fulltimer56
10-23-2006, 10:58 PM
NEWS OF THE WEEK FOR OCT. 23, 2006
King's 'The Mist' Film Coalesces
Dimension Films will turn Stephen King's novella "The Mist" into a horror film, which Frank Darabont will direct from his own script, Variety reported. Thomas Jane is in talks to be part of the ensemble cast.
Darabont, whose biggest hits were the King adaptations The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, has long been enshrouded in "The Mist."
King entrusted the rights to him several years ago, when Darabont had a first-look deal at Paramount. Darabont is in the final stages of reclaiming rights to his script.
A spring production start is envisioned for the film, which Darabont will produce with Castle Rock's Martin Shafer and Liz Glotzer.
Published in 1985 as part of King's short-story collection Skeleton Crew, "The Mist" takes place in a small town where a thick mist engulfs the area, killing those caught in its darkness. Terrified survivors seek refuge in a supermarket, while a swarm of murderous critters tries to get in.
Me2 Is Time-Travel Comedy
Walt Disney Pictures has bought a time-travel comedy project from screenwriter Larry Doyle titled Me2, with Mark Waters attached to direct, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Waters and his producing partner, Jessica Tuchinsky, will produce via their Watermark Pictures production company.
The plot for Me2 is being kept under wraps. Doyle came up with the idea before taking it to Watermark and will begin writing immediately.
Doyle was a writer-producer on TV's The Simpsons and also wrote episodes of Daria and Beavis and Butt-head; his feature credits include Looney Tunes: Back in Action.
Waters is directing The Spiderwick Chronicles, the big-budget adaptation based on the best-selling children's books, which is shooting in Montreal.
Grudge Writer Helms White
The Grudge 2 screenwriter Stephen Susco will make his feature-film directorial debut on the supernatural horror movie White for Focus Features' genre banner Rogue, Variety reported.
White is based on a novella included within author Tim Lebbon's White and Other Tales of Ruin and is an apocalyptic tale centering on a band of people trapped in a blizzard and systematically picked off by mysterious phantoms.
Former Miramax executive Michael Zoumas is producing for his Zoom Entertainment imprint.
The Lebbon book was published in 2003 by Night Shade Books. Susco optioned the story, and he and Zoumas brought the project to Rogue, headed by Andrew Rona.
Focus and Rogue are both owned by NBC Universal, which also owns SCIFI.COM.
Piven, Shannon Voice Igor
Jeremy Piven and Molly Shannon are lending their voices to Igor, the computer-animated comedy from Exodus Film Group, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Igor centers on a mad scientist's hunchbacked lab assistant, Igor, who has big dreams of becoming a scientist and winning first place at the annual Evil Science Fair. It will be distributed domestically by the Weinstein Co., which also has secured rights in most foreign territories.
Piven will voice the role of Dr. Schadenfreude, Igor's nemesis, with Shannon voicing Eva, a giant, indestructible monster invented by Igor. They join a cast that includes Steve Buscemi, John Cleese and Christian Slater. Anthony Leondis is set to direct the screenplay by Chris McKenna (American Dad).
Zombie Fido Has Bite
Henry Czerny, co-star of the upcoming horror comedy Fido, told SCI FI Wire that the film is a thinking man's zombie movie. The story takes place in a near future that resembles the near past, when killer zombies are kept at a safe distance and domesticated zombies handle the basic chores for normal humans. K'Sun Ray stars as Timmy, a boy whose pet zombie, Fido (Billy Connolly of Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events), becomes his best friend. The cast also includes Dylan Baker (Spider-Man 2) and Carrie-Anne Moss (The Matrix) as Billy's parents; Czerny (The Exorcism of Emily Rose) plays Mr. Bottoms, a Zombie Wars hero and the boss at Zomcom, the company that keeps the bad zombies fenced out and manufactures the collars that keep the domesticated zombies from eating their masters.
"I think it's a riot," Czerny said of Fido in an interview while promoting his latest film, the Oct. 27 release Conversations With God. "It's a wonderful satire. It's a love story on some level, of course, but it's a wonderful satire, and it's a discussion, from my point of view, about the use of fear to govern. Obviously, it's timely. It's so lateral in its demonstration, in its presentation, and it's so evocative and humorous, to a certain extent, because this kid befriends a zombie as he would a dog. And there are people who are terrified of the zombie."
Czerny added: "Basically, the film is a discussion on if we generate our fear and we see things as purely fearful, of course they always will be, and we'll have to build bigger fences. If we can turn around and see, if you will, the experience, the fearful thing, as something we've manifested on some level to teach us how to deal with fear, then we've got a whole different planet. That's one of the themes, through my filter, that's in Fido, and that was thrilling to do, even though the character I play is nefarious."
Czerny said that Fido has its share of zombies, but it's not a gorefest in the manner of the Night of the Living Dead-style zombie movies horror fans are used to seeing. "No," Czerny said. "No, no, no. It's far too tongue-in-cheek for that. It's far too whimsical a style to go there. But my character gets his humorous comeuppance at the end. Actually, it's not so much a comeuppance, because it's not that kind of a story. It's not an indictment, if you will; it's more of a discussion." Lionsgate has picked up domestic distribution rights to the Canadian film and will likely release it later this year or in early 2007. —Ian Spelling
Inkheart Gets New Producer
New Line has signed Barry Mendel to produce Inkheart, based on the first book in Cornelia Funke's fantasy children's trilogy, which will go into production in London this fall with Brendan Fraser, Variety reported.
