Paramount Swats at ‘Flies’ with Soprano Scribe

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The world behind the world. Those lives that we all see, but never experience. The pain that is reserved for the broken, the downtrodden, the lost. There seems to be a resurgence in interest in Hollywood for the seedier underbelly of our society and the heroes that reach into it to try to pluck life out without their sanity being drug down. Todd A. Kessler, formerly a scribe for the HBO hit ‘Sopranos’ has been tapped to pen Black Flies based on the unpublished memoirs of Shannon Burke, a former Emergency Medical Technician in Harlem.

The story follows a young man who takes a job as an emergency medical technician on his path to entering medical school. While on the beat, he comes across an array of crises and misadventures. He also becomes close with his mentor, a veteran EMT who has become so numbed to the job that, when a life-or-death situation arises, the mentor ultimately makes the wrong decision. Paramount recently announced Darren Aronofsky, fresh off the Hugh Jackman-starring film The Fountain to helm the flick.

Paramounts choice of Kessler to pen the flick shows the studios determination to follow the current trend of dramatic, character driven life scenarios, along the lines of ‘Bringing Out the Dead’ or TNT’s “Saved” as opposed to the lighter network humor driven set such as “Scrubs” or “M*A*S*H”. Kesslers 2000-2001 sessions with “The Sopranos” leads more to the deeper issues of society than to the escapist philosophy that has driven Hollywood the past few years.