Month: May 2021

EXCLUSIVE: Ernie Hudson, who just wrapped stints on two TV series — season 4 of Netflix’s hit Grace and Frankie and Fox’s freshman prime time cop show A.P.B. — has just signed on to headline the feature film The Family Business which is based on The New York Times best-selling author Carl Weber’s novel. The film also has Armand Assante (American Gangster), Nick Turturro (The Longest Yard, NYPD Blue), Emilio Rivera (Sons of Anarchy), Miguel Nunez (Scooby-Doo), Clifton Powell (Ray) and Darrin Henson (Soul Food) aboard.

Directed by Trey Haley (The Preacher’s Son), the film began shooting today in and around Los Angeles. The screenplay was written by Weber and with ND Brown, the author and Veronica Nichols are serving as producers. Weber’s The Family Business, published in 2012, was the first of a series of novels under the same title. In fact, this first title launched eight books in what has been a popular and ongoing series about the travails of the Duncan family. The series easily sold over 2 million books.

“It’s an honor to bring this great book from Carl Weber to the screen with an incredible cast and Ernie headlining it,” ND Brown told Deadline before passing the phone over to Weber who said, “It’s like a dream come true. You work your entire life towards something and I can almost say this is a Bucket List item. It’s one of the things I wanted to do before I closed my eyes. Ernie was the person that we were envisioning, and he was the person that I had in mind the entire time I was writing this series.”

Hudson will portray ‘LC Duncan,’ the patriarch of the Duncan family who runs a thriving exotic car dealership. When he thinks about passing the leadership reigns to one of his sons, his greatest adversaries try to take over. By day, the Duncans are an upstanding family; by night, they live a dangerous secret life. L.C. Duncan, patriarch of the family, is at the age when he’s starting to think about retirement and has to decide which of his children should take over. The Duncans quickly come under siege from some of the Top Politicians, Mafia and Drug cartels in the city. The Duncan’s will have to stick together–or die separately.

Tri Destined Studios and Urban Books Media serve as the production company with One Unit (Queen Latifah’s Company). The film is expected for a fall 2018 release. Hudson is repped by Michael McConnell of Zero Gravity Management and APA.

It’s set to “America the Beautiful,” and things initially appear idyllic in a new teaser for Jason Bateman’s upcoming drama Netflix series Ozark. But it takes a dark turn.

Bateman stars in, executive produces and directs Ozark, which takes place in the dark and dangerous world of drug-money laundering. The present-day story revolves around financial planner Marty Bird (Bateman), his wife Wendy (Laura Linney) and their family’s sudden relocation from the suburbs of Chicago to a summer resort community in the Missouri Ozarks. Rather than the familiar skyscrapers and trading floors, Ozark explores capitalism, family dynamics and survival through the eyes of anything-but-ordinary Americans.

Bill Dubuque (The Judge) created the series and executive produces alongside showrunner Chris Mundy (Hell on Wheels, Criminal Minds) and Bateman. Premiering on July 21, the series is produced by Aggregate in association with Media Rights Capital for Netflix.

The series premieres July 21. Check out the teaser above.

XLrator Media has acquired North American rights to Destined, the Cory Hardrict-starring drama written and directed by Qasim Basir that bowed at last year’s Los Angeles Film Festival. It will bow in theaters in the fall via XLrator’s Pace label. Hardrict (All Eyez On Me, American Sniper) plays both lead roles in the pic that tells parallel stories of Rasheed a rising star in the architectural community, and Sheed, a neighborhood drug dealer, and how even the smallest incident can manifest into a life-changing event. Jesse Metcalfe, Margot Bingham, Jason Dohring, Hill Harper, La La Anthony, Robert Riley and Zulay Henao co-star. Tommy Oliver, Rick Rosenthal, Codie Elaine Oliver and Matt Ratner are producers. The deal was negotiated by XLrator Media’s Mike Radiloff and Robert Patla with Oliver and Rosenthal on behalf of the filmmakers.

Uncork’d Entertainment has acquired Almost Amazing, a romantic comedy written and directed by Justin Price starring Eric Roberts, Azmarie Livingston, Camila Banus and Torrei Hart. It will be released in select theaters in late August followed by a VOD bow. The story follows three best friends who find themselves at romantic crossroads in their lives as their break-up card service job is under hostile new management, and they are given an ultimatum to fall in love or lose their jobs. Price, Khu, Shaun Cairo and Deanna Congo are producers.

EXCLUSIVE: Warner Bros is mobilizing a sequel to the 2016 hit The Accountant. Screenwriter Bill Dubuque, director Gavin O’Connor and Ben Affleck are in talks to return, along with the producers Lynette Howell Taylor and Mark Williams. All those deals are being worked out right now. I’m told they will then work out the beats of the story, which likely will include Jon Bernthal, whose character asserted himself at the conclusion of the first film.

The original starred Affleck as the title character, a math savant with high-functioning autism who works as a forensic accountant and un-cooks the books for unsavory criminal organizations under the glare of law enforcement. When a new client put him in danger and the Treasury Department closes in, the title character’s skills as an assassin led to a body count that might have prompted John Wick to say, “Woah.”

