Judd Apatow has conquered comedy. Will Broadway be next? In an interview with GQ magazine that appears in the January issue, the This Is 40 director tells writer Amy Wallace that he’s writing his first play. And it may not be funny. Here’s the passage from Wallace’s profile:
“I have a great idea. Maybe like the best idea I’ve ever had,” he says. “It requires me to create characters and situations that have absolutely nothing to do with my experience.” When he reveals the idea, off the record, I can see what he means. The subject matter (all he’ll let me say about it is “It’s about victims of the criminal-justice system and the challenges they face”) is unlike anything he’s tackled before. It’s not remotely autobiographical. It’s complicated, relevant, political even. “I am excited to write something which has a social conscience,” he e-mails me later when I push him to reveal more. “That is not something I have attempted before, and I hope I am up for the challenge.”
Will it be funny? “I don’t know yet,” he says. “I think it will. But it might stop being funny.”
The idea sprung from Apatow’s wish that “there was another part of my relationship with the crowd,” he tells GQ. “I miss doing something where I’m interacting more with the audience. I like the idea of writing something and rewriting it every night based on how it’s playing.”
He could call it 12 Funny Men. If it’s funny, that is.
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Right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh may publicly disparage Hollywood to his legions of Ditto-heads, but that is not keeping the movie biz away from cashing in on the widely followed conservative. And John Cusack is just the man to do it.
John Cusack will take on the role of the ever-controversial Limbaugh in a new biopic that is in its early stages, according to The Guardian. Betty Thomas is eyeing the project as director, which takes a look at the radio personality’s meteoric rise over the past three decades.
Cusack may not necessarily share Limbaugh’s conservative orthodoxy, but the story will reportedly give a “non-partisan approach.” Cusack had been a strident critic of George W. Bush’s Administration. He is also expected to be a producer on the project.
Betty Thomas has radio credentials having previously directed Howard Stern pic Private Parts.
Limbaugh recently lashed out at Hollywood, saying The Dark Knight Rises was anti-Romney because its villain was named Bane, which he said was a reference to the Republican candidate’s former involvement with Bain Capital, which President Obama’s campaign accuses of exporting jobs to China.
[Sources: The Guardian, Deadline]
If you are a previously godless East coaster who’s found himself prostrate and praying for electricity in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, here’s a suggestion: Visualize Denzel Washington when you say those Lord’s Prayers. If God makes his will known through the people, then it turns out that the Flight star would be the top choice to portray Jesus Christ in a movie about the New Testament.
By the way, this does not rule out God being a woman, since we all know that Denzel is so handsome and talented that the female God would want him to play her son so she could get closer to all that hotness. (Memo to God: Do not underestimate the power of Pauletta!)
Washington is far and away the top choice, with 21 percent of the vote, seven points higher than Daniel Day-Lewis, who is the actor of choice when it comes to portraying god-like historical figures. Al Pacino finishes third, which suggests that Jesus says ”Hoo-ah!” a lot, while Ryan Gosling, who evokes the most “OMGs” among the young female crowd would be fourth. (Come to think of it, if Baby Goose grew his hair out, he would look a bit like the Son of God).
The biggest surprise of the poll: Woody Allen, who, cinematically speaking, was the King of the Jews back in the 1970s, beats out Philip Seymour Hoffman, who is generating Oscar buzz for portraying a man who appoints himself the god of a self-invented religion in The Master. Apparently, Americans do not want their big-screen Jesus on the beefy side.
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Tom Hanks will make his Broadway debut in a play written by his friend, the late Sleepless in Seattle director Nora Ephron. Hanks will play the late tabloid columnist Mike McAlary in Lucky Guy, Ephron’s play about the charismatic and controversial newspaperman, who worked for both the New York Post and its rival the New York Daily News during the gritty 1980s.
According to the New York Times, Ephron, who died in June, first developed Lucky Guy as a movie but later decided to adapt it to the stage. (She last worked on Broadway in 2002 when Imaginary Friends, her play about the writers Mary McCarthy and Lillian Hellman, opened.) An announcement put out on Thursday by the play’s producers described Lucky Guy as the “rise, fall and rise again” of McAlary who, shortly before succumbing to colon cancer at the age of 41, won a Pultizer Prize in 1998 for his coverage of the Abner Louima police brutality case.
Earlier that decade, McAlary came under fire for three columns he wrote questioning the story of a former Yale University student who claimed she’d been raped in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. The 29-year-old woman hit McAlary with a $12 million libel suit claiming that he damaged her reputation by writing that she fabricated the rape claim to publicize a feminist rally. A judge cleared him of the charges in 1997.
Lucky Guy will be directed by George C. Wolfe (Angels in America) and will open on April 1, 2013 at the Broadhurst Theater on West 44th Street for a limited engagement. (Previews will begin March 1.)
The Times also reported that, although Hanks has never appeared on Broadway before, he made his professional theater debut as a servant in a Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival production of The Taming of…
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Roman Polanski will go French in his next project based on a Tony Award-winning stage-play and he’s tapping his wife to play the star. Polanski is adapting Avid Ives’ stage play Venus in Fur, relocating the setting to Paris from New York, casting his spouse Emmanuelle Seigner who auditions a role in a sadomasochistic drama.
It is not clear if Polanski’s on-going warrant from a statutory rape charge dating back to 1978 prompted him to change the setting to France where he has lived since the alleged incident. Last year, he directed Kate Winslet, Jodie Foster, Christoph Waltz and John C. Reilly in another play adaptation, Carnage, which was also set in New York, though directed from the safety of France.
This will be Seigner’s the third collaboration with her husband, following Frantic, Bitter Moon, and The Ninth Gate, according to BBC. In the latest collaboration, she will star opposite French heart-throb Louis Garrel.
“I’ve been looking for a chance to make a film in French with Emmanuelle for a long time,” Polanski said in a statement. “Reading Venus in Fur, I realized the moment had arrived.”
The Lionsgate production will begin shooting in November, so perhaps a Cannes premiere is in the works.
Quick synopsis from Wikipedia:
The writer-director of a new play, an adaptation of the novel which inspired the term Masochism, is on the telephone lamenting the inadequacies of all the actresses who showed up that day to audition for the lead character. Suddenly, at the last minute, a new actress bursts in, the exemplar of every fault he has decried: needy, crude, compliant, desperate. Yet over the next 90 minutes, the balance of power shifts as the actress establishes total dominance over the director, exactly as in the novel.
