blog.itsonthegrid.com

Variety: Chris Morgan is writing "Fast Five" (aka Fast and Furious 5) for Universal

Chris Morgan is writing "Fast Five," marking the third time he and Lin have teamed for a "Fast and Furious" film. The story finds protags Dom (Diesel) and Brian (Walker) as fugitives being pursued by relentless lawmen.

Lensing will begin later this year for a 2011 release.

via www.variety.com

We'll have this on the grid shortly.

Variety: Jessie Nelson to write 'Enchanted 2' for Disney

Disney is hoping to charm auds again with a sequel to "Enchanted," hiring Jessie Nelson to pen a script for the live-action fairy tale that "The Proposal" helmer Anne Fletcher is attached to direct.

via www.variety.com

We'll have this on the grid shortly.

Variety: Steven Knight to write "The Lost Symbol" for Columbia

Columbia Pictures is moving forward with "The Lost Symbol" -- the third pic in the "Da Vinci Code" franchise -- and has tapped British scribe Steven Knight to adapt.

via www.variety.com

We'll have this on the grid shortly.

Finke/Fleming: Sony Announces ‘(500) Days’ Marc Webb To Direct Rebooted ‘Spider-Man’

Marc Webb, the director of the Golden Globe nominated Best Picture (500) Days of Summer,  will direct the next chapter in the Spider-Man franchise, set to hit theaters summer 2012, it was jointly announced today by Columbia Pictures and Marvel Studios.

via www.deadline.com

This isn't exactly breaking news now (6 hours after Finke & Fleming's post and a couple of days after their scoop), but it's still worth posting.

Fleming: DreamWorks Hires Screenwriter For MLK, Jr. Biopic

DreamWorks Studios announced today it's hired playwright and Academy Award-winning screenwriter Ronald Harwood to write the Martin Luther King, Jr. biopic.

via www.deadline.com

Yep, this whole Fleming-leaves-Variety thing is going to be a problem for the paper.  Here's the link to the project on the grid [subscription required]; we'll have the record updated shortly.  As we noted here, this project appeared on the unnamed agency's OWA grid in May last year and disappeared as of December.  

Filled Assignment (IESB Exclusive): Reese & Wernick to write G.I. Joe 2

Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick have been in the news this week when it was announced they had officially signed on to pen DEADPOOL for 20th Century Fox. 

IESB has exclusively learned that not only are these two writing the script for the Merc with the Mouth, they've also just been handed the sequel to G.I. Joe:  The Rise of Cobra that hit theaters this past August with Stephen Sommers at the helm.

via iesb.net

Missed this last week. Hat tip to Peter Sciretta at /Film for reposting.  It's on the grid here.

Nikki: Blade's Norrington goes on 'The Lost Patrol'

Legendary Pictures announced today it's hired Stephen Norrington to write and direct THE LOST PATROL, a supernatural action thriller set against the backdrop of World War II.

via www.deadline.com

Nikki's headlines are already getting more Variety-esque. This project is now on the grid here [subscription required].

2009 OWA Scorecard: CBS Films, Columbia Pictures

Note:  We'll be metering out the rest of the studios' OWA scorecards over the next week or two.  Sign up for one of our feeds to get notified when a new post goes up -- the links are all at the top of the left column.

 

2009 OWA Scorecard:  CBS Films & Columbia Pictures

by Jason Scoggins
December 30, 2009

Since there won’t be much of a spec market to track for another month or so, I decided to fill the gap with a series of articles looking back at an arguably more important part of the film development business:  Studio Open Writing Assignments, or OWAs.  Before I begin, here’s a quick primer for those of you unfamiliar with the term.

OWAs are job opportunities for professional screenwriters.  How writers become eligible for studio assignments, and the process by which the studios go about “filling” their OWAs, are topics for another day.  For the purpose of this article, you just need to know the following:

• When a studio or a production company needs a writer for a given project, the project’s producers and development executives put the word out to their friends.
• I use the term “friends” here in its most Hollywood sense, since in this case it includes the big agencies’ “covering” agents, whose jobs revolve around gathering as much information as possible about potential open writing and directing assignments at studios and production companies.
• The fruits of every covering agent’s labor are collected in their companies’ internal databases, and hard-copy printouts of the databases are circulated internally on a regular basis.  Those documents are called “OWA grids,” or simply “grids.”

Now, hard-copied grids are poor tools for tracking client submissions or the state of a given studio’s projects in development.  Live databases are much better for this purpose, and web-enabled databases are ideal (which is one reason my colleagues and I launched www.itsonthegrid.com).  That said, the physical documents are fairly useful snapshots of Hollywood’s most active development projects at a given point in time.  So what I intend to do in this series is examine one agency’s grid from several points throughout 2009 in order to get a sense of how active the various studios were in this arena. 

