At 83, two years past his Honorary Oscar and with more than 40 films to his credit (Twelve Angry Men, The Pawnbroker, Serpico, Network and Dog Day Afternoon are just a few of the best known), Sidney Lumet has slowed down just a little. For his the first four decades of his career, he averaged one film per year; now he spaces them out a bit more. But he doesn't like to repeat himself, or to be recognizable by his particular directorial style. In an interview with the New York Times, he said, "I hate any style if you can spot it...I try very hard to find the visual style that story needs."

Lumet will categorize his latest film, though. Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, which opens this Friday, is a melodrama. He told Emmanuel Levy, "In most dramas, the story has to come out of the characters: this is such-and-such kind of person, and therefore this is the inevitable result. In a melodrama, it's the exact reverse. The characters have to adjust to the demands of the story and justify their actions." 

In the Times interview, Lumet discussed how that affects his actors, in this case Ethan Hawke, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Albert Finney: "It's something I warned the actors about. I said, 'Listen, I may need to ask you for a climax here that you may not feel, because the nature of the plot demands it."

The sixth and final 2007 Nobel Prize was awarded today, to three American economists for their work in mechanism design theory (which sounds as though they dreamed up new plans for gadgets, but that's probably not what it means).

This got me thinking about the Nobel Prize for Literature, the only one that recognizes achievement in the arts. Since 1901, 104 people have won: novelists, poets, essayists and playwrights. Some of them have also written screenplays, but none is primarily a screenwriter. This year's winner is Doris Lessing, "that epicist of the female experience, who with skepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny," according to the prize committee (maybe there will one day be a Nobel Prize for Nobel Prize winner descriptions). Lessing has written a few teleplays, but she's primarily known for her books, "The Golden Notebook" and "The Fifth Child" in particular.

Continue reading "Should Screenwriters Win the Nobel Prize for Literature?" »

JT Petty will script Fox Atomic's adaptation of the award-winning Japanese novel "Goth," which was written by Otsu-ichi and made into a manga by Kendi Oiwa. It tells the story of Boku and Yoru, two death-obsessed high school students who team up to solve some murder mysteries.

Fox Atomic released the futuristic zombie thriller 28 Weeks Later; their sports spoof The Comebacks is due out October 19th.

Petty's past writing credits include two recent novels, "The Squampkin Patch" and "Clemency Pogue: Fairy Killer," as well as video games "Batman Begins" and "Splinter Cell."  He also wrote and directed The Burrowers, currently in post-production.

Hopefully this development will inspire Petty to update his website.  There's some neat stuff there, but nothing new since June.

The Secret is a DVD that tells you how to make your life awesomely perfect by imagining that it already is, or something like that. Lots of people swear by it, or at least have checked it out – it's #14 on Amazon's bestselling DVDs list despite being released almost a year ago. And according to the director's website, the sort-of documentary "has been hailed by critics as one of the most important films ever made."

Now that director, Drew Heriot, is planning a new feature film called The Aquarian Gospel, about the years of Jesus Christ's life that aren't discussed in the Bible. The script, by John F. Sullivan and William Sees Keenan, is based on two books and on what the writers call "the lost gospels that shed light on Jesus' secret teachings predating the four canonized Gospels."

Heriot's previous credits include several episodes of "Sensing Murder," an Australian television series.

If production goes half as smoothly as on the set of The Secret, it will be a joy and a pleasure for all concerned. Rhonda Byrne, who discovered The Secret in 2004, actually used The Secret to make The Secret! Meta.

Sarah Paulson, late of the late NBC drama "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip" has signed on to Will Eisner's The Spirit, joining Eva Mendes, Scarlett Johansson, Gabriel Macht and Samuel L. Jackson. The film is Frank Miller's directorial follow-up to Sin City (the second and third installments of that series are currently in pre-production); a January 2009 release is planned.

On "Studio 60," Paulson played Harriet Hayes, a born-again Christian and all-around moral touchstone for the rest of the characters (she also had a lovely singing voice, a gift for impressions and a wicked sense of humor). So it seems fitting that while Mendes and Johannson play bad girls in The Spirit, Paulson will portray Dr. Ellen Dolan, Police Commissioner Dolan's daughter and the crime-fighting hero's love interest.

Fans who want written material to go with their celluloid experience will want to snap up Titan Book's "making-of" account of the production, available in December of 2008.

In case you missed it, here's Shootout Video's interview with Frank Miller, filmed earlier this year.

Actress Katherine Heigl (that's "Hi-gull," as she pointed out at the Emmy Awards this past Sunday when an announcer botched her name) has optioned the film rights to "Lost & Found," a novel by Jacqueline Sheehan that was released earlier this year.

