Road.

The article that’s running in Sydney’s Daily Telegraph is just as sparse with concrete details as the Times-Picayune‘s is, but there are a lot of juicy quotes to pour over and names to Google:

The Daily Telegraph has learned that work on the film will start immediately, injecting tens of millions of dollars into the economy and creating more than 500 jobs.

Much of the work will be done at Redfern’s CarriageWorks and there will also be 30 weeks of filming in Broken Hill. It is estimated the whole project will take two-and-a-half years to complete, create 540 jobs and generate countless millions.

Miller, himself, chimed in as well:

“Hollywood has cut its production in half. Big movies like Fury Road and Happy Feet are rare and competitively sought after in all the filmmaking regions of the world,” he said. “The production agreements have been a long time in the making and Premier Nathan Rees and his team have worked like Trojans to ensure this substantial investment comes into this country. Not only does it help fuel the local economy but it means many talented people get a chance to practise their craft and lift their skills.”

However, there was no mention in the article of whether or not Miller was going to continue with the idea of making this an anime movie; with all the talk of creating jobs and whatnot, I am starting to doubt that development in the project.

Updated on 10/29: Variety‘s Dave McNary and every other scribe in the movie biz must have been working overtime because there are some more concrete details to add to this production news.

Even though no one knows exactly what the plot will be, Miller was able to reveal that Charlize Theron and British actor Tom Hardy (Black Hawk Down) will star in Mad Max: Fury Road, but he wouldn’t confirm that Hardy would be leading male or whether or not Mel Gibson would return to the series.

Related Posts: Mad Max to get new life as a 3D anime film

Matt Damon and Josh Brolin are in discussions to join the cast of True Grit, the Coen brothers’ remake of a John Wayne film readaptation of the Charles Portis novel. Damon would  play a fellow U.S. Marshall to star Jeff Bridges and Brolin would play the villain who killed the little girl’s father. Production will start in March for a release late next year. (Source: Variety)

Thanks to a recurring role in the HBO TV series “Hung,” Anne Heche has gotten her name out in the Hollywood world again; it has rewarded her by landing her two movie roles. She’s teaming up with Ed Helms to star in a comedy called Cedar Rapids as a woman he befriends at an insurance convention and then will go on to play a businesswoman that hires Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlburg to look into the financial losses at her company in The Other Guys. (Source: Variety)

Tony Scott is going to be directing a film about the rise and fall of the Chippendales dance clubs and its founder Steve Banerjee, from a script by Lisa Schrager (Pay the Girl) which itself will be adapted from a manuscript written by Rodney Sheldon. The only two reasons I mention this project is that a) I remember wanting to go to a Chippendales club when I was a pubescent girl in the 1980s and b) I just realized that both Patrick Swayze and Chris Farley from the “Saturday Night Live” sketch about the audition process are dead. (Source: Variety)

Related Posts: Jeff Bridges to join Coens for some True Grit?

Looks like Chace Crawford won’t be playing chicken with tractors for quite some time.

The “Gossip Girl” star was announced to be the star of the new Footloose remake last May and filming was going to start during the hiatus; however, according to Variety, director Kenny Ortega (the High School Musical franchise) has left the production due to “differences with Paramount Pictures on tone and budget.”

More specifically:

Insiders said Ortega wanted to make a picture with elaborately staged musical numbers at a budget of $30 million or so. [Paramount] production chief Adam Goodman wanted an edgier drama with less emphasis on the musical numbers and a budget around $25 million or less.

To this, I say, why can’t you have both?

Remember a little movie musical called West Side Story? You know, that one that’s based off of William Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” and won 10 Academy Awards, including the one for Best Picture?

Well, that movie had racial discrimination, gang violence, death by knife, and a near-rape scene and yet also features some of the most elaborate and most demanding choreography ever seen on film, thanks to director Jerome Robbins and his cast of mostly Broadway veterans.

And considering that the L.A. Times just profiled high schools in California that are forcing the students to sign binding contracts stating what dance moves they can and can’t use on the floor (“no touching breasts, buttocks or genitals”), I’d say that a movie about freedom through dance would definitely be welcome, both with and without drama.