Obviously, I’m focusing on one agency’s grid for the sake of consistency.  (I would have used the IOTG database, but it didn’t really exist until November 2009.)  I won’t name the agency whose grid I’m using for my comparison, but I’ve chosen it for three reasons:  1) It’s the most comprehensive of the three or four agencies’ grids I see on a regular basis; 2) The company did not have a major structural upheaval during the year, which would have affected the quality of the data; and 3) It’s the one for which I have the most copies from 2009 (six).  The dates are well distributed throughout the year, too:  Mid-April; early June; mid-July, mid-August; mid-October; and the beginning of December.

A couple of final notes:  First, there are a number of reasons a project may have been removed from the grid for a given studio:  A writer may have been hired, the project may no longer be in active development, the project may have changed studios, and so on.  Therefore, to keep the stats concise and consistent, I’ve labeled any project no longer on the unnamed agency’s grid as “Closed” rather than “Filled.”  Second, since there’s so much ground to cover (over three dozen studios and other buyers are represented on the grid), I’ll be publishing some of the articles in this series on the IOTG blog here: http://blog.itsonthegrid.com  Keep an eye on this newsletter as well as the blog over the course of the next several weeks to get a complete sense of 2009’s OWA Market.


CBS Films

 

Month	OWAs	Closed	New
April	3
May	3	2: The Christmas Cookie Club When Dads Were Men	2: A Week With Will Keystroke
July	4	0	1: Big Brave Brian
August	6	1: A Week With Will	3: Ex-Files The Best Mistakes The Eternals
October	6	1: The Eternals	1: I Didn’t Like Him Anyway
December	6	0	0

In addition to the above 9 projects, “Assault on Pelindaba” was on the grid for CBS Films since at least April. 

Since CBS Films is such a new studio (they were formed in 2007), it was fairly easy to compare the above with the company’s slate as listed in two of the most frequently cited film development websites (FilmTracker.com and IMDb Pro).  I had expected to see the two sites’ listings more or less mirror each other, since they glean their data in similar ways (primarily from articles in Variety, The Hollywood Reporter and the Los Angeles Times).  I was surprised to discover they diverged significantly:  Four of the ten projects on the agency grid are listed in FilmTracker (“A Week With Will,” “The Best Mistakes,” “The Christmas Cookie Club” and “The Eternals”), and a different set of five of the ten appear in IMDb Pro (“A Week With Will,” “Big Brave Brian,” “The Christmas Cookie Club,” “The Eternals and “When Dads Were Men”).


Columbia Pictures

Month	OWAs	Closed	New
April	36
May	31	8: A Butler Well Served by This Election Angelology Gidget Meet John Doe No Impact Man Socialite Rank Total Recall (Remake) Unt. Columbus Short/Channing Tatum Project	3: Destination Wedding aka Honeymoon Unt. Indian Baseball Project Venom
July	30	8: A Capella Beautiful Dreadnaught My Wife Hates Your Wife The Reliable Wife Unt. Indian Baseball Project Uprising aka Alien Prison	7: Bad Boys 3 Grand Prix King Dork No Impact Man Shell Game Unt. Somali Pirate Rescue Project Unt. Maguire True Life Thriller Project
August	27	9: American Neurotic Foundation Trilogy Grand Prix Me and My Monster Metal Gear Solid Sisters of Mercy The Lords’ Day Unt. Maguire True Life Thriller Project (changed to Indie) Venom	6: End of the Road aka Unt. Tough Sexy Crime Chase Film Hothouse Flowers J-Mac aka Unt. Jason McElwain Autistic Basketball Player Project Maximum Ride Stealing Time aka Anakythera Clock Unt. Natalie Portman Project aka The Devil Wears Oxfam
October	25	8: Bad Boys 3 Hancock 2 Jerry the Giant Killer aka Jack The… J- Mac aka Unt. Jason McElwain Autistic Basketball Player Project Stealing Time aka Anakythera Clock The Billionaire’s Vinegar Uncharted:  Drake’s Fortune Vitus	6: Cooked Eat My Dust Grayskull:  The Masters of the Universe aka He-Man Modern Love The Last Pharaoh aka Taharqa Working Mom
December	24	8: End of the Road aka Unt. Tough Sexy Crime Chase Film Ghost Rider 2 Hothouse Flowers King Dork Shell Game Unt. Allen Counter Project Unt. Natalie Portman Project aka The Devil Wears Oxfam Unt. Somali Pirate Rescue Project	7: Cities aka Extreme Cities Flowers for Algernon I Dream of Jeannie Real Genius Risk The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo The Lost Symbol

 

I have to admit, before I did this exercise I didn’t have a true sense of the scope of the studios' active development slates.  I assumed every major studio had hundreds of scripts sitting on the proverbial shelf, but like my spec market analysis this year, I couldn’t see the forest for the trees until I started breaking down the data.  