Shooting will start first in November in Italy and then head to London's Shepperton studios, where New Line's The Golden Compass is already filming; it's based on the first of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials books.
Funke is also producing Inkheart, with Diana Pokorny executive-producing.
Inkheart stars Fraser as a father who can bring characters from books to life by reading stories aloud to his daughter. When the father is kidnapped by some of the fantasy villains in the bedtime tales, his daughter and her friends try to free him. Others in the cast include Paul Bettany and Jim Broadbent.
Iain Softley is directing from a screenplay by David Lindsay-Abaire, who already has been commissioned to adapt the second tome in Funke's series, Inkspell. The final tome in the trilogy, Inkdawn, will be published next year by the British company Chicken House, which has a deal with Scholastic in the United States.
Snipes Indicted On Tax Fraud
Blade star Wesley Snipes was indicted Oct. 17 on eight counts of tax fraud accusing him of trying to cheat the government of $12 million in false refund claims, the Associated Press reported.
Snipes, 44, also failed to file tax returns for six years, according to an indictment unsealed in Tampa, Fla.
Federal prosecutors said that Snipes fraudulently claimed refunds totaling nearly $12 million in 1996 and 1997 on income taxes already paid. The indictment also charged him with failure to file returns between 1999 and 2004, the AP reported.
According to the indictment, Snipes had his taxes prepared by accountants with a history of filing false returns to reap payments for their clients. As part of the deal, the indictment alleges, the firm, American Rights Litigators, would receive 20 percent of refunds from clients. Snipes faces a maximum of 16 years in prison.
Aniston Goes Counter Clockwise
Universal Pictures has picked up Counter Clockwise, a dramedy written by Paul Bernbaum for Jennifer Aniston to produce with an eye to star, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The story centers on Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer and a study in which she reversed the aging process of her subjects by making them believe they were younger. Grant Scharbo and Gina Matthews (13 Going on 30) of Roundtable Entertainment also are producing, along with Aniston's partner, Kristin Hahn.
Scharbo and Matthews came across the study in Deepak Chopra's book Ageless Body, Timeless Mind and acquired Langer's rights and brought it to Aniston and Hahn.
Universal is owned by NBC Universal, which also owns SCIFI.COM.
Continued Compiles Silverberg
Multiple award-winning SF author Robert Silverberg told SCI FI Wire that his latest book, To Be Continued, is the first of a nine-volume set of his collected short fiction. "Not my complete stories, just the ones I think are worth reprinting for modern readers," Silverberg said in an interview. "This volume covers the first five years of my career, stories written between 1953 and 1958. I've done an introduction for each story, placing it in its context of the era, telling how I came to write it and who published it."
The stories cover a broad range of Silverberg's fiction. "One of the stories is the very dark and bleak novelette 'The Road to Nightfall,' which I wrote in 1954, but which was considered too dangerous to publish until 1958," he said. "At the other end [of the spectrum] is the light little short-short 'The Silent Colony,' written in 1953, which is essentially a quick joke in the Robert Sheckley manner."
Of the stories collected in the book, Silverberg said he thinks the aforementioned "Road to Nightfall," which he wrote when he was 19, is his favorite. " because it shows that even at that early age I had a good sense of craft," he said.
He added: "I'd suggest 'The Macauley Circuit,' which foretells computer-synthesized music, [as the most scientifically accurate]."
Silverberg said that revisiting stories that he'd written so long ago was a fascinating experience. "Took me back to those strange, uneasy times when I stood on the outside peering in, full of ambition, and then—almost literally overnight—found the door opening for me, and everything happening at once," he said. "I was still an amateur at the beginning of 1954, and by the summer of 1956 I had won a Hugo."
The nine-volume series will reprint most, but not all, of Silverberg's short fiction, he said. "The pulp stories of the early years will not be included," he said. "I collected some of the best of them in last year's book In the Beginning. The rest are unlikely to see new publication. From somewhere about the midway point of my career, I do reprint just about every story I wrote, perhaps every one. But the first couple of volumes are quite selective."
Silverberg said that his only new work consists of two forthcoming short stories. "[One is for] an anthology called The New Space Opera, edited by Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan, and [the other is] a very short story that Asimov's will publish next spring," he said. "I haven't been doing much new writing lately—been too busy reassembling the earlier stuff. I'm not sure how soon I'll get back to new work. It's not as though there's any shortage of existing Silverberg stories, after all." Subterranean Press will publish the first volume in November. —John Joseph Adams
Nights 2 Due On Halloween
Atari and Obsidian Entertainment announced that their upcoming PC video game Neverwinter Nights 2 is ready for manufacture and is on schedule to ship to stores on Oct. 31 in North America and on Nov. 3 in Europe.
Neverwinter Nights 2, the sequel to BioWare Corp.'s best-selling and genre-defining role-playing game, is set in the Dungeons & Dragons Forgotten Realms universe, created by Wizards of the Coast, and will transport players back to the embattled city of Neverwinter.
Developed by Obsidian, Neverwinter Nights 2 features a new, extensive single-player game with deep character development and a powerful new toolset that provides players with unprecedented ability to create their own universes, quests and storylines.
