• $2 million to option "Across the Nightingale Floor"
• Toby Stephens will match wits with Bond for MGM
• New Mick Jagger Film Set For Fall Release
• Pants on Fire for Disney
• Murder saga lures Bruce Willis
• John Hughes tracks 'Grisbeys' pitch
• ContentFilm buys into Blow Up
• The curtain rose on the Sundance Film Festival Thursday night
• Mayhem, TNT Telling It Like It Was With Inside Tale Of 'MNF'
• Previous
  • Jan 7
  • Jan 8
  • Jan 9
  • Jan10

$2 million to option "Across the Nightingale Floor"

Universal has paid close to $2 million to option the first book in a trilogy of historical novels about a Japanese orphan for Universal-based producers Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall.

"Across the Nightingale Floor," by Lian Hearn, concerns a 16-year-old who is the only survivor when his village is massacred by an evil warlord.

The story, which blends elements of "Harry Potter" and "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," created a stir in publishing circles when agency Russell & Volkening sold the trilogy to Riverhead for close to $750,000. It also drew some interest from other studios before Universal moved aggressively to take it off the market.

The trilogy also bears some similarity to "A Cloud of Sparrows," a first novel by Takashi Matsuoka, which Universal optioned for the Kennedy/Marshall Co. in October. But "Nightingale" has the trappings of a franchise, with the potential for extensive CGI work, and is unlikely to be fused into one story with "Sparrows.

Toby Stephens will match wits with Bond for MGM

British actor Toby Stephens has been cast as the lead villain in MGM's latest James Bond film for director Lee Tamahori. The project will begin shooting at the end of the month and continue through the spring.

Although the script is being kept tightly under wraps, it is known that the story involves a device enabling facial mutation.

Sources say Stephens' ("Onegin") character undergoes a facial transformation to elude Bond (Pierce Brosnan), who is tracking him down. Before his altered state, the character is played by Rick Yune ("The Fast and the Furious").

The feature, produced by Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson, is the 20th in the Bond series. Neil Purvis and Robert Wade wrote the script for the latest installment, which also stars Halle Berry, John Cleese and Judi Dench.

Graves, repped by ICM, is the son of British actors Maggie Smith and the late Robert Stevens. Graves, performing in the London stage production of "The Royal Family" opposite Judi Dench, next stars in Neil LaBute's "Possession" for Warner Bros. His credits include "Space Cowboys," "Photographing Fairies" and "Orlando."

New Mick Jagger Film Set For Fall Release

"The Man From Elysian Fields," a drama starring Andy Garcia and Mick Jagger, will reach North American theaters in the fall.

Samuel Goldwyn Films and Fireworks Pictures said Thursday they have picked up theatrical and all other media rights in the U.S. for the George Hickenlooper-directed film.

The picture made its world premiere at the 2001 Toronto Film Festival and will unspool Jan. 14 at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City.

"Fields" stars Garcia as a desperate writer and family man who is recruited by the owner (Mick Jagger) of an upscale male escort agency. On the job, the writer finds his life entwined with that of a beautiful and lonely woman (Olivia Williams), married to one of the most famous and honored authors on the planet (James Coburn), and a high-stakes shot at literary stardom. Julianna Margulies and Anjelica Huston co-star.

Pants on Fire for Disney

Disney has nabbed the comedic pitch "Pants on Fire" for studio-based producer Rachel Pfeffer to develop.

"Pants," to be penned by Christopher Dean Johnston, is a comedy about a liar so compulsive that Liars Anonymous ousts him from its membership. But when he becomes embroiled in a high-stakes game of international espionage, his real identity is uncertain. The CIA wants to know: are they chasing a nut or being led by a master?

Pfeffer, who had been president of Robert Redford's Wildwood shingle, has been on the Disney lot for three years. With the "Pants" deal she re-upped with the studio for an additional year.

Murder saga lures Bruce Willis

Bruce Willis is near a deal to film the story of a woman's decadelong quest to pin a murder on an heir to a Gotham real estate empire.

Willis' Cheyenne Enterprises, which he runs with business partner Arnold Rifkin, and Sony-based Revolution Studios, have snagged the rights to Ned Zeman's upcoming Vanity Fair article "The Millionaire Fugitive." Under the deal, which is potentially worth almost $1 million, Zeman will also write the script with his writing partner, Daniel Bernstein.

The story focuses on Gilberte Najamy and an unlikely quest to solve the murder of her friend Kathie Durst, wife of real estate scion Robert Durst.

Najamy had tried to get her friend to leave her husband; when Kathie went missing, Najamy became convinced she had been murdered by Durst. Durst, meanwhile, remains under investigation in connection with several murders.

