Burden of Dreams; Alfonso Gomez-Rejon Befriends with “Me & Earl & the Dying Girl”

Directing a popular television series has become, the new calling card currency for wannabe future feature filmmakers and American Horror Story‘s Alfonso Gomez-Rejon is parlaying/transitioning between the series into a sophomore feature jackpot in a top 10 2012 Blacklist screenplay and what might be considered a future companion piece to The Fault in Our Stars. The Wrap reports that producers at Indian Paintbrush are currently circling actress Olivia Cooke for the titular dying girl part in Me & Earl & the Dying Girl. Dan Fogelman is producing.

Gist: Adapted by Jesse Andrews from his own novel, this is a coming-of-age tale which follows a quirky high school student in Pittsburgh who is forced by his mother to befriend a sick girl he once knew when they attended Hebrew school together. Well-liked by every clique in school without actually belonging to any of them, the young man’s commitment to the new friendship changes his life.

Worth Noting: A commercials director (see sample below), Gomez-Rejon was a second unit director on Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel and Ben Affleck’s Argo.

Do We Care?: We’ll see who is matched in the male lead before we include/exclude this from our radar, but our eyes do perk up at Blacklist mentions, especially when they’re at the top of the list — and it also helps that this is based on a well-received young adult fiction.

)