The Neverwinter Nights franchise has sold more than 2 million copies worldwide, is translated into 10 languages, has sold in more than 40 countries and features one of the largest and most active fan communities in all of gaming.
Murphy Beams Onto Starship
Director Brian Robbins and Eddie Murphy are reteaming on the SF comedy film Starship Dave, Murphy's next project, which is in preproduction at 20th Century Fox, Variety reported. Deep River Productions is producing, along with Guy Walks Into a Bar. Shooting is slated to begin in March.
Robbins (The Shaggy Dog) recently directed Murphy in the DreamWorks comedy Norbit, due out in February. Based on their Norbit relationship, Murphy gave Robbins the Starship script.
Pete Segal was previously attached to direct, but has a scheduling conflict thanks to Get Smart, which he's helming for Warner Brothers.
Starship Dave is the story of a crew of miniature, human-looking aliens who are seeking a way to save their doomed world. Murphy will play the human spacecraft they travel in (Starship Dave), as well as the ship's captain.
Penelope Picked Up
Reese Witherspoon's first film as a producer, the fantasy-tinged Penelope, has been picked up for theatrical release by IFC Films and home video and TV distribution by the Weinstein Co. in North America, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Witherspoon co-stars in the romantic tall tale of a rich girl (Christina Ricci) born with a pig snout who seeks true love to break the curse of her porcine face. A relentless paparazzo (Peter Dinklage) hires a plant (James McAvoy) to vie for her affection among many scared suitors, but the spy finds himself strangely attracted to the girl he has been hired to expose to the world.
Playing against type, Witherspoon portrays the biker chick the girl befriends after escaping the clutches of her overprotective parents (Catherine O'Hara and Richard E. Grant).
Penelope had its world premiere as a Gala Presentation at the Toronto International Film Festival, heading in as one of the most talked-about projects and ending up on a relatively slow burn toward gaining a distribution.
The project was developed and produced by Witherspoon and Jennifer Simpson's Type A Films and produced and financed by Stone Village Pictures. Financing was arranged by Grosvenor Park. Leslie Caveny and Phil Robertson co-produced. Dylan Russell, Michael Roban, Chris Curling, Robin Greenspun, Danny Greenspun, Andrew Molasky and Christian Arnold-Beutel served as executive producers.
Lane Logs Onto Untraceable
Diane Lane will star in Screen Gems' Untraceable, about an FBI cybercop who races against time to track down a ruthless online predator, Variety reported. Gregory Hoblit is attached to direct for Lakeshore Entertainment. Shooting is scheduled to begin in February.
Allison Burnett (The Feast of Love) wrote the script based on an original screenplay by Robert Fyvolent and Mark R. Brinker.
Hoblit's credits include the recently wrapped Fracture, starring Anthony Hopkins, and Fallen, with Denzel Washington.
Rogue Adapting Blood
Rogue Pictures has pre-emptively bought film rights to Blood on the Tracks, an upcoming vampire comic book, with Neill Dela Llana and Ian Gamazon writing and directing the adaptation, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Michael Zoumas will produce via his Zoom Entertainment, while Barry Levine is producing via his newly formed Blatant Pictures.
Blood revolves around a series of killings in the New York subway system, which at first are thought to be the work of a serial killer, but are later revealed to be the work of a vampire who has been living in the tunnels since the city was called New Amsterdam.
CAA agent John Levin, who reps Levine's company, came up with the initial concept and pitched it to Levine. Levine was setting up a comic-book company called Radical Comics that also would produce movies via an arm called Blatant Pictures. He took it to author/comic writer David Tischman, who shares co-creator credit. Tischman will executive-produce. Phillip Bond will do the art for the comic.
Zoumas, whose Zoom has a producing deal at Rogue, partnered with Levine in the early stages and brought it to Dela Llana and Gamazon. The filmmakers helped develop some of the story's mythology.
Rogue is owned by NBC Universal, which also owns SCIFI.COM.
Bilson Jumps To Jumper
Rachel Bilson (TV's The OC) is stepping in as the leading lady opposite Hayden Christensen in Regency Enterprises and 20th Century Fox's SF adventure movie Jumper, being directed by Doug Liman, Variety reported.
Bilson takes over the role from Teresa Palmer (The Grudge 2), who dropped out when the role was reconceived as a 25-year-old woman rather than a 20-year-old.
The switch is the second for Jumper: In August, Christensen replaced Tom Sturridge. Samuel L. Jackson and Jamie Bell also star in the movie, which is currently shooting in Toronto.
Planned as a trilogy, Jumper is the next project for the creative team behind the Regency hit Mr. & Mrs. Smith: Liman and producers Lucas Foster and Simon Kinberg.
Based on the 1992 Steven Gould novel, Jumper follows a young man from a broken home who discovers he has the ability to teleport. In his quest for the man he believes responsible for the death of his mother, he draws the attention of the National Security Agency and another young man with the same abilities. David Goyer (Batman Begins) adapted the screenplay, which was rewritten by Jim Uhls and Kinberg.
Berg To Helm Smith's Tonight
Columbia Pictures has set Peter Berg to direct Tonight, He Comes, the long-gestating film that will star Will Smith as a superhero in existential crisis, Variety reported.
The movie begins shooting in May for a summer 2008 release. Akiva Goldsman, Michael Mann, James Lassiter and Smith produce.
