In a stunning end to the biggest and wildest book rights auction in memory, Imperative Entertainment has paid $5 million and won the right to make a movie out of David Grann book Killers Of The Flower Moon: An American Crime And The Birth Of The FBI.
Imperative partners Dan Friedkin and Bradley Thomas will be producing. Friedkin is a Houston-based entrepreneur who made his fortune through automotive and other ventures and he fully funds Imperative.
Masters Of Sex star Lizzy Caplan is joining the cast of the untitled film that Robert Zemeckis will direct with Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard from a script by Steven Knight. The film is backed by Paramount Pictures, GK Films and New Regency.
The title and plot are shrouded in secrecy, but I’ve heard that Caplan will play Pitt’s character’s sister.
GK Films’ Graham King is producing the film with ImageMovers’ Zemeckis and Steve Starkey, with Jack Rapke, Knight, Patrick McCormick and Denis O’Sullivan exec producing.
The Tracking Board is calling it the biggest bidding war of 2016 and so far a lot of Hollywood’s A-listers have put their name in the hat for rights to adapt upcoming book Killers of the Flower Moon.
The book, from New Yorker staff writer Grann, isn’t set for publication until June, 2017, but it’s already triggered a feeding frenzy on the rights market. The non-fiction chronicles the real-life 1920s mystery surrounding the suspicious deaths of several Osage Indians, who were at the time among the richest people on the planet. The story follows the twists and turns of the investigation that eventually became the first major case solved by J. Edgar Hoover’s brand new FBI.
Hollywood A-listers George Clooney and Brad Pitt have put bids in through their respected production companies to get territorial rights for the adaptation. As of last night there were at least ten offers on the table from Hollywood heavy hitters like Jerry Bruckheimer, Kathleen Kennedy (Star Wars) and Anonymous Content who are coming down from their best picture win with Spotlight. Several companies are partnering up to increase their chances.
A full two weeks ahead of last year, due to an exceptional year with its ideal winemaking conditions, Miraval opens the season for Provence Rosé 2015. With its delicate pale pink color and soft gleams, Miraval Rosé 2015 offers exceptional fruit with immense freshness and minerality.
Marc Perrin (Famille Perrin): “Miraval Rosé 2015 is a nectar of the gods. It is nature at its best, grapes in perfect harmony in the vineyard, and sun of course, because we are in Provence. This vintage all the wines are of stunning quality: white or rosé. It is without any doubt the best vintage yet at Miraval.”
In 2015 the soils of Provence filled up their groundwater reserves right through winter and spring. The timing of flowering was just perfect, during a hot dry period in May and up to mid-June when a wet spell replenished the reserves. These well timed rains and the earth’s natural reserves prevented any hydric stress in the vines and allowed maturities to progress regularly and rapidly, with no scorch in spite of the heat. This balance has ensured an extraordinary aromatic palette for Miraval Rosé which is beautifully fresh and mineral, with subtle notes of citrus, red fruit and white blossom. In the mouth, the expression of the terroir is revealed with balance and elegance, underlined by a superb tension which confers great length. Aromatic persistence characterizes the palate, finishing in a register which is fruity and saline.
Great news for the 2015 vintage: Half bottles of Miraval are now available!
Disney and Brad Pitt’s Plan B are developing “Dr. Q” — a movie based on the life story of an illegal immigrant who became the head of brain tumor surgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital.
Matt Lopez, whose credits include the Civil War play “The Whipping Man,” has been tapped to write the screenplay about Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa. Plan B, which is run by Pitt, Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner, began working on the project in 2007 when execs heard about Quinones-Hinajosa on the radio.
Quinones-Hinojosa crossed into the United States from Mexico in the late 1980s when he was 19 and began working on farms in California. He started his education at San Joaquin Delta College and completed his bachelor’s degree at the University of California at Berkeley. He then received his medical degree from Harvard Medical School and became a U.S. citizen.
He is currently a professor of neurosurgery and oncology at Johns Hopkins, where he serves as the director of the brain tumor program at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center.
Real-life inspired dramas Spotlight and Big Short won the best original and adapted screenplay Oscars at the 88th Academy Awards here.
The Tom McCarthy-directed drama, about Boston Globe’s Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation of child sex abuse by Catholic priests, won Josh Singer and McCarthy trophies in the original screenplay category.
The film, featuring a stellar ensemble cast of Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams, Michael Keaton, John Slattery, Liev Schreiber, Stanley Tucci, and Billy Crudup, revolves around the investigative team of Boston Globe reporters who relentlessly pursue the story even as they get constantly stalled by those in power.
Big Short, a biographical drama, is based on the non-fiction 2010 book of the same name by Michael Lewis about the financial crisis of 2007-2008 that was triggered by the build-up of the housing market and the credit bubble.
Before securing a best picture Oscar (2013’s ’12 Years a Slave’), the production company — created by the stars and Brad Grey in 2001 — endured a change of studio heads and the couple’s very public divorce.
This story first appeared in a special awards season issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine.
Plan B Entertainment might win its second best picture Oscar in three years with The Big Short (after 2013’s 12 Years a Slave), but there was a time when things were not looking so golden for the production company. The name has its roots in a shingle started by Bruce Berman at Warner Bros. after he stepped down as the studio’s worldwide production head in 1996. Eighteen months later, Berman left to head Village Roadshow, and the company went dormant. In 2001, he passed the name on to Brad Grey for a production company Grey was creating at Warners with Brad Pitt and Pitt’s then-wife, Jennifer Aniston.
Brad Pitt’s Plan B and Cross Creek Pictures are teaming with writer Tony Kushner to develop medical research drama “He Wanted the Moon.”
The project is a co-production with Cross Creek’s Brian Oliver and Tyler Thompson producing with Plan B. The companies have acquired movie rights to the memoir, written by Dr. Perry Baird’s daughter Mimi and Eve Claxton, titled “He Wanted the Moon: The Madness and Medical Genius of Dr. Perry Baird, and His Daughter’s Quest to Know Him.”
Baird was a rising medical star in the late ’20s and ’30s who researched the biochemical root of manic depression, just as he began to suffer from it himself. By the time the results of his groundbreaking experiments were published, he had been institutionalized multiple times and he had become estranged from his family. He later received a lobotomy and died from a seizure.
Plan B co-presidents Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner are producers operating at the highest level, finding themselves and their films in the awards conversation repeatedly and closing major deals on a regular basis. They won Best Picture for 12 Years A Slave just three years ago, and will be hoping to capitalize on their PGA triumph with The Big Short this year when the AMPAS envelopes get opened on Feb 28. The Big Short has been hailed not only for its humor but for its pressing sociopolitical relevance. Gardner and Kleiner discuss the outcome of the film’s successfully “bipartisan” screening before Congress, the great effects on the world of socially conscious films, and some of the best advice they’ve taken from fellow Plan B producer Brad Pitt.
Read more. Very interesting interview.
• x014 Candids – San Servolo, Italy (04/03/10).
• x004 Candids – Venice, Italy (04/13/10).
• x005 In the Land of Blood and Honey – New York City, NY (12/05/11).
• x085 Venice, Italy (03/12/10).
• x010 Venice, Italy (03/04/10).
• x010 Venice, Italy (03/08/10).
Thanks Vaska.
PS. Still working on the BP Gallery backstage.