Sheehan is a psychologist and essayist, and her earlier work includes a novel based on the life of abolitionist and former slave Sojourner Truth. The author's website describes "Lost & Found" as "a heart-wrenching exploration of one woman’s stunning loss" when her "veterinarian husband dies at a stunningly young age," as well as "a stunning, shattering work that gently probes the human psyche." Prepare to be stunned, obviously. Anyway, the heroine gets a dog, which, as responses to tragedy go, represents a nice change from Jodie Foster's approach in The Brave One.

Heigl won an Emmy this past Sunday for her role as Dr. Izzy Stevens on Grey's Anatomy, and critics raved about her performance in Knocked Up. Her producing partner is her mother, Nancy Heigl.

Exactly Like You, a biopic about the unusual (to say the least) life of jazz legend Billy Tipton has been selected as one of 168 independent projects scheduled for presentation in the "No Borders" program at the 29th Annual IFP Market Festival, happening now in New York.  Effie Brown (Real Women Have Curves, In the Cut) produced, and Silas Howard wrote and directed.

Billy Tipton, born Dorothy Lucille Tipton in 1914, became interested in jazz at an early age. In order to be taken more seriously as a musician, she began dressing as a man when she was nineteen. By 1940, Tipton consistently presented as male in both public and private life. He had a series of relationships with women and married dancer and stripper Kitty Kelly in 1960, with whom he adopted three sons. Until Tipton's death in 1989, only two of his cousins knew his biological gender – he successfully kept it secret from his wife, children and the rest of the world.  Tipton was the subject of a 1998 book by Diane Wood Middlebrook and inspired a novel as well, Jackie Kay's "Trumpet."

In an interview last year, Howard said "I've always loved (Tipton's) story because people think, 'Oh, look what he had to do.' But it's very current identity stuff, and it's always a timely subject...We all make up who we are anyway." She said she hopes viewers of the film "see some commonality they might not have realized before."

A rash of books on a particular subject often presages a related spate of films. So it was no surprise that the mini-genre (genrette?) of disgruntled-assistant lit spawned film versions: The Devil Wears Prada, The Nanny Diaries, and now The Frog King.

Bret Easton Ellis adapted Adam Davies 2002 debut novel about an Ivy League graduate in his first post-college job, at a New York publishing house, which is – shockingly! – not as intellectually fulfilling or financially rewarding as he might have hoped.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Mysterious Skin, Brick) will play the main character, Harry, who according to reviews of the book is a pretty annoying guy. As to who’s directing, it depends where you look. IMDB (among many others) says Darren Starr, well-known for Sex and the City and the upcoming television series Cashmere Mafia. Gawker (among no others) says Asif Kapadia, a British director with an impressive number of awards for his not so very many films. But Gawker also notes “the remarkable similarities a certain character in it bears to a famous recently-deposed publishing tyrant.” What say you?

Twenty-five years (!) after the release of the thoughtful yet hilarious teen ensemble piece, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, writer/director Amy Heckerling is back with I Could Never Be Your Woman, due to open early in November.

Michelle Pfeiffer is a divorced woman involved with a younger man (Paul Rudd). Saoirse Ronan (who snagged the lead in the upcoming film adaptation of Alice Sebold’s novel The Lovely Bones) is her teenage daughter, and gifted comedienne Tracy Ullman – last seen on the big screen in John Waters’ A Dirty Shame – controls their fates as Mother Nature. Fred Willard, Henry Winkler and Jon Lovitz appear as well. 

Pfeiffer called I Could Never Be Your Woman, her first onscreen work since 2002’s White Oleander, “like getting back on a bike. I was really rusty and that film helped me find my way back.” 

It’s been a long six years since Heckerling’s last film, Loser, which didn’t get a lot of love from the critics. But this latest sounds closer in quality to timeless Clueless than to, say, Look Who’s Talking Too.

The all-star cast of He's Just Not That Into You already includes Jennifer Aniston, Kris Kristofferson, Scarlett Johansson, Jennifer Connelly, Kevin Connolly, Justin Long, Ginnifer Goodwin, Bradley Cooper and Drew Barrymore, who’s one of the producers.

Now it may expand by one Ben Affleck; he’s in negotiations to join the ensemble film, which is scheduled for a 2009 release.

Ken Kwapis (License to Wed, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants) will direct.

 The movie’s based on a humorous self-help book of the same name by Greg Behrendt (a standup comedian and consultant for Sex and the City) and Liz Tucillo (Sex and the City’s executive story editor). At first glance, the book doesn’t seem like a good candidate for adaptation. But chapter headings like "He’s just not into you if he’s not asking you out" (or calling you, or dating you, or having sex with you) do seem as if they might weave together into those "interconnected story arcs" promised by the advance publicity.