Berg is the third helmer to join the project, but the producers feel he'll be the one to bring the project to fruition after Jonathan Mostow and Gabriele Muccino quit previously over creative differences, the trade paper reported.
The film has been in development for 10 years, starting with a quirky Vincent Ngo script and ending with one that former The X-Files writer Vince Gilligan has redrafted into a potential summer tentpole. The quartet of producers have supervised several Gilligan rewrites that accentuated the superhero's love affair with a married housewife. That has turned the latter role into one coveted by actresses. Charlize Theron is the favorite to take the job.
New Hellboy Comes To TV
Hellboy: Sword of Storms, a new animated feature based on Mike Mignola's graphic novel series, continues the comic-book and film series when it debuts Oct. 28 at 9:30 p.m. ET/PT on Cartoon Network's Toonami programming block.
In the new film, a university professor opens a forbidden scroll and is possessed by the twin demons of thunder and lightning, who seek to return to the world to wake their brothers, the dragons. Hellboy (voiced by Ron Perlman), along with a folklore expert and a psychic, travels to Japan to investigate and finds the sword of storms, the only weapon that can defeat the demons.
In addition to Perlman, the new movie features the voices of several actors from the 2004 Guillermo del Toro-directed live-action Hellboy movie, including Selma Blair (Liz Sherman) and Doug Jones (Abe Sapien). Mike Mignola co-wrote the movie's story. Phil Weinstein and Tad Stones direct the movie. Del Toro and Mignola are creative producers. Hellboy: Sword of Storms is produced by Film Roman, a Starz Media Company, and is distributed worldwide for television and on DVD/video by Starz Media, LLC.
It's A Shooter's Holiday
Gamers will be ringing in the holidays to the sounds of gunfire, mortar explosions and alien roars as a bevy of SF and fantasy-based shooters for every next-generation gaming system and PC march into stores in the next few months.
One of the most anticipated shooter titles this year is Gears of War (Xbox 360), a third-person shooter with hyper-realistic graphics, which pits gun-toting soldiers against a subterranean race called the Locust. As protagonist Marcus Fenix, players fight with a "stop-and-pop" fighting style that is a unique amalgam of Halo and Ghost Recon combat.
Resistance: Fall of Man (PlayStation 3) is a first-person shooter that reimagines the 1950s as a place where World War II never happened and a parasitic alien race called the Chimera have swept all the way through Europe. As an American Ranger who's immune to the Chimera's infectious virus, players fight to drive them out in gameplay that is like a cross between Call of Duty 2 and Aliens.
Far Cry Vengeance (Wii) is a first-person shooter/hack-and-slash title, which follows a man who becomes a victim of scientific experimentation that leaves him with super feral powers. Players use the new motion-sensitive Wii controller to shoot and attack the militant baddies who are crawling all over the island he inhabits.
Battlefield 2142 (PC), the latest entry in the popular first-person-shooter Battlefield series, jumps almost 150 years into the future, when there's not enough livable land to go around. Players square off online in massive flying warships called Titans.
Gears of War comes out Nov. 12, exclusively for the Xbox 360. Resistance: Fall of Man comes out on Nov. 17 with the launch of the PlayStation 3. Far Cry Vengeance is slated for release in November, while Battlefield 2142 came out on Oct. 17. —Casey Lynch
BRIEFLY NOTED
The Jim Henson Company confirmed that it is in development on a full-length feature film about the Fraggles, stars of the 1980s television show Fraggle Rock.
A two-part behind-the-scenes featurette on the making of Resident Evil: Extinction, which originally aired on MTV in Germany, has surfaced on YouTube.com. (*This video has been removed due to Copyright infringement*)
Julia Ormond (Inland Empire) has joined the cast of Paramount's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, directed by David Fincher and based on a story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, about a man (Brad Pitt) who hits age 50 and begins aging backward, Variety reported.
Fox has updated the official Web site (http://www.eragonmovie.com/) for the upcoming film version of Christopher Paolini's fantasy novel Eragon, which opens Dec. 15.
Serenity and [i]Slither star Nathan Fillion has signed a talent-holding deal with Fox Broadcasting Co. and 20th Century Fox TV, under which the studio and the network will develop a comedy or drama script for the actor or cast him in an existing project if the new one doesn't go to pilot, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Shaun of the Dead, the cult British zombie romantic comedy film, has its U.S. TV premiere on Comedy Central, Oct. 28 at 9 p.m. ET.
The CW has given a put pilot commitment to a one-hour action-comedy from Veronica Mars writer-producer Diane Ruggiero, about two very different young women and best friends who unite to fight crime after a mysterious event gives them superpowers they can use only when they are together, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Bloody-Disgusting.com (http://www.freezedriedmovies.com/news/index.php?Action=Full&NewsID=5164) reported that Joel Moore (Art School Confidential) has been cast as one of
the leads in James Cameron's Avatar, which is aiming at a 2008 release, playing a paraplegic war veteran in the future who is brought to the planet of Pandora.
Joel Silver's Dark Castle Productions has raised $240 million from half a dozen investment firms to make 15 films over the next six years, with Warner Brothers aboard to distribute the entire slate, Variety reported.
Both of The CW's Thursday dramas, Smallville and Supernatural, delivered week-to-week growth in viewers and key demographics despite increasingly tough competition, the network announced.
The Grudge 2 debuted in first place on the Oct. 13 weekend, taking in $22 million during the three-day period, the Associated Press reported.
