Brooke Bunny
1. James Roday (“Psych”) today begins shooting his dark comedy – also directorial debut – “Gravy”, about a group that descends on a Mexican cantina on Halloween and gets more than they bargained for. The movie features Sarah Silverman, Michael Weston, Jimmi Simpson, Sutton Foster, Lily Cole, Gabourey Sidibe, Paul Rodriguez, Molly Ephraim, Lothaire Bluteau, Gabriel Luna and Ethan Sandler.
2. Sally Hawkins (“Happy Go Lucky”) has joined the cast of Gareth Edwards’ “Godzilla” reboot.
3. Susan Sarandon and Topher Grace are teaming for the indie thriller “The Calling”, for director Jason Stone. “Sarandon will play a small-town Canadian detective who tracks down a serial killer targeting the terminally ill to use as disciples in his own planned resurrection. Topher Grace is the ambitious police officer recently transferred from Toronto who becomes the detective’s right-hand man.”
4. Fox 2000 has snapped up the rights to the novel “Half Bad”, a contemporary supernatural thriller “taking place in a world inhabited by covert witches; one faction is good and the other evil. They are divided by hatred and united by one thing only — fear of a boy descended from both sides.”
5. Michael Pena (“End of Watch”) has joined the starry ensemble of David O.Russell’s untitled Abscam pic.
6. “Incredible Burt Wonderstone” co-stars Steve Carell and James Gandolfini will star in HBO Films’ “Bone Wars”, about feuding paleontologists. ”The project, now in development, is based on the real-life Bone Wars (aka the Great Dinosaur Rush) between Edward Drinker Cope of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia and Othniel Charles Marsh of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale. Set during the post-Civil War birth of American science, the film is a sophisticated comedy about one of history’s most notorious feuds — the great dinosaur fossil race between paleontologists Marsh (Gandolfini) and Cope (Carell) — a decades-long competition that led to the discovery of more than 160 dinosaurs and their mutual downward spiral.”
7. “Sons of Anarchy” star Katey Sagal is set to guest-star on “Glee”, playing Artie’s mother.
8. “Downton Abbey” star Dan Stevens is in talks to play James Turner, aka Captain Flint, in the first film in a proposed “Swallows And Amazons” movie series. ”Set in England’s Lake District in the summer of 1929, the books center on the Walker kids and the Blackett kids whose respective sailboats are dubbed Swallow and Amazon. When the adventurous and imaginative children meet, they join forces against their common enemy – the Blacketts’ uncle James whom they call Captain Flint”.
9. “Veronica Mars” creator Rob Thomas says of the now-financed movie version : “[I] knocked out a too-long first draft of the script” and ”We’re at $4.5 million now. That’s a lot of money. But for a feature length movie, it’s still a pretty conservative budget. Everything you’ve pledged beyond the initial $2 million gives us more options, and for that I’m eternally grateful. More backing means more locations, more sets, more actors, and most important of all, more shooting days. The bottom line? That extra support will give us the freedom to make the best movie possible. That additional money could mean the difference between a movie that lasts 90 minutes, and one that lasts 110. It could also mean the difference between us shooting in Southern California, where the series was shot, and in a less expensive location somewhere else.”
10. ‘Ghostbuster’ Dan Aykroyd is joining Melissa McCarthy and Mark Duplass comedy “Tammy”. Aykroyd will play the latter’s father.