John Hughes tracks 'Grisbeys' pitch

 Revolution Studios has teamed with filmmaker John Hughes on an original family comedy pitch, "The Grisbeys," which Hughes will write and produce.

The project is about a very wealthy family that loses all of its money and has to move to the other side of the tracks at Christmas.

Revolution executive Greg Silverman is overseeing the project. Chicago-based Hughes, repped by WMA, most recently helmed 1991's "Curly Sue" for Warner Bros., which he also wrote and produced.

During his 18-year career, Hughes has written and produced two dozen films, including the three "Home Alone" films, "Flubber," "101 Dalmatians" and "Dennis the Menace."

His writing credits also include "The Visitors," "Uncle Buck," "Planes, Trains & Automobiles," "Mr. Mom," a remake of "A Miracle on 34th Street" and three films in the "National Lampoon" franchise.

Hughes is best known for his mid-1980s films, which include "Ferris Bueller's Day Off," "Weird Science," "The Breakfast Club" and "Sixteen Candles," all of which he also wrote.

ContentFilm buys into Blow Up

ContentFilm, the new production/distribution venture recently set up by Edward R Pressman and John Schmidt, and its international investors are acquiring a minority share in Jason Kliot and Joana Vicente's digital production outfit Blow Up Pictures.

Blow Up, which since its launch in 1999 has been behind some of the most successful digital features yet seen such as Chuck And Buck, Series 7 - The Contenders and Nicole Holofcener's upcoming Lovely And Amazing, is at this year's Sundance Film Festival with its most recent feature Love In The Time Of Money which is screening out of competition.

Blow Up will use the financing from ContentFilm to develop and produce a slate of digital films budgeted under $2m which will then be distributed by ContentFilm. The multi-picture domestic distribution agreement which Blow Up has in place with Lot 47 Films will be integrated into the distribution strategy of films produced by Blow Up purusant to ContentFilm's investment.

Kliot and Vicente will also continue to produce larger budget films shot on traditional film under their other banner Open City Films.

"The deal came about after we met with key members of the New York independent film community as we ramped up to launch this fall," said Pressman and Schmidt in a statement. "It became clear to us that Blow Up has led the way in this emerging field with Chuck and Buck, Series 7 and Lovely and Amazing."

At the same time, Blow Up's Kliot and Vicente were seeking new capital, and their representative Bart Walker of ICM began talks with Content and its backers, most notably Franz Prinz Von Auersperg. ContentFilm is fully funded by a number of equity investors, including lead investor Syntek Capital. Frank Biondi's company WaterView Advisors is also an investor in ContentFilm, which focused principally on films shot on digital video budgeted under $3m.

Kliot and Vicente were represented in the deal by Bart Walker of ICM and Andrew Hurwtiz of Epstein, Levinsohn, Bodine, Hurwitz and Weinstein, who negotiated with ContentFilm's head of business affairs Michael Roban.

The curtain rose on the Sundance Film Festival Thursday night

One week earlier than its traditional mid-January launch, the 2002 Sundance Film Festival begins in earnest today, and it's aiming for a gold medal year, according to festival co-director Nicole Guillemet.

Moved up seven days to distance itself from the upcoming Winter Games in Salt Lake City, the annual filmfest is trying to avoid a collision with Olympics fever, now beginning to build in this mountain resort.

Certainly Park City will be America's busiest host during the next month. With last week's Gold Cup ski extravaganza and the upcoming ski events that begin here and in nearby Deer Valley on Feb. 8, Sundance organizers are braced for a heightened excitement level at this year's fest.

"The timing of this festival is perfect," Guillemet said. "We need an event to celebrate filmmaking now. This festival is small enough that the coming together of filmmakers and the industry at large should make for the kind of healing and regenerating we need. We need to be recharged."

Festival attendance, which many thought might be off this year owing to the time change and concerns with travel security, should top last year's total, according to current sales. "We will probably have 23,000 at this year's festival, roughly 1,000 more than last year," Sundance spokesman RJ Millard said. In terms of industry participation, however, the festival has suffered a slight drop-off. Reportedly, sales of the festival's largest ticket packages, which run in the neighborhood of $3,000, are down. But sponsorships are up.

"Movie industry companies are sending fewer people this year," Guillemet said. "It seems to have more to do with the overall situation of the economy than with anything particularly dealing with the festival or even the mood of post-Sept. 11." One noticeable festival drop-off has been among the "dotters," the dot-com companies that were an ostentatious presence during the last two festivals but have now bitten the dust.