King's 'The Mist' Film Coalesces
Dimension Films will turn Stephen King's novella "The Mist" into a horror film, which Frank Darabont will direct from his own script, Variety reported. Thomas Jane is in talks to be part of the ensemble cast.
Darabont, whose biggest hits were the King adaptations The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, has long been enshrouded in "The Mist."
King entrusted the rights to him several years ago, when Darabont had a first-look deal at Paramount. Darabont is in the final stages of reclaiming rights to his script.
A spring production start is envisioned for the film, which Darabont will produce with Castle Rock's Martin Shafer and Liz Glotzer.
Published in 1985 as part of King's short-story collection Skeleton Crew, "The Mist" takes place in a small town where a thick mist engulfs the area, killing those caught in its darkness. Terrified survivors seek refuge in a supermarket, while a swarm of murderous critters tries to get in.
Me2 Is Time-Travel Comedy
Walt Disney Pictures has bought a time-travel comedy project from screenwriter Larry Doyle titled Me2, with Mark Waters attached to direct, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Waters and his producing partner, Jessica Tuchinsky, will produce via their Watermark Pictures production company.
The plot for Me2 is being kept under wraps. Doyle came up with the idea before taking it to Watermark and will begin writing immediately.
Doyle was a writer-producer on TV's The Simpsons and also wrote episodes of Daria and Beavis and Butt-head; his feature credits include Looney Tunes: Back in Action.
Waters is directing The Spiderwick Chronicles, the big-budget adaptation based on the best-selling children's books, which is shooting in Montreal.
Grudge Writer Helms White
The Grudge 2 screenwriter Stephen Susco will make his feature-film directorial debut on the supernatural horror movie White for Focus Features' genre banner Rogue, Variety reported.
White is based on a novella included within author Tim Lebbon's White and Other Tales of Ruin and is an apocalyptic tale centering on a band of people trapped in a blizzard and systematically picked off by mysterious phantoms.
Former Miramax executive Michael Zoumas is producing for his Zoom Entertainment imprint.
The Lebbon book was published in 2003 by Night Shade Books. Susco optioned the story, and he and Zoumas brought the project to Rogue, headed by Andrew Rona.
Focus and Rogue are both owned by NBC Universal, which also owns SCIFI.COM.
Piven, Shannon Voice Igor
Jeremy Piven and Molly Shannon are lending their voices to Igor, the computer-animated comedy from Exodus Film Group, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Igor centers on a mad scientist's hunchbacked lab assistant, Igor, who has big dreams of becoming a scientist and winning first place at the annual Evil Science Fair. It will be distributed domestically by the Weinstein Co., which also has secured rights in most foreign territories.
Piven will voice the role of Dr. Schadenfreude, Igor's nemesis, with Shannon voicing Eva, a giant, indestructible monster invented by Igor. They join a cast that includes Steve Buscemi, John Cleese and Christian Slater. Anthony Leondis is set to direct the screenplay by Chris McKenna (American Dad).
Zombie Fido Has Bite
Henry Czerny, co-star of the upcoming horror comedy Fido, told SCI FI Wire that the film is a thinking man's zombie movie. The story takes place in a near future that resembles the near past, when killer zombies are kept at a safe distance and domesticated zombies handle the basic chores for normal humans. K'Sun Ray stars as Timmy, a boy whose pet zombie, Fido (Billy Connolly of Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events), becomes his best friend. The cast also includes Dylan Baker (Spider-Man 2) and Carrie-Anne Moss (The Matrix) as Billy's parents; Czerny (The Exorcism of Emily Rose) plays Mr. Bottoms, a Zombie Wars hero and the boss at Zomcom, the company that keeps the bad zombies fenced out and manufactures the collars that keep the domesticated zombies from eating their masters.
"I think it's a riot," Czerny said of Fido in an interview while promoting his latest film, the Oct. 27 release Conversations With God. "It's a wonderful satire. It's a love story on some level, of course, but it's a wonderful satire, and it's a discussion, from my point of view, about the use of fear to govern. Obviously, it's timely. It's so lateral in its demonstration, in its presentation, and it's so evocative and humorous, to a certain extent, because this kid befriends a zombie as he would a dog. And there are people who are terrified of the zombie."
Czerny added: "Basically, the film is a discussion on if we generate our fear and we see things as purely fearful, of course they always will be, and we'll have to build bigger fences. If we can turn around and see, if you will, the experience, the fearful thing, as something we've manifested on some level to teach us how to deal with fear, then we've got a whole different planet. That's one of the themes, through my filter, that's in Fido, and that was thrilling to do, even though the character I play is nefarious."
Czerny said that Fido has its share of zombies, but it's not a gorefest in the manner of the Night of the Living Dead-style zombie movies horror fans are used to seeing. "No," Czerny said. "No, no, no. It's far too tongue-in-cheek for that. It's far too whimsical a style to go there. But my character gets his humorous comeuppance at the end. Actually, it's not so much a comeuppance, because it's not that kind of a story. It's not an indictment, if you will; it's more of a discussion." Lionsgate has picked up domestic distribution rights to the Canadian film and will likely release it later this year or in early 2007. —Ian Spelling
Inkheart Gets New Producer
New Line has signed Barry Mendel to produce Inkheart, based on the first book in Cornelia Funke's fantasy children's trilogy, which will go into production in London this fall with Brendan Fraser, Variety reported.