Too bad Ortega wasn’t a strong enough negotiator to stick to his guns.

Related Posts: Zac Efron beats feet from Footloose and into a new Life , Efron to get Footloose and fancy free

Looks like things weren’t working out for Jamie Moss (Street Kings) in his quest to eke out a great live-action adaption of Ghost in the Shell for Dreamworks because Variety reports that Laeta Kalogridis (Night Watch, Pathfinder) has now accepted the job as screenwriter for the film.

On the Triple Feature podcast, Gordon and I (and by extension Tom Brazelton and Joe Dunn) talked about why although we loved the original GitS anime (.mp3 download), we couldn’t make it a MMO Top 10 sci-fi movie pick. If you don’t feel like wading through the podcast, I’ll summarize my points: first part was awesome, second part drags. With the second movie—which was distributed by DreamWorks—things got worse.

In my mind, if Kalogridis and producers Avi Arad, Ari Arad, and Steven Paul want to get a successful live-action movie script out of one of the most amazing anime movies ever released, they need to look at how well the TV series adapted the original work, remember that Section 9 is a team of misfits, and that lead character Motoko Kusanagi has a real sense of humor and personality.

And for God’s sakes, keep the action in Japan!

Related Posts: Ghost in the Shell gets the live-action treatment — in 3-D

There was bad news and good news for the New York Times yesterday. The bad news is that the organization will cut 100 newsroom jobs thanks to the decline in advertising revenue.

The good news from Variety, however, is that the organization also cut a deal with Columbia Pictures to give the studio first crack at turning specific stories from its “Modern Love” column into feature films.

This is not the first deal for the newspaper for this column, as HBO will be developing a TV series around it, using the hook of a fictional male editor who rediscovers the beauty of love after a divorce through his work. Nor is it the first deal from the newspaper for any of its other work:

Among the recent [New York Times] content deals was the recent story of immigrant students planning a prom (“This Strange Thing Called Prom”), which Jenny Lumet is scripting for Miramax; an article about a 12-year-old wannabe food critic that Lorne Michaels is developing at Paramount (“12-Year-Old’s a Food Critic, and the Chef Loves It”); and one about a small college football team paid to be crushed by bigger schools, which Universal is developing with Jack Black (“In College Football, Big Paydays for Humiliation”). None of the development projects has yet turned into a movie.

And here’s the part where I get a little bit stabby.

I have always been a reader because I love good stories. I also read a lot of blogs and personally speaking, some of the most interesting, well-written and well-covered stories are the ones that come from the Times.

Sure, bloggers put their own spin on things—like I’m doing right now—but that’s not going to replace good old fashioned journalism where you dig, and you dig, and you dig for a story, spend hours with your subject, put in a lot of hours in libraries in search of the truth.

For decades, the New York Times has been one of the places for hungry journalists to earn their stripes and win Pulitzer Prizes. Some have even wanted to write for the paper so much they’d fake and plagiarize stories just to retain a “New York Times staff writer” byline.

There’s also a certain reputation the Times has that appeals to my inner conservative. Known as “the Gray Lady,” everyone is referred to as being “Mr. Smith” instead of just “Smith” upon second reference and headlines have initial caps on all the non-particled words.

If by selling the rights to their stories to movie studios they can forestall the firing of any other newsroom reporters or support staff, I’m all for it… and I’m also deeply depressed that print staffers will soon be flooding the ‘tubes with content that belongs in print.

Gyah. Excuse me while I watch His Girl Friday for the umpteenth time and yearn to be a real newswoman.

Last December, I wrote that whomever Paramount Pictures got to play the role of Jack Ryan in the new reboot of that movie franchise, he would need to be able to embody all the qualities of the biggest, most likable Mary Sue that ever graced the silver screen.

With the news from Variety‘s Michael Fleming that Chris Pine (J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek) is “in talks” to assume the role, I think that they’ve hit the jackpot.

That is, assuming that Pine’s able to work this into and around the other Paramount productions he’s signed on for: the second Star Trek movie, and a film called The Art of Making Money that is to be directed by D.J. Caruso (Eagle Eye).

There is still no word on what the plot by Hossein Amini (Shanghai, Drive)is going to look like.