The film isn’t the kind that usually makes a studio like Warner Bros rush to sequelize. But on a $44 million budget, it grossed $155 million. It was a clever, unusual crime thriller, and there is room to expand the palate with Bernthal, who played a long-lost bad-guy brother equally capable of creating mayhem thanks to the sadistic military ops father who trained them.

Affleck next stars as Batman in Justice League, which Warner Bros opens November 17. O’Connor is also developing with Imperative Entertainment the WWII thriller Atlantic Wall for Bradley Cooper to star in. WME reps Affleck and O’Connor, and CAA and Zero Gravity Management rep Dubuque.

NBC is rounding out the cast for its upcoming Law & Order True Crime: The Menendez Murders. Lolita Davidovich (The Longest Ride), Heather Graham (The Hangover), Elizabeth Reaser (The Twilight Saga) and Larry Cedar (Trial & Error) are the latest to join the limited series from Dick Wolf and Rene Balcer.

The eight-episode first season will focus on the infamous case of Lyle (Miles Gaston Villanueva) and Erik Menendez (Gus Halper), brothers who were convicted in 1996 of murdering their wealthy parents seven years earlier. After a mistrial and deadlocked juries — there was one trial but two separate juries, one for each brother — the brothers later were re-tried and convicted of two counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to life without parole.

Davidovich will play mother Kitty Menendez. Graham will portray Judalon Smyth, a sexy, emotionally fragile woman having an affair with the brothers’ therapist Dr. L. Jerome Oziel. Desperate for Oziel to leave his wife, she craves his attention. Reaser is Deputy District Attorney Pam Bozanich, who’s assigned to the murders of Jose and Kitty Menendez. She has to fight the machismo politics of the DA’s office to keep control of the case. Cedar will play Milton Andersen, Kitty’s older brother, a man of Midwestern reserve, who attends a family memorial in a large hotel suite. He covets the Menendez’s fortune.

In addition to Villanueva and Halper, they join previously cast Edie Falco, Julianne Nicholson, Anthony Edwards, Sam Jaeger, Constance Marie, Carlos Gomez, Sterling Beaumon, Molly Hagan and Dominic Flores.

Angela Lansbury is in talks to join the cast of Little Women, a three-part drama series adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s coming-of-age classic for BBC One and Masterpiece on PBS.

The project, from Colin Callender’s Playground, is written by Heidi Thomas (Call The Midwife) and directed by Vanessa Caswill (Thirteen). Set against the backdrop of the Civil War, the story follows sisters Jo, Meg, Beth and Amy March on their journey from childhood to adulthood. With the help of their mother, Marmee, while their father is away at war, the girls navigate what it means to be a young woman: from sibling rivalry and first love to loss and marriage. Lansbury will play Aunt March.

Little Women is produced by Susie Liggat. Executive producers are Callender and Sophie Gardiner for Playground, Heidi Thomas, Lucy Richer for the BBC and Rebecca Eaton for Masterpiece. Filming is slated to be begin in July.

Lansbury, an honorary Oscar winner, is seeking her first Emmy after 18 nominations, including 12 for her signature role in Murder, She Wrote. She next will be seen in Mary Poppins Returns. Lansbury is repped by Zero Gravity Management and attorney Bob Myman.

EXCLUSIVE: Highwayman, the drama that once had Paul Newman and Robert Redford poised to play the veteran Texas Rangers who put an end to the violent robbery spree of Bonnie & Clyde, might finally find its way into production. Sources said Netflix is in early discussions to team Woody Harrelson and Kevin Costner as the lawmen who hunted down Depression Era outlaws Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, with John Lee Hancock directing. To do this, Netflix is negotiating to extricate the project from Universal Pictures, where it was originally set four years ago. There is a John Fusco script rewritten by Hancock, the filmmaker who directed the fact-based Michael Keaton-starrer The Founder, Saving Mr. Banks and The Blind Side. Casey Silver, who has patiently shepherded the picture for years, is the producer.

Costner would play legendary lawman Frank Hamer and Harrelson would play Manny Gault. They were out of the Rangers by the time Bonnie & Clyde started their robbery reign, but were commissioned as special investigators, coaxed by a consortium of banks to assemble a posse and end the robbery spree of the notorious gang reputed to have killed 13 cops and others. The details are different than the version depicted in the 1967 Arthur Penn-directed Bonnie and Clyde, which starred Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway (the stars reunited at the last Oscars for the film’s 50th anniversary, which didn’t end well after an accountant passed them the wrong Best Picture envelope). Highwaymen takes the vantage point of the formidable posse headed by Hamer, an old style Texas Ranger who’d survived 100 gunfights and killed 53 people. CAA reps Hancock and Harrelson, WME reps Costner. Hancock is lawyered by Del Shaw Moonves.

