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According to various Internet reports last Thursday, there were rumors swirling that Stephen Sommers had been let go from working on the G.I. Joe movie that’s coming out on August 7, mostly based on a message board post on producer Don Murphy’s website.

Of course, this isn’t the case, Variety says, adding with a little bit of glee:

The incident marks the latest example of studios having to combat false rumors just because film news sites and bloggers are eager to break news about a hot property.

“In this day and age we are constantly dealing with online rumors that take on a life of their own,” says a Paramount spokeswoman. “We love Steve and couldn’t be happier with the movie he made.”

Times like these, I can’t help but think about this phase from Terry Pratchett’s The Truth: A lie can run round the world before the truth has got its boots on.

The more I read about Love and Other Drugs, the film adaptation for which Brokeback Mountain co-stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway are “in negotiations” to star as the romantic leads, the more I become invested in this project.

According to last week’s Hollywood Reporter, multi-talented Academy Award-winning producer Ed Zwick (Shakespeare in Love) will be directing and Charles Randolph (The Interpreter) will write the screenplay for Fox 2000 and New Regency, who are busy securing the rights from Universal Pictures after they’d put it into turnaround.

Normally, with such great talent attached to a project, that should be enough to be excited about it. But it’s the story in and of the original non-fiction book that has me hooked.

It’s based on Jamie Reidy’s nonfiction book Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman and though THR reports that this will be the plot (“Gyllenhaal will play the salesman, who begins a relationship with a woman [Hathaway] who has Parkinson’s while on one of his sales calls”) I think the better way to go for this movie would to be to turn it into a mishmash of Thank You for Smoking, Adaptation, and Stranger Than Fiction (but without the last one’s fluffy ending). Too bad I don’t have any pull in Hollywood.

And the best part about Reidy’s personal story is that he didn’t set to write a “tell-all” about the pharmaceutical industry, as he notes in the closing to this interview at Natural News.com:

[Interviewer Jessica] Smith: So is the part that bothered [former employers Eli Lilly who fired him after the book came out in 2005] the most was that it might leave the wrong impression with future trainees; that they could get away with less work? That bothered them more than you talking about the industry as a whole?

Reidy: Yeah, because I didn’t really bash the industry in the book. That was one of my things; I didn’t want to be a whistleblower. I thought it would be really unreal to say, “Hey, I’ve been doing this for nine years and these are all the things that are wrong!” People would say, “Well, asshole, if you thought that, why did you work there for nine years?” So I didn’t ever want anyone to say that. I wanted to write a funny, funny book, that also opens a lot of peoples’ eyes to what happens, but I didn’t really trash the industry too badly, or really at all. I just tell my story, and then people can extrapolate that how they want.

I mean, I don’t think people think I’m the only rep in America that slept late and quit early. They can probably figure out that. But I had an interview with the guy on NPR’s Marketplace, and he says to me, “Well surely you aren’t the only one doing this.” And I said to him, “Am I the smartest guy you ever met?” He just sat back in his seat and started laughing, and that was the last line in the interview.

Production is set to start in the fall.

Echoing the same centrist-leaning principles that have confused fans of U.S. president Barack Obama, the SAG members overwhelmingly ratified a 2-year picture contract presented to them by the AMPTP by 78%.

The terms of the deal—which you can download in a handy .pdf format here—are the same exact terms that were offered to the WGA and the DGA last year, and the only concession that interim national executive director David White and chief negotiator John McGuire were able to get from the AMPTP was that the contract would end at the same time as the other two organizations, guaranteeing a slew of backchannel talks between the three sets of organizers for the next two years on how they’ll be handling the negotiations in 2011.

Variety has the basic rundown on all the events that lead to this ratification… or you could read these four pages of previous coverage here.

Given that the economy is in the toilet right now, I really do think that the Guild made the best decision it could, particularly due to Variety‘s claims that most of the new work was heading over to AFTRA, which had signed its own contract with the AMPTP. My biggest stumbling block in trying to understand why some SAG members were still pushing for a strike is because everyone’s economic situation changed in October, from Joe Average Actor to Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick who have lost an undisclosed amount of millions due to Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme being revealed by the collapse of the stock market.

