Half Nelson duo pass the ‘Sugar’ to HBO

Specialty channel HBO Films have picked up the sophomore feature from Half Nelson's creative team of Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden. The Hollywood Reporter reports that the production banner is financing Sugar and the co. will take a wait and see stance during the upcoming Sundance film festival (where the film is receiving its world preem) to evaluate whether a theatrical distribution is worth considering. So the park city public might ultimately decide whether we'll be seeing this on Picturehouse Films 08 line-up.  

Written by Anna Boden and Fleck, this will look at the promise and broken dreams of a Dominican baseball prospect plucked from his native country to play in the U.S. minor-league system. Story is a fictional tale based on Miguel “Sugar” Santos, a teenager who ends up far from home playing for a team in the Midwest after showing baseball aptitude in his native country. Project is described as a dramatic and cautionary account of the baseball scouting machine with a good-natured character at its center.

Next up for the pair is Miramax Films' Special Topics in Calamity Physics – based on the novel written by Marisha Pessl, this centers on a teenage girl who, after spending years of high school moving each semester with her eccentric teacher father, settles in a small North Carolina town for her senior year. There she becomes part of an upper-crust social set called the Bluebloods and gets caught up in the mysterious death of their favorite teacher.