Related Posts: Jack Ryan gets a new voice for next Tom Clancy movie

I truly do not envy Sean O’Keefe and Will Staples right now.

Writers of the PlayStation 3 videogame Lair, the duo has been tapped to take a stab at a Jerry Bruckheimer Films project called Apaches, from the novel of the same name by Lorenzo Carcaterra, according to Variety.

Apaches is the story of six retired New York City cops who decide to take the law and their disability pensions into their own hands to stop a drug smuggling ring using their brains, brawn, and connections. The first fiction novel by Carcaterra, the book was the subject of a bidding war back in 1997 when Touchstone beat out Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros. to the film rights.

Yes, you heard me correctly: Bruckheimer and company have been holding onto this project for 12 years–and therein lies the problem.

Since that initial bidding war, the task of adapting the novel has passed through the hands of several other action-suspense screenwriters–including Marshall Todd (Bad Boys II), John Ridley, John Fusco (The Forbidden Kingdom) and David Klass (Walking Tall)–all of whom have failed at bringing a script to the table that everyone likes.

Thankfully, O’Keefe and Staples have more than just a poorly received videogame on their credits list:

[They] are generating heat for two scripts: World’s Most Wanted, which Neal Moritz will produce at Universal, and their adaptation of the book The Cruelest Miles that Walden Media and Mark Johnson are prepping to start lensing early next year. They also penned The Murder of King Tut for Sony and helmer Roland Emmerich.

The more I read about Apaches and its sequel novel Chasers (published a decade after the acquisition), the more I like the idea of the story and think it would make a great movie. It sounds to me what would happen if you took Walt Kowalski from Gran Torino and teamed him up with Burke and his Family from the Andrew Vachss novels, all tinged with a “Homicide: Life on the Street”-like viewpoint.

At least that’s what it’d be like if I wrote it.

Okay, maybe I do envy them a little bit, after all.

Mandalay Pictures has acquired the rights to the in-progress novel Horns, written by Joe Hill, the son of Stephen King. The story revolves around a guy who wakes up after an epic hangover to find that he’s got horns growing out of his head, which also seem to be connected to the unsolved murder of his girlfriend. I’m betting that he made some sort of deal with the devil, but we’ll know for certain when the book comes out in February 9, 2010. (Source: Variety)

Dog Soldiers and The Descent director Neil Marshall and Lionsgate Films and Ghost House Pictures are teaming up to make Burst, the next film in the Lionsgate stable to turn 3D. The film will be produced by Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert (co-partners in Ghost House) from a script by Gary Dauberman about “a group of stranded travelers who meet during a blizzard and get stalked by a malevolent force that makes people spontaneously combust.” What, are we running out of perfectly valid things to be afraid of now? (Source: Variety)

Charlize Theron will no longer be starring in The Tourist and as a result, the project is looking for a new director. THR‘s Stephen Zeitchik has sources that say Angelina Jolie will step into the role, but as the very first commenter said, she previously decided to stop making movies for about a year. Also, Tom Cruise is no longer attached, but Sam Worthington (the cyborg in Terminator: Salvation) is, and that’s going to make a huge difference in the final product as well. (Source: The Hollywood Reporter: Risky Business)

Related Posts: Making Out with the Media: The Roundup for November 4, 2008

After turning in his re-writes on the Spider-Man 4 script, writer Gary Ross is making a deal to work on the Venom script as well. According to Variety, Ross would be taking over from screenwriters Paul Wernick, Rhett Reese (Zombieland), and Jacob Estes (Nearing Grace), each of whom had a first-go at the script.

The article goes on to say that Topher Grace isn’t likely to return as Venom or Eddie Brock due to filming on Robert Rodriguez’s Predators. But that’ll be okay, as the film is going to be “a spinoff from the drawing board”–which I’m taking to mean that the alien symbiotic organism is probably going to leave Brock and find some other victim who may be an entirely new person created just for the movie.

Wouldn’t it be cool if the new Venom was a woman? Honestly, the possibilities are endless when you don’t see the face behind the main character for most of the film and especially in a superhero/supervillain movie where the emphasis is on the action.

Venom is still without a release date.