EXCLUSIVE: On the anniversary of his 1939 retirement from baseball, late great New York Yankees first baseman Lou Gehrig will be the subject of a new feature that has gotten a rare endorsement from the New York Yankees, the only team for which he played. The Luckiest Man On The Face Of The Earth will be directed by Jay Russell, the helmer behind My Dog Skip and Ladder 49. Based on the Jonathan Eig biography Luckiest Man, the film has a script by Dan Kay. Branded Entertainment’s Michael Uslan and David Uslan head a producing team that includes Kingsway Productions’ Robert Molloy and Conglomerate Media’s Armando Gutierrez. Barrie Osborne and Jeff Steen are exec producing, and casting will get underway this month.

Gehrig’s life was previously captured in the 1942 film The Pride of the Yankees, which starred Gary Cooper as Gehrig, and which won one of the 11 Oscars for which it was nominated. Gehrig is a true baseball immortal, a Hall of Famer who starred on six World Series-winning teams but was as understated as teammate Babe Ruth was verbose. He is best remembered for playing in 2,130 consecutive games, and for the courage he showed when the incurable neuro-muscular disorder ALS began to ravage his body, forcing his retirement and eventually claiming his life. The movie covers all those heroics, but also focuses on his love affair with wife Eleanor.

“Lou Gehrig is an iconic character, not just in baseball, but as a true American hero, a man who faced his intense, personal battles with quiet bravery,” said Russell. “While Gehrig’s story has previously been told in the beloved Pride of the Yankees, this will be a new depiction with a more contemporary style and approach.

Molloy, the grandson of the late Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, said: “As my late grandfather always believed, Lou Gehrig was a great role model for the world. There is triumph even in tragedy and it’s only in the face of great odds that true human heroes are born and inspire us all.”

Osborne, the producer of Apocalypse Now and The Lord Of The Rings, said Gehrig’s life and accomplishments have that kind of epic sweep: “What I love most about the project is the fact that audiences need know nothing about sports, baseball, the Yankees, or even the legend of Lou Gehrig in order to be moved by this emotionally uplifting story.”

Russell is repped by APA, Zero Gravity Management and Gang, Tyre; the Uslans are WME and Manatt Phelps & Phillips; Kay is APA, Circle of Confusion and Myman, Greenspan, and Osborne is Gersh and Stankevich Law, Inc.

Transgender actors have a message for Hollywood and have taken part in a video to spread the word and equality. In a video written by actress/writer Jen Richards, a number of actors — Alexandra Billings (Transparent), D’Lo (Sense8), Elliot Fletcher (The Fosters), Alexandra Grey (Transparent), Ian Harvie (Transparent), Jazzmun (When We Rise), Trace Lysette (Transparent), Jen Richards (Nashville), and Rain Valdez (Lopez) — take their plea to producers, studios and networks:

“You have the power to educate, to change minds, shape public opinion, and open hearts so we need you to show us, as we really are. Tell our stories with the creativity, dignity, humor and depth that make us real people. Let us help you tell those stories or better yet, help us tell them ourselves and then put us in them. And in everything else. In all kinds of parts. Yes, you’ll be giving us a job, and thank you for that, but you’ll also be making the world a little bit safer for an intensely maligned, under-represented, and vulnerable population.”

This comes shortly after GLAAD released its Studio Responsibility Index, which mapped the quantity, quality and diversity of LGBTQ people in films released by the seven major motion picture studios during the 2016 calendar year found just one transgender character in film, and the character was used as punchline. On television, GLAAD’s latest Where We Are on TV Report found that transgender characters accounted for only 6% of the 278 LGBTQ characters on broadcast, cable and streaming programs.

The video was released today by that organization and ScreenCrush and is part of the latter’s Our Hollywood, a month-long series about the past, present and future of transgender visibility in film and television during LGBTQ Pride Month. Richards, who penned the script for the ScreenCrush video, is the creator behind Her Story, an Emmy-nominated web series about the lives of two trans women. She is also an actress who appeared on CMT’s Nashville.

Noteworthy: Lysette, Billings, and Grey have recently been submitted for Emmy recognition for their roles on Amazon’s Transparent while Grey has also been submitted for her guest role on Comedy Central’s Drunk History.

Al Capone is taking the streets of Chicago once again.

In the Absence of Good Men, a film set during the 1920s gangland wars in the city, has set a cast that includes Milo Gibson as the feared gangster, alongside Sean Faris, Jamie Lynn Sigler and Peter Facinelli.

The pic looks at the bloody wars between the Italian and Irish mobs as Capone and his right-hand man “Machine Gun” Jack McGurn (Faris) battle George “Bugs” Moran (Facinelli), culminating in the famous St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. The real-life event took place on Feb. 14, 1929, and saw seven men die in a machine gun attack thought to be ordered by Capone.

Sigler is playing famous flapper dancer Lulu Rolfe, love interest to amateur boxer-turned-mobster McGurn, who is at the heart of the story. Gibson, who is the son of Mel Gibson, recently appeared in Hacksaw Ridge.

In the Absence of Good Men, which comes 30 years after Robert De Niro played Capone in the mobster classic The Untouchables, is currently in production.

Timothy Woodward Jr. is directing the film for his Status Media & Entertainment banner. Lauren de Normandie, James Cullen Bressack and Jarrett Furst are producing.

Facinelli is repped by Zero Gravity Management and Paradigm.