Shooting will start first in November in Italy and then head to London's Shepperton studios, where New Line's The Golden Compass is already filming; it's based on the first of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials books.
Funke is also producing Inkheart, with Diana Pokorny executive-producing.
Inkheart stars Fraser as a father who can bring characters from books to life by reading stories aloud to his daughter. When the father is kidnapped by some of the fantasy villains in the bedtime tales, his daughter and her friends try to free him. Others in the cast include Paul Bettany and Jim Broadbent.
Iain Softley is directing from a screenplay by David Lindsay-Abaire, who already has been commissioned to adapt the second tome in Funke's series, Inkspell. The final tome in the trilogy, Inkdawn, will be published next year by the British company Chicken House, which has a deal with Scholastic in the United States.
Snipes Indicted On Tax Fraud
Blade star Wesley Snipes was indicted Oct. 17 on eight counts of tax fraud accusing him of trying to cheat the government of $12 million in false refund claims, the Associated Press reported.
Snipes, 44, also failed to file tax returns for six years, according to an indictment unsealed in Tampa, Fla.
Federal prosecutors said that Snipes fraudulently claimed refunds totaling nearly $12 million in 1996 and 1997 on income taxes already paid. The indictment also charged him with failure to file returns between 1999 and 2004, the AP reported.
According to the indictment, Snipes had his taxes prepared by accountants with a history of filing false returns to reap payments for their clients. As part of the deal, the indictment alleges, the firm, American Rights Litigators, would receive 20 percent of refunds from clients. Snipes faces a maximum of 16 years in prison.
Aniston Goes Counter Clockwise
Universal Pictures has picked up Counter Clockwise, a dramedy written by Paul Bernbaum for Jennifer Aniston to produce with an eye to star, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The story centers on Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer and a study in which she reversed the aging process of her subjects by making them believe they were younger. Grant Scharbo and Gina Matthews (13 Going on 30) of Roundtable Entertainment also are producing, along with Aniston's partner, Kristin Hahn.
Scharbo and Matthews came across the study in Deepak Chopra's book Ageless Body, Timeless Mind and acquired Langer's rights and brought it to Aniston and Hahn.
Universal is owned by NBC Universal, which also owns SCIFI.COM.
Continued Compiles Silverberg
Multiple award-winning SF author Robert Silverberg told SCI FI Wire that his latest book, To Be Continued, is the first of a nine-volume set of his collected short fiction. "Not my complete stories, just the ones I think are worth reprinting for modern readers," Silverberg said in an interview. "This volume covers the first five years of my career, stories written between 1953 and 1958. I've done an introduction for each story, placing it in its context of the era, telling how I came to write it and who published it."
The stories cover a broad range of Silverberg's fiction. "One of the stories is the very dark and bleak novelette 'The Road to Nightfall,' which I wrote in 1954, but which was considered too dangerous to publish until 1958," he said. "At the other end [of the spectrum] is the light little short-short 'The Silent Colony,' written in 1953, which is essentially a quick joke in the Robert Sheckley manner."
Of the stories collected in the book, Silverberg said he thinks the aforementioned "Road to Nightfall," which he wrote when he was 19, is his favorite. " because it shows that even at that early age I had a good sense of craft," he said.
He added: "I'd suggest 'The Macauley Circuit,' which foretells computer-synthesized music, [as the most scientifically accurate]."
Silverberg said that revisiting stories that he'd written so long ago was a fascinating experience. "Took me back to those strange, uneasy times when I stood on the outside peering in, full of ambition, and then—almost literally overnight—found the door opening for me, and everything happening at once," he said. "I was still an amateur at the beginning of 1954, and by the summer of 1956 I had won a Hugo."
The nine-volume series will reprint most, but not all, of Silverberg's short fiction, he said. "The pulp stories of the early years will not be included," he said. "I collected some of the best of them in last year's book In the Beginning. The rest are unlikely to see new publication. From somewhere about the midway point of my career, I do reprint just about every story I wrote, perhaps every one. But the first couple of volumes are quite selective."
Silverberg said that his only new work consists of two forthcoming short stories. "[One is for] an anthology called The New Space Opera, edited by Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan, and [the other is] a very short story that Asimov's will publish next spring," he said. "I haven't been doing much new writing lately—been too busy reassembling the earlier stuff. I'm not sure how soon I'll get back to new work. It's not as though there's any shortage of existing Silverberg stories, after all." Subterranean Press will publish the first volume in November. —John Joseph Adams
Nights 2 Due On Halloween
Atari and Obsidian Entertainment announced that their upcoming PC video game Neverwinter Nights 2 is ready for manufacture and is on schedule to ship to stores on Oct. 31 in North America and on Nov. 3 in Europe.
Neverwinter Nights 2, the sequel to BioWare Corp.'s best-selling and genre-defining role-playing game, is set in the Dungeons & Dragons Forgotten Realms universe, created by Wizards of the Coast, and will transport players back to the embattled city of Neverwinter.
Developed by Obsidian, Neverwinter Nights 2 features a new, extensive single-player game with deep character development and a powerful new toolset that provides players with unprecedented ability to create their own universes, quests and storylines.
The Neverwinter Nights franchise has sold more than 2 million copies worldwide, is translated into 10 languages, has sold in more than 40 countries and features one of the largest and most active fan communities in all of gaming.
