Caffeinated Clint
1. Alex Koch and Natalie Martinez have joined the cast of CBS’s “Under the Dome”.
2. TBS has cancelled the sitcom “The Wedding Band”, starring Brian Austin Green, after just one season; meanwhile, ABC has axed the very funny “Don’t Trust the B in Apartment 23”.
3. David Fincher is in talks to helm Fox’s “Gone Girl”, with Reese Witherspoon producing, adapted from the Gillian Flynn novel. “Gone Girl” ‘is the dark and suspenseful story of a woman who disappears on the day of her fifth wedding anniversary. It’s not known if Witherspoon would be interested in starring as the mysterious wife.’
4. Marcia Gay Harden will replace Roseamarie DeWitt on “Newsroom”. DeWitt, expected to be a regular presence on the show’s second season, had to drop out due to a shift in the production schedule.
5. Daniel Gillies will play the lead role in the “Vampire Diaries” spin-off, “The Originals”.
6. Evan Peters and Bella Heathcote are set to star in “The Preppie Connection”, which “chronicles the exploits of a group of Choate private school students who ran a drug distribution operation in the early 1980s. The story centers on Toby, the lower-class scholarship student, who uses his street cred and access to drugs to make friends with the popular kids, eventually allowing him to cultivate a drug trafficking network. Toby gets in far over his head as he leads his friends into the dangerous world of Colombian drug cartels.”
7. The previously untitled Bill Condon-directed Wikileaks feature has been titled “The Fifth Estate”.
8. James Franco is in talks to star in and direct a feature adaptation of the James Ellroy novel “American Tabloid”. “Ellroy’s 1995 novel follows five years in the lives of three ex-law enforcement officers embroiled in shady interconnected Washington dealings that lead to President Kennedy’s 1963 assassination — a saga peppered with real-life figures including Jimmy Hoffa, Jack Ruby, Howard Hughes, and the Kennedy clan.”
9. Ray Liotta (“Killing Them Softly”) has joined the cast of “The Muppets” sequel. It’s not yet known who the actor, who made a cameo in 1999’s “Muppets from Space”, is playing.
10. Frank Darabont took over scripting duties on Gareth Evans’ “Godzilla”. The “Mist” spoke a little about his vision for the film, in an interview with io9. “What I found very interesting about Godzilla is that he started off definitely as a metaphor for Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” he explains. “And some of the atom bomb testing we were doing in the South Pacific in the subsequent years. The giant terrifying force of nature that comes and stomps the s–t out of your city, that was Godzilla… What we’re trying to do with the new movie is not have it camp, not have it be campy. We’re kind of taking a cool new look at it. But with a lot of tradition in the first film. We want this to be a terrifying force of nature. And what was really cool, for me, is there was a very compelling human drama that I got to weave into it. It’s not that cliched, thinly disguised romance or bromance, or whatever. It’s different, it’s a different set of circumstances than you’re used to seeing.”