Related Posts: Raimi and Maguire may be back for Spider-Man 4 (updated), More remakes, sequels, spin-offs and adaptations, blah blah blah

Lionsgate Films and Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Films have joined forces for a most unusual rights purchase… or at least that’s what I once thought. According to Variety, they obtained the live-action screen adaptation rights to an article that appeared in GQ magazine called “Will You Be My Black Friend?” as a possible starring vehicle for comedian Chris Rock.

Written by the magazine’s senior correspondent Devin Friedman back in November 2008, the surface goal of the article was for Friedman to acquire more than one friend who was black:

I had a cocktail party the other night. A natural moment to look around at the demographics of your life. And I thought: Jesus Christ, there are a lot of white people in this room. I’ve always thought of the whiteness of my adult life as a temporary condition. Like somehow all these white people have been foisted on me; pretty soon it’ll change; it’s probably my wife’s fault. But it’s time to acknowledge that I’ve become a character in a Wes Anderson movie. I wear white tennis sneakers from the ’70s. I listen to ambient music. I have dinner parties where I serve Spanish rosé and this softer version of mozzarella that has a lovely, almost liquid center that you can only get at the Italian import store. I do yoga, and I get excited when it’s ramp season. Sometimes I’d really like to punch myself in the face. (You might argue that I’m not describing “whiteness” but “arugula-ness”; but when black people have this lifestyle, they get accused of being white.) I used to make jokes about “look at us here at the weekend house in the Catskills in our blazers and sneakers eating the braised pork shoulder from the Jamie Oliver cookbook with the David Gray on in the background—aren’t we like that Amstel Light commercial?” You know that Amstel Light commercial about the white people’s country weekend—it’s white-people pornography. But I stopped making the joke, because it stopped being a joke. Because I stopped noticing it.

Friedman’s writing is both satirical and serious because while reading the entire piece, I found myself confronting my own racism issues. I live in an area just south of Bedford-Stuyvesant (formerly one of the most dangerous parts of Brooklyn) at the north end of Crown Heights, and before that I lived in Harlem, Bushwick, and Flatbush. In each of those neighborhoods, I always felt out of place because not only was I the only Asian person in the neighborhood, I know that I’m what they call a “banana”: yellow on the outside, white on the inside.

Like Friedman, I have a few black friends and most of my friends are white, and just like him, I do worry and wonder about the fact that by not expanding my social circle enough, I am contributing to a “re-segregating” of the races. In my particular case, there’s also a fear that I am continuing a cycle of colonialism that began with the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan. At least the natives killed him, and on my birthday, too!

To see this in Winfrey’s hands and starring Chris Rock, whose stand-up routines and new documentary Good Hair already touches on these issues? Would be pretty hilarious and definitely a movie I’d want to see.

As reported extensively by Variety‘s main TV reporter Cynthia Littleton, the new head of the Walt Disney Studios is going to be Disney Channels Worldwide chief executive Rich Ross, and I, for one, am not going to welcome our new Mouse-ical overlord.

The reason for my distrust of Ross and the new direction that Walt Disney president and CEO Bob Iger wants to take the studio can be found in the second paragraph of Littleton’s article:

Ross earned his promotion by proving to be a master brand builder at the Disney Channel and its myriad worldwide offshoots. His appointment signals the Mouse House plans to focus heavily, though not exclusively, on franchises that not only drive [box office] but can also generate biz for other divisions like TV, licensing and merchandising, [home video] and online.

I may not be old enough to remember the first time Disney took Hollywood and the rest of the world by storm with its movies, but I am old enough to remember when Disney movies started getting good again.

Referring to the period between 1989 and 1994, author David Koenig seemed to argue in his book Mouse Under Glass that when the people running a movie studio trust the creative people they’ve hired, try not to take themselves too seriously, and ignore how to best leverage the synergy into other branches of the company, great movies can be made. And no animation fan can argue that The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King aren’t great movies.

I will grant that Ross is pretty good at starting franchises, grooming the actors and actresses that will star in them, and unleashing the juggernaut onto the world, as he’s the one who helped turn Miley Cyrus into “Hannah Montana” and oversaw the rise of Selena Gomez’ star (that’s her to the right with Ross) in “The Wizards of Waverly Place.” That’s fine and good–if making franchise films is was the only reason why people made movies.

