If you ever wanted to find an irritable bunch of people working in Hollywood, you wouldn't have to go much further than the names in the screenwriter's directory. First Run Features have picked up the rights to Peter Hanson’s talking heads docu about the horror stories of those of who lived to tell the tale: contemporary screenwriters who got stung in their careers as scribes and consider themselves lucky, managed to see one of their works turn into a final product and retain some shards of its former self.
One look at the filmmaker names below, and it appears as if the Sundance alumni have come out in droves. We find a known variety of filmmakers such as Spike Jonze (Being John Malcovich), Ira Sachs (Married Life), Nicholas Jasenovec (Paper Hearts), James Franco and the Zellner bros. who have dabbled this year in the short form while working in between their feature film projects.
Not sure if it was his fatherly touch in Matt Aselton's Gigantic that helped nab him this role, but indie veteran thesp Paul Dano is, according to Production Weekly, top-lining So Yong Kim's third feature film titled For Ellen. Having Dano onboard will be a first for Yong Kim, as she is known for having employed non-actors in her previous two, the little seen In Between Days and Treeless Mountain (which was distributed by Oscilloscope Laboratories earlier this year).
Tons of Park City alumni are bringing their latest films, but I'm a bit surprised that March-pegged releases of The Weinstein's All Good Things and Focus Features' Greenberg aren't getting a Park City push. Instead, as expected, Sony Pictures Classics will show up and they get to showcase Get Low and A Prophet (Spotlight section) once again, and they'll preem Holofcener's Please Give. Overture will introduce Philip Seymour Hoffman's directing debut (Jack Goes Boating) and Fox Searchlight will preem Duplass Bros.' untitled comedy, which I'm calling Center of Attention - because its a great title considering the subject matter.
Being with Inuit who are experts in living in that environment and learning from them, adapting to their pace and their rhythm, letting the work be influenced by that, accepting that and finding the aesthetic of that relationship to nature, is a great pleasure, a challenge, a learning experience and it is very rewarding.