Latest Hollywood script deals
LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - "Ghostbusters" director Ivan Reitman's production company is checking IDs for "Underage," a broad comedy spec script from the writers of "Pink Panther 2."
The story centers on a 17-year-old girl who seduces a twentysomething guy and proceeds to blackmail him into being her boyfriend in order to exact revenge on her ex.
DreamWorks-based Montecito, which Reitman runs with Tom Pollock and Joe Medjuck, paid a $500,000 advance for Scott Neustadter and Michael Weber's script. If the film is produced, the duo will receive a total of $900,000.
"Pink Panther 2" is slated for a winter 2009 release. Neustadter and Weber are in preproduction on "500 Days of Summer," an anti-romantic comedy being directed by Marc Webb at Fox Searchlight.
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LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Twentieth Century Fox has picked up "Man and Wife," an action-thriller spec script from Alan McElroy, for mid-six figures. McElroy wrote "The Marine," which starred John Cena. Other credits include "Spawn," "Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever" and "Wrong Turn."
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LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - CBS Films has optioned "Plan B," a spec script by TV writer-producer Kate Angelo.
Plot details are being kept under wraps, though it is known to be a romantic comedy. Angelo's TV credits include "What About Brian?" and "Will & Grace." "Plan B" is her debut feature-length project.
Launched in 2007, CBS Films intends to make between four and six movies per year at budgets as much as $50 million per film.
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LOS ANGELES -- Columbia is donning its galoshes to make the trek to "The Wettest County in the World."
The studio has pre-emptively picked up the upcoming book by Matt Bondurant. John Hillcoat ("The Proposition") is attached to direct.
The novel, a sweeping, historical crime drama of the American South, is based on the author's grandfather and two grand-uncles -- three infamous brothers who made up a fierce criminal gang at the center of the country's moonshine trade. The brothers eventually were shot down in December 1930 after they refused to join the illegal cartel set up by the Commonwealth's attorney Carter Lee, grandnephew of Robert E. Lee. Carter Lee subsequently was tried for conspiracy.
At the same time, writer Sherwood Anderson was on the trail of the bootlegging story, reporting on the moonshine trade and the trial for Liberty magazine and researching his novel "Kit Brandon," published in 1936.
"Wettest County" follows the brothers on their exploits while Anderson tracks them, trying to get inside the Mafia-like violence and double dealing in what turned into the biggest bootlegging conspiracy the country ever saw and the longest court case in the history of Virginia. The novel will be published by Scribner/Simon & Schuster in October.
No writer is on board to adapt the project.
Reuters/Hollywood Reporter