“Oh, but you’re wrong!” I hear you exclaim through my computer screen. “Because Iger said in the article that:

there’s no question that creating high-quality films is the most important thing. The need to adapt to change comes secondary to the need to make films that are good.

In response, I say that ever since Disney stopped being a private company and sold itself to the stock market, it will always be focused on the bottom line more than it will be focused on what its founder Walt Disney did best: make movies that more than one age demographic can enjoy at the same time.

I will note, however, that the fact that Ross is openly gay fills me a not-small amount of schadenfreude because when I worked at the Walt Disney Travel Company and booked vacations, a travel agent from the Midwest once told me that she wouldn’t want to send her clients to the park if one of the Gay Days was going on at the same time, adding that she didn’t want to “expose” them to those kinds of people. I cheerfully assuaged her fears while thinking to myself that she shouldn’t send her clients to the Park at all because almost every cast member I had ever met in or out of the Park was gay.

And now, so is the new head of Walt Disney Studios.

Related Posts: Could Disney studio chairman’s exit leave future of Pirates 4 in doubt?

Though I normally don’t place much credence in what directors and actors say at film festivals because I can understand how the excitement of being there can make one say just about anything, director Quentin Tarantino’s pronouncement that he will make a third sequel to 2003 and 2004’s Kill Bill movies is completely plausible.

While at the Morelia International Film Festival in Mexico, Variety reported at a conference on Saturday that Tarantino said that he’d like to “give Uma Thurman’s central character and her daughter Beebe 10 years of peace before the next bloody installment” which means that the release date would be in 2014. Before that, however, Tarantino also told the conference attendees that he’d like to do another movie before then, adding that it would be something like a gangster movie or a western.

Of course, we all know that Tarantino is amazingly tenacious when it comes to getting his pet projects finished which is why I’m not calling this “Myth busted.” There’s also a surprising amount of material to mine here because when Beatrix Kiddo left Nikki Bell alive after killing Copperhead, she did say that Nikki could come after her seeking revenge.

Ooh… a teenage and preteen girl fighting to the death? Definitely sounds like a Tarantino-esque film to me.

Continuing its roll through the Hollywood landscape, Electronic Arts and 20th Century Fox are teaming up to make a movie based on the creature-creation game called Spore. According to Variety, the CG-animated film will be written by Greg Erb and Jason Oremland (The Princess and the Frog) and directed by Chris Wedge (the Ice Age franchise).

Word is that Fox is looking to emulate Ice Age‘s box office and home video successes and I can see why they looked hard at Spore because just like in Ice Age, any movie that gets made would feature weird-looking animals in a landscape no human has ever seen and everything will be completely character-driven–which means that whomever they eventually get to do the voices will be near-universally liked.

If that sounds like they were just better off making another Ice Age, that’s where you’re wrong because the series is quickly approaching Land Before Time status wherein any adult taking their kids to see these movies is starting to wonder when the gigantic meteor is going to come down and wipe everyone out. With Spore‘s otherworldly setting and the ability to move beyond prehistorical worlds into tribal, civilization, and space-age worlds, the types and kinds of stories that can be told are endless.

Well played, Fox.

Though I think it rather ludicrous to think about what I’m going to be doing in two years, I think I know some of what I won’t be doing.

For example, on July 1, 2011 I will be nowhere near a movie theater that is screening Transformers 3 because Paramount Pictures has set that date as when the picture will be coming out. According to the Variety article, Michael Bay announced the release date on his website, adding that he has already begun pre-production work with the various companies involved. Stars Shia LaBoeuf and Megan Fox are slated to return, unless they can find a lawyer good enough to get them out of the contract, that is.

However, you will find me in the theater around the holidays in December 2011 because Disney has moved the updated 3D re-release of Beauty and the Beast forward as to take advantage of the movie’s 20th anniversary–has it really been only 20 years since any animated feature has been nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award?–and get out of the way of its already-announced release of Cars 2 that June.

Now if only I knew what I was doing for Thanksgiving this year…