"First Sunday" director stakes "Claim"

By Steven Zeitchik

NEW YORK (Hollywood Reporter) - The director of the new Ice Cube comedy "First Sunday" is moving ahead with a new project about a flight attendant who jets around the country in search of a husband.

David Talbert, who has earned comparisons to one-man moviemaking factory Tyler Perry, wrote and will direct and produce "Baggage Claim," a romantic comedy based on his debut 2005 novel. The Fox Searchlight project is currently casting.

"Baggage" centers on the thirtysomething Montana Moore, who, frustrated with being single, embarks on a 30-day, 30,000-mile barnstorm across America to find an appropriate suitor. Along the way she encounters several interested prospects, including a preacher, a politician and a tycoon.

Talbert wrote, directed and produced "First Sunday," which opens Friday via Screen Gems, the low-budget arm of Sony Pictures. The inspirational comedy stars Ice Cube and Tracy Morgan as friends who plot to rob a church.

Like Perry, Talbert is a veteran of the "chitlin circuit." For years they penned plays geared toward black audiences and took them to cities with large black populations, often to theaters that served as the pre-integration home of such icons as Duke Ellington, B.B. King and Richard Pryor. Earlier Talbert works that traveled the circuit include "The Fabric of a Man" and "Love Makes Things Happen."

Fox Searchlight has sought to expand its presence in movies centering on the black experience, with plans to move ahead on a biopic about late rapper the Notorious B.I.G. and an adaptation of the multiracial female-bonding book "The Secret Life of Bees."

Reuters/Hollywood Reporter