Because of my day job, I was glued to economic news last fall, and the more I read about how the collapse happened, the more indignant I got towards the actors who wanted to stick to their guns and fight things out with the AMPTP—yes, even Martin Sheen whom I normally admire for his activist soul.

I really hope that in the future, they will have a stronger leg to stand on because I do think it’s wrong for the producers to claim two different things about the future of new media, as they did back in 2007 as the WGA went on strike. If you really do think it’s the new thing and the bee’s knees, then treat your workers like you mean it and you’ll get a quality product, I say.

Related Posts: TOO NUMEROUS TO LIST

Stop me if this sounds familiar: A group of people who play an massive multiplayer online role-playing game (or MMORPG, pronounced “meh-mor-puh-guh”) who know each other in the virtual world but don’t know each other in real life have to team up in the real world to solve a problem.

That’s the logline for the new movie project called The Defenders by “Heroes” actor Masi Oka, who conceived and developed it while playing World of Warcraft. Quoth he in the Hollywood Reporter article:

“You can be whoever you want to be,” [Oka] said. “The question came to me: What if you had to live up to the person you created in the virtual world?”

The project is going to be produced at Dreamworks by Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci (who worked together on the recent Transformers movies and several episodes of “Alias”), D.J. Caruso (Eagle Eye, the in-production Y: The Last Man) is in negotiations to direct, and Gary Whitta (The Book of Eli, with Denzel Washington) will be writing the script.

But again, if this project sounds familiar to you, it should because that’s the basic premise behind popular web sitcom “The Guild,” written by actress Felicia Day who conceived of the project when she was playing WOW for two years between gigs.

The idea of teen gamers meeting in real life is also a major plot point for “Kyle + Rosemary,” a part machinima-part cel-animated cartoon created by Jun Falkenstein which aired on Nickelodeon last year.

And who could forget the “South Park” episode “Make Love, Not Warcraft,” which actually won an Emmy in 2007?

Each of these other comedic projects are awesome, and while it does sound like Oka’s project will be totally different from these two due to his budget being larger and his producers being more connected, I can’t help but feel a little like an indie music lover who wants her bands to get a little more recognition.

Anyway, you can watch episodes of “The Guild” on the website above, Comedy Central re-runs that episode now and then, and here’s “Kyle + Rosemary”:

Find more videos like this on Channel Frederator RAW

According to CNN, actor David Carradine has been found dead in a hotel in Bangkok, Thailand. The death was reported by his personal manager, Chuck Binder. There have been no details at this time, other than that his death is currently under investigation.

Carradine’s first major film was Taggart in 1964, a western based on a story by Louis L’amour. He bounced back and forth between films and TV, and it was his leading role in the “Shane” TV series that probably lead to the role that would define him, as Kwai Chang Caine in the 1972 TV movie Kung Fu, which lead to the TV series from 1972 to 1975 and the remake sequel series from 1993 to 1997.

That role stuck out in Quentin Tarentino’s mind, because years later, he would give Carradine the plum part of Bill in his two-part revenge epic Kill Bill, released in 2003 and 2004.

We’ll keep updating this story as more news comes out.

UPDATED at 11:21 am: This MSNBC story says that it was an apparent suicide, which it relayed from a Thai online paper called The Nation.

The newspaper said Carradine could not be contacted after he failed to appear for a meal with the rest of the film crew on Wednesday, and that his body was found by a hotel maid at 10 a.m. Thursday morning. The name of the movie was not immediately available.

It said a preliminary police investigation found that he had hanged himself with a cord used with the room’s curtains. It cited police as saying he had been dead at least 12 hours and there was no sign that he had been assaulted.

UPDATE (6/7/09): According to Variety, the current leading theory is that Carradine’s death was not suicide but an accident, and that the 72 year old either suffocated or had a heart attack during autoerotic asphyxiation.… ew.

Forensics techs are checking DNA found at the scene to see if anyone other than Carradine may have tied the ropes.

Though I only skimmed over it yesterday, I decided to look more into Overture announcing that it would be producing a contemporary version of Hamlet because Variety‘s Anne Thompson actually included the quote from producers Dan Jinks and Bruce Cohen that explains the reason why we need another filmed version:

“Hamlet was in college when the story takes place, yet there hasn’t been a movie version with an appropriately-aged actor playing the role. Our goal is to present the story as a suspense thriller. We want to make it exciting and accessible for an audience today.”