The above grid represents just the 60+ projects at Columbia that actively sought writers during 2009, and it doesn’t even include the projects that were too high level to make it onto the grid (e.g., Spider-Man 4) or already had writers in place.  That’s a lot of material, all of which is supervised by a relatively small group of people.  I have a new appreciation for the workload of studio production and development executives.

Also, I previously had no sense at all of how many projects were added to or removed from the grid on a monthly basis.  Sony hired writers for at least 40 projects in 2009, and the real number is no doubt upwards of 50 (I really wish I had good data for January through mid-April now).  That’s roughly ten times the number of specs they bought in 2009 (five, as of December 16), and it’s much clearer now why Sony publicly stated toward the end of the year that they intended not to purchase much original material for the foreseeable future.  Given how few movies the studios now finance and produce in-house each year, Sony really does have enough projects in the hopper to get through several years’ worth of production if they wanted.  (Let’s hope their outstanding year at the international box office results leads to an investment in new material anyway.)

Compared to CBS Films, more of Columbia’s OWAs showed up in FilmTracker and IMDb Pro on a percentage basis (two interesting ones that I haven’t seen discussed publicly so far are the remakes of “Grand Prix” and “Real Genius”), though this is probably to be expected given how long most of their projects have been in development.  “I Dream Of Jeannie,” for example, hit the grid in December again; according to FilmTracker, the project has had at least seven different writers/teams to date.


About The Scoggins Reports:
The Scoggins Reports (Jason Scoggins’ Spec Market Roundup, Spec Market Scorecard and now this OWA Scorecard) are terribly unscientific analyses of the feature film development business based on information culled from a variety of public and non-public sources. These are by no means official statistics, merely a fairly complete summary.  Past editions can be found in the archives of The Business of Show Institute (http://bit.ly/2HRZ67) as well as on Scoggins’ website:  http://www.lifeonthebubble.com. 

Details on each person, project and company in the Reports can also be found at http://www.itsonthegrid.com, a subscription-supported, web-based database of feature film development information recently launched by Scoggins and several other literary managers.  For daily posts of new and updated spec script, OWA and ODA information, check out the IOTG blog here:  http://blog.itsonthegrid.com.

About Scoggins:
Jason Scoggins is a partner at Protocol, a literary management and production company.  He manages writers, directors and producers of film and TV alongside Protocol’s founding partners Brian Inerfeld and John Ufland.  Follow him here:  http://twitter.com/itsonthegrid.

Filled OWA: Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick to write "Deadpool" (Variety)

20th Century Fox is making progress with its "X-Men" spinoff, "Deadpool," and has tapped "Zombieland" scribes Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick to pen the screenplay.

via www.variety.com

Just updated the grid. Here's the project's detail page (subscription required).

Fleming: Morel to direct "Dune" (Variety)

Paramount Pictures has set Pierre Morel to direct “Dune,” the adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi classic novel.

Morel, who last directed the action hit “Taken,” has signed a deal with the studio and will work toward getting the script right. Pic is one of the biggest priorities on the slate of Par Motion Picture Group prexy Adam Goodman. 

Kevin Misher’s Misher Films will produce with New Amsterdam’s Richard Rubenstein, who produced the telepic “Dune” and the sequel “Children of Dune.”

Pic had been developed by Peter Berg, who exited when he committed to Universal’s “Battleship,” based on the Hasbro naval combat board game. Universal set a July 1, 2001 release for that film and committed to follow with Berg’s passion project, the Afghan was drama “Lone Survivor.” Those back-to-back directing gigs will keep Berg busy for at least two years.

Berg developed a “Dune” draft with Josh Zetumer, the script who separately has been scripting the fourth installment of “The Bourne Identity” for Universal. Paramount will work off Zetumer’s draft, but the studio will secure another writer shortly.  

“Dune” was first turned into a film by David Lynch, whose 1984 effort was not a financial success. Herbert’s novel—about an intergalactic struggle to control the supply of a valuable spice found only on the remote desert planet Arrakis—remains the biggest selling sci fi novel and it’s still enormously popular. Morel, for instance, is a long time fan who brought his well-worn copy of the novel with him to meetings at Paramount, sources said.

The studio will begin doing R&D work on a picture that promises to be pricey.

Deal makes “Dune” a candidate to be the next directing assignment for Morel, who is also in early stage development on a sequel to “Taken.” He is also developing “Pursuit,” an action thriller at Universal based on the exploits of conflict photographer Jason Howe. Howe fell in love with a woman while on assignment in Colombia, only to discover she was an assassin. Morel most recently wrapped the John Travolta-starrer “From Paris with Love.” He is repped by WME and Artist Talent Management.

via weblogs.variety.com  [Above links point to www.itsonthegrid.com; subscription required.]