In the flood of announcements that followed Diablo Cody’s overnight overexposure, perhaps the most persistent was the bond between the Oscar-adorned Juno screenwriter and Steven Spielberg. If we’re to believe the Hollywood lore, he even considered directing Juno at one point, and before long he had Cody attached as a writer on several of his fledgling projects.
For quite a while now, DreamWorks has been due for some change. Its relationship with distributor Paramount had gone from shaky, to rocky, to in dire need of a life raft. Due to this tension, it was no surprise that as its contract with Paramount ended the company looked elsewhere to produce its films. Reliance, a company based mostly out of India, is helping to fund a stand-alone production company for DreamWorks.
Director M. Night Shyamalan has been accused of pilfering plotlines several times in his career: Signs supposedly stole from a script for Lord of the Barrens: The Jersey Devil and The Village followed a shockingly close track to Margaret Peteson Haddix's children's novel Running Out Of Time.
In January, we reported that Sacha Baron Cohen, best known for his characters Borat and Ali G, had been cast in Steven Spielberg's upcoming feature The Trial of the Chicago Seven. And while it still looks like Cohen's involved in the film, Spielberg is bowing out due to his commitments to about five other projects. Film School Rejects noticed that Production Weekly added Paul Greengrass to the film's listing, and though no official confirmation has been announced, suspicions that Spielberg would postpone the project have been around for months.
Diablo Cody has come a long way since the days when she was merely the proprietor of the Pussy Ranch
. The woman born Brook Busey—and self-described "unlikely stripper
" turned Academy Award laureate—was recently pegged by Steven Spielberg to write a script for an as-yet-untitled Dreamworks comedy, based on an original concept by Spielberg. That's literally all we know at this point. Apparently the project is under wraps to the point that there's not even a producer attached to the film yet.
Showtime has picked up the Diablo Cody-penned
sitcom The United States of Tara for 12 half-hour episodes, including pilot. As
previously reported, Steven Spielberg is producing the endeavor that now will
begin filming this summer. Showtime president Robert Greenblatt said he hopes
to launch the show early next year, though there is no definite air date yet.
TechCrunch has revealed that Steven Spielberg’s forthcoming paranormal social networking site will be called either “Rising” or “The Rising,” which may confuse some Bruce Springsteen fans looking for song lyrics rather than explicit alien abduction narratives.
Hot off of the set of the fourth Indiana Jones film, Steven Spielberg refuses to relax.
Now that he's tackled the latest adventures of Jones and company (that sadly but unsurprisingly does not include Sean Connery), Spielberg promises to finally focus on a biopic of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, a project that has been on the director's back-burner for nearly seven years. It's possible that the movie may begin shooting as soon as 2009, since the script has already been written by Tony Kushner.
Liam Neeson is said to be on board to take on the formidable role of Lincoln, which might prove to be a bit of a head scratch since Neeson was born and bred in Ireland and Lincoln grew up in Illinois. But hey, that's why they call it acting, right?
Related links:
CivilWar.com
Steven Spielberg on IMDb
Liam Nesson on IMDb
Got news tips for Paste? E-mail news@pastemagazine.com.
We haven't heard a good ghost story since Nickelodeon retired Are You Afraid of the Dark?, but that might change very soon. Rumor has it that producer Steven Spielberg—who has a bit of extraterrestrial experience under his belt (Casper, Men in Black and War of the Worlds, to name a handful)—is in the midst of developing a social networking site called Ghost Town. The site will be for people to share their paranormal experiences with others who can relate. As one Paste staffer put it, the man who made E.T. is making a site...(dramatic pause)...for people who have encountered E.T.
Spielberg is reportedly a believer, having experienced inexplicable encounters in the past. So will this network, which is also reported to possibly have original video content, be relevatory for believers or just fodder for hoaxes? Will it have user accounts like Facebook, rendering that ever-present profile question mark as an actually legitimate replacement for a photo?
If all these sources are correct, Ghost Town should be up and running in the next few months.
Related links:
Steven Spielberg on IMDb.com
Paste: Steven Spielberg-helmed video game details emerge
Paste: Steven Spielberg casts Sacha Baron Cohen in Chicago Seven
Got news tips for Paste? E-mail news@pastemagazine.com.
It's still a little bit crazy to think of a new Indiana Jones movie coming out this summer. Not to worry, though, because Steven Spielberg is still on top of his game...right?
In any case, the first real glimpse of the film will be out this Thursday (Feb. 14) when the teaser trailer for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull premieres. The trailer will air first during Good Morning America (8:00-9:00 a.m., ABC), and will be available immediately afterwards on IndianaJones.com, Yahoo! Movies and in theaters, specifically before The Spiderwick Chronicles.
The film itself premieres May 22, reuniting the sacred trifecta of Harrison Ford, Spielberg and George Lucas.
Related links:
Official Indiana Jones website
Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull on IMDB
Paste: Indiana Jones IV name announced
Got news tips for Paste? E-mail news@pastemagazine.com.
Back in 2005, Steven Spielberg first signed a deal with video-game behemoth Electronic Arts to help create, in some sort of capacity, three new video game IPs. Then, for the next couple of years, not much was heard about this development until last July. Newswek's game guru N'Gai Croal divulged some info about two of the titles. One of them was code named "LMNO," where players control a former special agent and interact with a robot girl of some sort. A description from game blog Kotaku described the game as "North By Northwest meets E.T.... if E.T. were female, grown up and hot."
Certainly interesting, but it's Spielberg's other game that will see release much sooner. While project "LMNO" is meant to be an epic for the PS3 and XBox 360, Spielberg's "PQRS" is a game made specifically for the Wii to utilize its unique control scheme. Croal described the game as "a hundred challenging, action-packed interactive games that take blocks to a new level of creativity for single player, co-op, and versus gameplay." Basically, Jenga. EA, in fact, elaborated that it's a cross between Jenga and a children's cartoon, but Spielberg assured the media that it will be "a great thing for the entire family to play together over Christmas."
Yesterday, EA sent out a press release revealing the title, Boom Blox. Spielberg explained in the release that "Boom Blox plays on the enjoyment of building and knocking down blocks." Not a high-concept game exactly, but it could potentially be quite fun. Characters in the game range from baseball-playing monkeys to Blox-laying chickens, with more than 30 possibilities. The game features 300 levels with the possibility of more through editing or trading over WiiConnect24. Perhaps the game bears more than a little resemblance to Jenga, but it looks to offer a whole lot more—at least until Jenga also begins to feature anthropomorphic block-monkeys.
Thanks to 1UP.com for the tip!
Related links:
IMDB: Steven Spielberg
EA.com
Jenga
Got news tips for Paste? E-mail news@pastemagazine.com.
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Episode 70
August 19, 2008
