EXCLUSIVE:  In a pre-emptive strike, Amblin Partners took the Spenser Cohen spec Distant off the table which has been described as When Harry Met Sally meets The Martian. Amblin is expected to produce with Automatik (Brian Kavanaugh-Jones) and Cohen’s producing partner Anna Halberg. The deal is said to be worth…

Feature films On the Basis of Sex and Love Simon, along with TV series God Friended Me were among the big winners at the 44th annual Humanitas Prize ceremony tonight at the Beverly Hills Hotel. A surprise double award, for 30-Minute Television Comedy, went to Dear White People and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. The…

EXCLUSIVE: F. Gary Gray's Fenix Studios has optioned rights to Echo, the third-person sci-fi video game, with the Straight Outta Compton and Men In Black: International helmer planning to turn it into a feature film. John Wick creator-writer Derek Kolstad is aboard to adapt the screenplay. Gray will produce (not…

A visionary director who had written or co-written each of his films since starting out in 1995, Yorgos Lanthimos changed tack with his latest effort, The Favourite, collaborating with screenwriters Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara, for his first period piece. While the auteur is famously uncompromising in his work…

While Jeff Whitty would write the first four drafts of Can You Ever Forgive Me?, summoning a screenplay from a memoir, he wasn’t anticipating the assignment. A Tony Award winner known at that point for Avenue Q—a raunchy and witty puppet musical, which has had a long run, on and off Broadway—the aptly named Whitty was…

EXCLUSIVE: Amblin Partners has preemptively acquired and put on a fast track The White Room. The pic has a script by hot genre scribe Bryce McGuire, and Rod Blackhurst will direct it. It was developed by The Picture Company and ACE Content and will be a co-production between those companies. Evan Hayes will produce…

While writing the script for Mary Queen of Scots, Beau Willimon spent a lot of time with two fascinating historical figures—Queen Elizabeth I, and her cousin, Mary Stuart—coming to identify personally with these women, for they ways in which they were devalued and misunderstood. For Willimon, as with these rulers, one…

The Oscar-winning scribe behind such historical projects as Spotlight, The Post and First Man, Josh Singer can't overemphasize the importance of getting his stories right. On the latter film from Damien Chazelle, based on a biography by James R. Hansen, the writer dove head first into a project of incredible…

A singular detective story and genre-defying showcase for star Nicole Kidman, Destroyer weaves its tangled web with confidence. With its immaculate structure and an array of finely drawn characters, the film pursues a fresh, uniquely shadowed corner of a familiar screen world, reflecting with great clarity the values…

As the writer of Mary Poppins Returns, David Magee embraced the major opportunity he saw before him, putting his stamp on an iconic character that meant so much to him. A sequel to Disney's 1964 musical classic—based on a series of children's books by P.L. Travers—Mary Poppins Returns circles back to the titular…

EXCLUSIVE: Famously, when writer-director Alfonso Cuarón set out to shoot Roma—his singular black-and-white period piece, examining memories from his childhood in Mexico City—he kept his script close to the vest. During production, his actors, many of them non-professional, were asked to focus only on the moment at…

FINAL ranked with storylines and reps info after noon post: The Black List, Hollywood’s annual rundown of unproduced screenplays, unveiled its titles today in Easter Egg fashion, hiding all 73 screenplay selections in a six minute-42 second second short The Last Days of TJ Staggs which starred Paul Scheer as an agent…