Cable TV execs will take up some of the slack. The festival kicked off Thursday night in Salt Lake City with the premiere of HBO's "The Laramie Project," a Good Machine production.

The prominent presence of HBO -- which has three features at the festival, with "Laramie," "Hysterical Blindness" and "Real Women Have Curves" in addition to their slate of documentaries -- exemplifies the rise of the cable networks as players on the indie film scene.

"When I first started looking into HBO Films, it suddenly struck me that it is the future of independent films," HBO Films Maud Nadler said. "(Cable) allows indie films to be screened but to also find a much larger audience."

Showtime, which acquired two films out of last year's festival -- Allison Anders' "Things Behind the Sun" and Henry Bean's "The Believer" -- has one film in this year's Premieres category, "Our America," directed by Ernest Dickerson. Showtime executive vp program enterprises Matt Riklan said Sundance is an opportunity-filled place for the network. "For us, it's about meeting with directors, distributors and other talent that we have relationships with," he said.

Although news of feature film acquisitions is sure to dominate the coming days, for other film execs the festival is as much about cementing future relations as it is about picking up a hot new film.

Lions Gate Releasing president Tom Ortenberg said that what makes Sundance interesting is not so much the prospect of acquiring films but the "discovery of new filmmakers."

"(Festival co-director) Geoffrey Gilmore has done a great job of focusing on filmmakers," Ortenberg said. Even with a large number of films already having distribution deals, he added, "Sundance is still about new filmmakers."

"The real Sundance success story is Marc Forster," he added. "He went to Sundance 2000 with 'Everything Put Together,' a really good film that was never picked up. Now, he's directed 'Monster's Ball,' and everybody is making him offers to direct his next film. He was discovered there. Now, the question is, who will be this year's Marc Forster?"

Other companies are looking to Sundance to promote their latest wares.

For Sony Pictures Classics, Sundance serves primarily as a launch site, not a place to indulge in an acquisition frenzy. "We prefer to launch there," SPC senior vp acquisitions Dylan Leiner said. "It's a place to unveil for the first time or, perhaps, the most pronounced time, our new films. It's a great opportunity for critics, the press, opinion makers, etc. to see films at the same time. As for acquisitions, we'll all be very cautious. We never go in with expectations, but we've had pretty good luck, picking up in the past 'American Movie,"Dogtown' and 'Z-Boys,' among others."

This year, SPC will be launching "Crush," "13 Conversations About One Thing" and the Chinese film "Quitting."

One of the newest kids on the block, ThinkFilm, is making its Sundance debut with the three films it's screening: "The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys," "World Traveller" and the French "Time Out." "For a variety of reasons, these films will be released in a two-month period this spring," ThinkFilm head of U.S. theatrical distribution Mark Urman said. "So Sundance is an excellent environment to launch them in." As a nascent distributor, ThinkFilm is looking for acquisitions as well.

In anticipation of the logistical challenges and crowds the Olympics will bring to the Park City community, Sundance organizers have been working for the past 3 1/2 years with the Park City civic community and the Salt Lake Olympic Committee. The Park City Police Department has stepped up law enforcement, with police monitoring big-ticket Sundance events. In addition, transportation measures have been refined: The Park City bus system has rescheduled its shuttles to follow the paths of the Sundance shuttles, allowing for a more expeditious flow between far-flung venues, from the Eccles Center at the Park City High School to the Egyptian on Main Street.

There have been a few preliminary snags.

Because of the shorter time period between film selection and the festival, the printed festival guides were not ready over the weekend. "It just made life a lot harder," grumbled one studio executive upon arriving in the mountain resort. "You could still find everything on the Web site, but it was much harder to navigate through and more confusing than having an actual book in your hands." The catalog and guide will be available at the fest itself, however.

In addition to festival granddaddy Sundance, Park City is braced for the upstart Slamdance Film Festival, based at the Park City Silver Mine, just up from Main Street, as well as other offshoot festivals. In total, city officials anticipate eight film festivals to be in full swing. That figure is fewer than last year's 17 festivals.

"There have been a lot of changes at this festival, many of them in technology," Guillemet said.

Guillemet has been with the festival since 1985, when it operated out of cardboard boxes and small cubicles in what is now Harry O's nightspot on Main Street. He noted that the original spirit of Sundance is still intact.

"At the core, no matter what the surface changes, it is so great to always see many of the same people -- those recognizable faces who have their love for independent film and the unique ways of artistic expression that have always characterized this festival. No matter how different things can seem, Sundance is always the same -- the celebration of the independent filmmaker and the expectation that you are going to see something different and unique."