Apparently, it was actor Emile Hirsch who brought the project to them and to director Catherine Hardwicke (with whom he’d worked on Lords of Dogtown) while he was working on Milk, and Jinks and Cohen rewarded his tenacity by casting him as the lead and giving him Hardwicke as his director.

And speaking of Hirsch working with Hardwicke, here’s
another detail that makes my Shakespearean-loving heart tingle and cringe with dread at the same time:

[Hardwicke said,] “We edited the play tightly, making the words extremely accessible. In our version, we’re working hard to make Hamlet a thrilling cinematic experience—the violent, intense, and romantic scenes that happen ‘off-stage’ in the play will be shown in vivid detail.”

The script hasn’t been finished yet, but already I’m excited. After all, what people keep forgetting is that Shakespeare’s works were originally written to be enjoyed by everyone, not just the highbrow elite. And if people these days have a hard time imagining the beautiful romance between Ophelia and Hamlet that all went sour when he started his cat-and-mouse game, then why not show it to them?

It’s not his fault that as a people, the English language has shifted away from his, but the core of his plots and stories has and always will remain the same, and it’s that which I celebrate. College-aged Hamlet? Action and violence? Bring it on, I say!

But with the right script, of course. I’m not that much of a libertine.

[It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these, so let’s get started! – TL]

Sigourney Weaver returns to comedic form in two new movies
One of Hollywood’s most versatile stars is treading the comedy boards again. Actress Sigourney Weaver will be in two upcoming comedies. The first is Paul, a comedy starring British duo Simon Pegg and Nick Frost as two sci-fi fans who come across an escaped alien (voice by Seth Rogen). Weaver’s role is being kept securely under wraps. Afterwards, she’s going to be playing the filthy rich aunt to the antagonist in Kristen Bell’s You Again, about a woman who finds out her high school nemesis will be her future sister-in-law. (Source: Variety)

Cast of Easy A gets rounded out
Attention all you Ojai, Californians! Be on the lookout for the following bone fide stars roaming around your neighborhood as they have been cast in Easy A, that re-imagining of The Scarlet Letter that had me in such a-flutter: Lisa Kudrow, Alyson Machalka, Thomas Haden Church, Patricia Clarkson, Stanley Tucci, Penn Badgley, Cam Gigandet, Malcolm McDowell and Daniel Bird. Production starts June 9. (Source: Variety)

Lance Gross joins cast of Ferrara’s and Forest’s flick
It’s still without a title, but the cross-culture family wedding film from Fox Searchlight has added “House of Payne” star Lance Gross to the cast as America Ferrara’s husband-to-be. So we’ve got the happy couple, we’ve got the fathers (Forest Whitaker and Carlos Mencia)… now all we need is some meddling sisters, an ex or two, oh! And how ’bout a title? (Source: The Hollywood Reporter)

Labrador hound takes a bite out of Malaysian DVD piracy
The Motion Picture Association took their anti-piracy operation one step further into the realm of WTF when after donating a bunch of optical disks to the Malaysian government last year, a Labrador dog named Paddy who’d been trained to sniff them out found them alright—in six warehouses storing goods bound for Singapore. The raids were conducted at the tail end of May with the support of the government; over 6,000 discs that had been burned with copies of Terminator: Salvation, Star Trek, and Angels and Demons were recovered. Now who’s a good boy? (Source: The Hollywood Reporter)

Related Posts: Kristen Bell takes lead in You, Again, Emma Stone to star in Easy A, Producer, creator Will Gluck earns a directorial Easy A, Cultures will clash for America Ferrara

The more I read about these deals between Universal Pictures, Hasbro, and various production studios, the more fascinated I get.

Take the latest news from Variety, for example. Imagine Entertainment and Brian Grazer will be taking on the task of producing a movie for Stretch Armstrong, and the studio has set the release date at April 15, 2011.

Here’s a quote from Grazer himself:

“Stretch Armstrong is a character I have wanted to see onscreen for a long time,” said Grazer, who is also behind a reboot of The Incredible Shrinking Man at [Universal]. “He’s an unconventional kind of superhero with a power that no one would want.”

