Variety has just posted an article relating to a new feature film they picked up for Ronald Harwood (The Pianist) to script based on last fall’s Dover, Pa., courtroom decision in which a federal judge denied a school board the right to force educators to teach intelligent design instead of evolution.
Apparently Harwood will begin writing the script once he finishes his work on a yet-to-be-titled feature for 20th Century Fox and Baz Luhrmann, which shoots later this year with Russell Crowe and Nicole Kidman. That film is an Australian-set period epic, which is being compared with Gone with the Wind, set around the time of World War II.
Those two pics aside, the article goes on to mention that this is not the Harwood feature is not the only “hot-button pic” for Paramount in production.
As many of you probably know the studio is preparing to release the upcoming Oliver Stone drama World Trade Center starring Nicolas Cage and Michael Pe̱a, which tells the true story of the heroic survival and rescue of two Port Authority policemen РJohn McLoughlin and Will Jimeno Рwho were trapped in the rubble of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, after they went in to help people escape. The film also follows their families as they try to find out what happened to them, as well as the rescuers who found them in the debris field and pulled them out. Their story shows how the best in people rose above the tragic events of that day.
World Trade Center hits theaters on August 11, however, this is just the start of things at Paramount.
The article goes on to say that there is a spring start date set for the Kimberly Peirce-directed Stop-Loss, about American soldiers who face being sent back to the front lines in Iraq because of a controversial statute invoked by the Defense Dept.
The next film on the docket is The Invisible World with Ridley Scott set to helm. Invisible is scheduled for an early 2007 production start and is described as a drama about the abduction of a female journalist in Iraq.