Murphy Beams Onto Starship
Director Brian Robbins and Eddie Murphy are reteaming on the SF comedy film Starship Dave, Murphy's next project, which is in preproduction at 20th Century Fox, Variety reported. Deep River Productions is producing, along with Guy Walks Into a Bar. Shooting is slated to begin in March.
Robbins (The Shaggy Dog) recently directed Murphy in the DreamWorks comedy Norbit, due out in February. Based on their Norbit relationship, Murphy gave Robbins the Starship script.
Pete Segal was previously attached to direct, but has a scheduling conflict thanks to Get Smart, which he's helming for Warner Brothers.
Starship Dave is the story of a crew of miniature, human-looking aliens who are seeking a way to save their doomed world. Murphy will play the human spacecraft they travel in (Starship Dave), as well as the ship's captain.
Penelope Picked Up
Reese Witherspoon's first film as a producer, the fantasy-tinged Penelope, has been picked up for theatrical release by IFC Films and home video and TV distribution by the Weinstein Co. in North America, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Witherspoon co-stars in the romantic tall tale of a rich girl (Christina Ricci) born with a pig snout who seeks true love to break the curse of her porcine face. A relentless paparazzo (Peter Dinklage) hires a plant (James McAvoy) to vie for her affection among many scared suitors, but the spy finds himself strangely attracted to the girl he has been hired to expose to the world.
Playing against type, Witherspoon portrays the biker chick the girl befriends after escaping the clutches of her overprotective parents (Catherine O'Hara and Richard E. Grant).
Penelope had its world premiere as a Gala Presentation at the Toronto International Film Festival, heading in as one of the most talked-about projects and ending up on a relatively slow burn toward gaining a distribution.
The project was developed and produced by Witherspoon and Jennifer Simpson's Type A Films and produced and financed by Stone Village Pictures. Financing was arranged by Grosvenor Park. Leslie Caveny and Phil Robertson co-produced. Dylan Russell, Michael Roban, Chris Curling, Robin Greenspun, Danny Greenspun, Andrew Molasky and Christian Arnold-Beutel served as executive producers.
Lane Logs Onto Untraceable
Diane Lane will star in Screen Gems' Untraceable, about an FBI cybercop who races against time to track down a ruthless online predator, Variety reported. Gregory Hoblit is attached to direct for Lakeshore Entertainment. Shooting is scheduled to begin in February.
Allison Burnett (The Feast of Love) wrote the script based on an original screenplay by Robert Fyvolent and Mark R. Brinker.
Hoblit's credits include the recently wrapped Fracture, starring Anthony Hopkins, and Fallen, with Denzel Washington.
Rogue Adapting Blood
Rogue Pictures has pre-emptively bought film rights to Blood on the Tracks, an upcoming vampire comic book, with Neill Dela Llana and Ian Gamazon writing and directing the adaptation, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Michael Zoumas will produce via his Zoom Entertainment, while Barry Levine is producing via his newly formed Blatant Pictures.
Blood revolves around a series of killings in the New York subway system, which at first are thought to be the work of a serial killer, but are later revealed to be the work of a vampire who has been living in the tunnels since the city was called New Amsterdam.
CAA agent John Levin, who reps Levine's company, came up with the initial concept and pitched it to Levine. Levine was setting up a comic-book company called Radical Comics that also would produce movies via an arm called Blatant Pictures. He took it to author/comic writer David Tischman, who shares co-creator credit. Tischman will executive-produce. Phillip Bond will do the art for the comic.
Zoumas, whose Zoom has a producing deal at Rogue, partnered with Levine in the early stages and brought it to Dela Llana and Gamazon. The filmmakers helped develop some of the story's mythology.
Rogue is owned by NBC Universal, which also owns SCIFI.COM.
Bilson Jumps To Jumper
Rachel Bilson (TV's The OC) is stepping in as the leading lady opposite Hayden Christensen in Regency Enterprises and 20th Century Fox's SF adventure movie Jumper, being directed by Doug Liman, Variety reported.
Bilson takes over the role from Teresa Palmer (The Grudge 2), who dropped out when the role was reconceived as a 25-year-old woman rather than a 20-year-old.
The switch is the second for Jumper: In August, Christensen replaced Tom Sturridge. Samuel L. Jackson and Jamie Bell also star in the movie, which is currently shooting in Toronto.
Planned as a trilogy, Jumper is the next project for the creative team behind the Regency hit Mr. & Mrs. Smith: Liman and producers Lucas Foster and Simon Kinberg.
Based on the 1992 Steven Gould novel, Jumper follows a young man from a broken home who discovers he has the ability to teleport. In his quest for the man he believes responsible for the death of his mother, he draws the attention of the National Security Agency and another young man with the same abilities. David Goyer (Batman Begins) adapted the screenplay, which was rewritten by Jim Uhls and Kinberg.
Berg To Helm Smith's Tonight
Columbia Pictures has set Peter Berg to direct Tonight, He Comes, the long-gestating film that will star Will Smith as a superhero in existential crisis, Variety reported.
The movie begins shooting in May for a summer 2008 release. Akiva Goldsman, Michael Mann, James Lassiter and Smith produce.
Berg is the third helmer to join the project, but the producers feel he'll be the one to bring the project to fruition after Jonathan Mostow and Gabriele Muccino quit previously over creative differences, the trade paper reported.