To which I say that Grazer probably doesn’t watch anime because if he could see the things that Monkey D. Luffy can do with his stretchy arms and legs, then he’d think twice about that statement. And what about Mr. Fantastic and Plastic Man? They even made a Saturday morning cartoon for the latter, which I loved!

Anyway, the other thing that’s helpful about this news is that it firmly affixes which production studios are attached to which of the other properties:

Monopoly is with Ridley Scott
Clue is with Gore Verbinski
Candy Land is with Kevin Lima
Battleship is with Peter Berg
Ouija is with Michael Bay’s Platinum Dunes

It’s absurd how much talent is being thrown at these toy tie-in movies and how much is on the line. Each of these six movies will eventually have stars attached to them, and as a result, everyone’s careers will be affected by how well (or how poorly) these movies will do.

Again, I’m enthralled and fascinated to see how this will all turn out.

Related Posts: First Transformers, then G.I. Joe, now… Candy Land?, Gore Verbinski to direct new Clue movie , Universal and Hasbro sign a six-year pact (updated)

Once upon a time, there was a girl named Lindsay Lohan who received a plum part in Disney’s remake of The Parent Trap, a movie which was originally created by Disney to help further showcase the talents of British child actor Hayley Mills.

She followed that up with the usual kinds of roles that kids who have good or even decent managers take in movies that help them develop their chops like Freaky Friday, culminating in a critically acclaimed role in Mean Girls.

And then she had to go and fuck everything up by buying into the Hollywood lifestyle and her own damn press, becoming little more than tabloid fodder and a punchline for standup routines, and helping bring back leggings.

I am particularly peeved about the leggings.

Now she’s got a chance to turn things around by returning to her comedic roots in leading an ensemble cast that will include Woody Harrelson, Giovanni Ribisi, and Alanis Morissette in a movie that will feature six new songs by Dave Matthews said Variety last month.

From Baudelaire, Film Star Pictures and Marston, The Other Side will be directed by newish director David Michaels who also co-wrote the screenplay. Lohan’s character is a grad student doing summer research on an island full of eccentric inhabitants who are harboring a secret about a local tragedy.

Now, I don’t presume to know much about how Hollywood works, but when Michaels told Variety that Lohan was committed to the part and behaving like a professional, I’m sure he believes himself. You have to admit, though, that if he could kick his producers in the junk for causing the film to lose its first star Katie Holmes, he would.

From E!Online:

“Katie would call me from Berlin at 4 a.m. her time to go over ideas and notes,” said Michaels, who also cowrote the script. “We did this over successive weeks while she was there with Tom when he was filming Valkyrie. The result of our collaboration has tremendously improved the arc and dynamic of the lead character.”

Now that’s a professional at work.

Filming is set of October on an island off the coast of Massachusetts.

It was only because Gordon piqued my interest in the comments section for the New Moon trailer story that I even paused for a brief second while scanning Variety‘s headlines, and now I’m glad I did.

For it was because I paused that I got to read about the latest project from British director Duncan Jones, a World War II-era thriller called Escape from the Deep, based on the book by historian Alex Kershaw.

Deep will be based on the true story of a U.S. Navy submarine called the U.S.S. Tang which was accidentally hit by one of its own torpedoes after a successful run which sank several ships in October 1944. According to the Tang’s Wikipedia entry, after sinking to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean the crewmen had to sit tight while the Japanese Navy fired depth charges at them and then swim 180 feet to the surface in order to get out of the burning tub.

Eventually, only nine seamen made it to the surface alive, only to be captured by the Japanese and spend the rest of the war as POWs. I also have to admit that the detail from the story that gets to me the most (which probably won’t be filmed) is this one:

When the nine survivors were picked up by a destroyer escort, there were victims of Tang’s previous sinkings on board, and they tortured the men from Tang. [Commander] O’Kane stated, “When we realized that our clubbing and kickings were being administered by the burned, mutilated survivors of our handiwork, we found we could take it with less prejudice.”

Kershaw will be adapting his own book for the movie, and production is set for sometime next year.

