William Morris and Endeavor talks hinge on top billing
from the LA Times --
William Morris Agency and Endeavor have been in merger discussions for weeks, setting the stage for a new Hollywood powerhouse that would wield considerable clout in film, television, music and publishing. Buffeted by waning consumer demand for DVDs and undercut by the Internet, the entertainment industry is facing economic upheaval that is recasting the role agencies play behind the scenes for actors, writers and directors...
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New Houdini in the works?
Summit Entertainment has its eye on magician Harry Houdini. The studio has taken feature rights to "The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America's First Superhero," a book from William Kalush and Larry Sloman.
The Houdini book was controversial upon its 2006 publishing thanks to insinuations that the magician had acted as a spy for Great Britain and asked to be an adviser to Czar Nicholas II's court in pre-revolutionary Russia.
Summit does not intend to make a biopic and will rather look to fashion an action thriller featuring a character who is part Indiana Jones and part Sherlock Holmes, says THR.
The studio is looking for writers to adapt the book. Although Houdini has long interested Hollywood, only a few projects have made it to theaters including 1953's "Houdini" with Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh and 2008's "Death Defying Acts" starring Guy Pearce and Catherine Zeta-Jones.
The Strange Adventures of H.P. Lovecraft
Title: The Strange Adventures of H.P. Lovecraft
Logline: Story borrows elements from horror author HP Lovecraft’s life, such as his family’s struggle with mental illness and his own bouts with writer’s block, and transforms the young writer’s darkest nightmares into reality when he comes across a book that puts a curse on him and lets the evils he conjures up loose on the world.
Writer: Mac Carter
Studio: Universal Pictures
Prod. Co: Imagine Entertainment
Genre: Horror
Logged: 3/26/2009
More: Image Comics' graphic novel by Mac Carter & Jeff Blitz, Carter will adapt. Imagine's Ron Howard & Brian Grazer will produce. Imagine's David Bernardi & Chris Wade will co-produce. Carter & Blitz will executive produce. Howard may also direct.
Hemingway & Fuentes
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Anthony Hopkins is "loosely attached" to "Hemingway & Fuentes," described as a historical drama to be written and directed by Andy Garcia, according to the Hollywood Reporter's Risky Business.
Annette Benning is a possibility to play the author's wife and widow Mary Welsh, and the author's niece Hilary Hemingway is co-writing the script with Garcia.
The movie will focus on the relationship between the author and his longtime fishing-boat captain Gregorio Fuentes, "centering on the final, troubled chapter in Hemingway's life," Risky Business said.
The timeframe was also a creative period in the author's life, during which he wrote the Pulitzer-winning "The Old Man and the Sea.
"I'm a Hemingway nut and also an avid fisherman, and the reality of the relationship between Hemingway and his captain is compelling to me," said Garcia, who plans to star as Fuentes. Some say Fuentes was the basis for "The Old Man" but that claim is in dispute, though he did live a colorful life after immigrating to Cuba when he was a child. He died in 2002 at the age of 104.
Nicholas Hughes, Sylvia Plath’s son commits suicide
The son of the poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath has taken his own life, 46 years after his mother gassed herself while he slept.
Nicholas Hughes hanged himself at his home in Alaska after battling against depression for some time, his sister Frieda said yesterday.
He was 47, unmarried with no children of his own and had until recently been a professor of fisheries and ocean sciences at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
Ted Hughes was hounded for the rest of his life by feminists and Plath devotees who accused him of driving her to her death by his infidelity.
In 1969 he suffered another terrible loss when his mistress gassed herself and their daughter in an apparent copycat suicide.
Plath’s friend, the poet and critic Al Alvarez, once said: “I would love to think that the culture’s fascination is because Plath is a great and major poet, which she is. But it wouldn’t be true. It is because people are wildly interested in scandal and gossip.”
Her turbulent marriage to Hughes became a modern myth, from their first meeting at Cambridge where he kissed the young American Fulbright scholar “bang smash on the mouth” and she bit his cheek so hard that it bled, through the whirlwind secret wedding all the way to its catastrophic ending.
Plath’s suicide in effect froze her children in time so that in the public memory they remained a one-year-old and a two-year-old lying in their cots, carefully sealed off from the gas leaking over their mother in the room next door.
Hughes did everything that he could to shield them from the increasingly lurid interest in their mother and did not tell them that she had killed herself until they were teenagers.
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