The film has been in development for 10 years, starting with a quirky Vincent Ngo script and ending with one that former The X-Files writer Vince Gilligan has redrafted into a potential summer tentpole. The quartet of producers have supervised several Gilligan rewrites that accentuated the superhero's love affair with a married housewife. That has turned the latter role into one coveted by actresses. Charlize Theron is the favorite to take the job.
New Hellboy Comes To TV
Hellboy: Sword of Storms, a new animated feature based on Mike Mignola's graphic novel series, continues the comic-book and film series when it debuts Oct. 28 at 9:30 p.m. ET/PT on Cartoon Network's Toonami programming block.
In the new film, a university professor opens a forbidden scroll and is possessed by the twin demons of thunder and lightning, who seek to return to the world to wake their brothers, the dragons. Hellboy (voiced by Ron Perlman), along with a folklore expert and a psychic, travels to Japan to investigate and finds the sword of storms, the only weapon that can defeat the demons.
In addition to Perlman, the new movie features the voices of several actors from the 2004 Guillermo del Toro-directed live-action Hellboy movie, including Selma Blair (Liz Sherman) and Doug Jones (Abe Sapien). Mike Mignola co-wrote the movie's story. Phil Weinstein and Tad Stones direct the movie. Del Toro and Mignola are creative producers. Hellboy: Sword of Storms is produced by Film Roman, a Starz Media Company, and is distributed worldwide for television and on DVD/video by Starz Media, LLC.
It's A Shooter's Holiday
Gamers will be ringing in the holidays to the sounds of gunfire, mortar explosions and alien roars as a bevy of SF and fantasy-based shooters for every next-generation gaming system and PC march into stores in the next few months.
One of the most anticipated shooter titles this year is Gears of War (Xbox 360), a third-person shooter with hyper-realistic graphics, which pits gun-toting soldiers against a subterranean race called the Locust. As protagonist Marcus Fenix, players fight with a "stop-and-pop" fighting style that is a unique amalgam of Halo and Ghost Recon combat.
Resistance: Fall of Man (PlayStation 3) is a first-person shooter that reimagines the 1950s as a place where World War II never happened and a parasitic alien race called the Chimera have swept all the way through Europe. As an American Ranger who's immune to the Chimera's infectious virus, players fight to drive them out in gameplay that is like a cross between Call of Duty 2 and Aliens.
Far Cry Vengeance (Wii) is a first-person shooter/hack-and-slash title, which follows a man who becomes a victim of scientific experimentation that leaves him with super feral powers. Players use the new motion-sensitive Wii controller to shoot and attack the militant baddies who are crawling all over the island he inhabits.
Battlefield 2142 (PC), the latest entry in the popular first-person-shooter Battlefield series, jumps almost 150 years into the future, when there's not enough livable land to go around. Players square off online in massive flying warships called Titans.
Gears of War comes out Nov. 12, exclusively for the Xbox 360. Resistance: Fall of Man comes out on Nov. 17 with the launch of the PlayStation 3. Far Cry Vengeance is slated for release in November, while Battlefield 2142 came out on Oct. 17. —Casey Lynch
BRIEFLY NOTED
The Jim Henson Company confirmed that it is in development on a full-length feature film about the Fraggles, stars of the 1980s television show Fraggle Rock.
A two-part behind-the-scenes featurette on the making of Resident Evil: Extinction, which originally aired on MTV in Germany, has surfaced on YouTube.com. (*This video has been removed due to Copyright infringement*)
Julia Ormond (Inland Empire) has joined the cast of Paramount's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, directed by David Fincher and based on a story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, about a man (Brad Pitt) who hits age 50 and begins aging backward, Variety reported.
Fox has updated the official Web site (http://www.eragonmovie.com/) for the upcoming film version of Christopher Paolini's fantasy novel Eragon, which opens Dec. 15.
Serenity and [i]Slither star Nathan Fillion has signed a talent-holding deal with Fox Broadcasting Co. and 20th Century Fox TV, under which the studio and the network will develop a comedy or drama script for the actor or cast him in an existing project if the new one doesn't go to pilot, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Shaun of the Dead, the cult British zombie romantic comedy film, has its U.S. TV premiere on Comedy Central, Oct. 28 at 9 p.m. ET.
The CW has given a put pilot commitment to a one-hour action-comedy from Veronica Mars writer-producer Diane Ruggiero, about two very different young women and best friends who unite to fight crime after a mysterious event gives them superpowers they can use only when they are together, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Bloody-Disgusting.com (http://www.freezedriedmovies.com/news/index.php?Action=Full&NewsID=5164) reported that Joel Moore (Art School Confidential) has been cast as one of
the leads in James Cameron's Avatar, which is aiming at a 2008 release, playing a paraplegic war veteran in the future who is brought to the planet of Pandora.
Joel Silver's Dark Castle Productions has raised $240 million from half a dozen investment firms to make 15 films over the next six years, with Warner Brothers aboard to distribute the entire slate, Variety reported.
Both of The CW's Thursday dramas, Smallville and Supernatural, delivered week-to-week growth in viewers and key demographics despite increasingly tough competition, the network announced.
The Grudge 2 debuted in first place on the Oct. 13 weekend, taking in $22 million during the three-day period, the Associated Press reported.