Unlike me who doesn’t watch them anymore because they haven’t been funny in a very long time, everyone else who saw the MTV Movie Awards ceremony last night got a chance to watch stars Robert Pattinson (Edward Cullen), Kristen Stewart (Bella Swan), and Taylor Lautner (Jacob Black) introduce the first official trailer for New Moon, the sequel to Twilight:

Also, unlike the first movie of which I’ve only heard things and not seen it myself, I actually kinda want to see this one or attempt to slog through the book because it would be kinda interesting to see how Jacob (he’s the werewolf) fights off all the crazy vampires who want to kill Bella and if he’ll be less mopey and emo than Edward.

Variety reported last week that Natalie Portman will be the third lead in Your Highness, a David Gordon Green-directed Universal Pictures comedy which will also star Danny McBride and James Franco, and I am pleased to note that this article has a bit more information about the plot.

McBride, who wrote the script with Ben Best, plays a lazy, arrogant prince who, with his brother (Franco), must complete a quest to save the kingdom and his brother’s fiancee. Portman will play a warrior princess with whom the lazy prince falls in love.

I’m a huge Xena fan from back in the day and the idea that Portman will finally get to to do some action sequences where her character doesn’t wither away and die from a broken heart after having acquitted herself well in the previous movie by surviving a firefight with battle droids makes me very pleased.

Also, Portman will get to show off her comedic chops, and as anyone who’s watched “Saturday Night Live” knows, she’s pretty hardcore.

Production is set to start this July in Ireland.

Related Posts: James Franco swears fealty to Your Highness, McBride and Green get High again

If earlier this week you woke up and heard an anguished cry all over the Internet, you have the Whedonites to blame for that.

The fans of writer/director/creator Joss Whedon are known for being an unruly, fiercely devoted lot and it was their cry upon learning from The Hollywood Reporter that Fran Rubel Kuzui and her husband Kaz Kuzui (who were responsible for directing and producing 1992’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie) are going to be remaking and/or relaunching the franchise without Whedon’s input, blessing, or influence that rumbled across the ‘tubes.

Instead, it’s Roy Lee and Doug Davison of Vertigo Entertainment (executive producers on The Ring and The Departed) who will be working with the Kuzuis on this new iteration.

From the article:

The parties are meeting with writers and hearing takes, and later will look for a home for the project. The producers do not rule out Whedon’s involvement but have not yet reached out to him. Speaking from Tokyo, Fran Kuzui said the company is constantly approached not only about sequels but theater, video games and foreign remakes for Buffy. When Vertigo’s Lee contacted them, they were intrigued.

“It was Roy’s interest in taking Buffy into a new place that grabbed us,” she said, noting that original exec producer Sandy Gallin also was consulted. “It was based on our respect for what he does, and his particular sensitivity to Asian filmmakers, that we wanted to work with him.”

A Variety article written later in the week has a bit more insight straight from a horse’s mouth: “Now seems like the right time,” said Vertigo principal Roy Lee. “Studios are looking for a franchise and vampires are relevant again.”

Taking a look at Lee and Davison’s producing record, I can understand why the Kuzuis want to work with him, and it’s more than just their “particular sensitivity to Asian filmmakers”—it’s the fact that they know how to put a project together well.

I mean, what Asian film fan in their right mind would have ever thought that a U.S. version of Infernal Affairs would ever turn out well? And yet, Departed has a 92% Tomatometer reading, which goes to show that not all remakes are terrible things.

It’s only because of their record that I’m withholding judgment until find out more. And if that makes me a traitor to the Whedonite cause, well then… I think I’m going to run and hide now.

According to Variety, America Ferrara will be starring in a culture clash comedy for Fox Searchlight wherein her father (who will be played by Carlos Mencia) will have to duel with her fiance’s father (played by Forest Whitaker) over the last-minute wedding plans.

Written by Rick Famuyiwa (Brown Sugar, The Wood), the film is set to be directed by him as well, and I do hope that this movie will be filmed with the same amount of care as those other two films.

I’m not sure how Gordon feels about this, but I’ve always hoped that the more and longer we have non-Caucasian actors and actresses on movie screens, the closer we will get to a point where people won’t be making terrible casting decisions when trying to make movies about non-Caucasians.

Let’s hope that this untitled movie, set to start filming next month in Los Angeles, won’t set my dreams back.