EXCLUSIVE: Fox has acquired Dead Mall, a pitch that will be written and directed by Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, the duo that shared the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay with Alexander Payne for The Descendants and wrote and directed the Sundance sensation The Way Way Back. Several studios bid on it. The pitch is a…

EXCLUSIVE: WME has signed Nat Faxon & Jim Rash, the Oscar-winning scribes who wrote The Descendants and who helmed their script for The Way, Way Back, the Sundance film that starred Steve Carell, Sam Rockwell and Toni Collette. This continues a run of screenwriter signings for the agency, which recently brought Akiva…

EXCLUSIVE: I’ve learned that Julianne Nicholson (Boardwalk Empire, Law & Order: CI) has been cast as the female lead in Sundance Channel's new drama series The Descendants. The project, which has a straight-to-series six-episode order, is described as a hard-hitting drama that revolves around Harold Jensen, a sheriff…

EXCLUSIVE: Bridget Carpenter has boarded Sundance Channel’s recently greenlighted drama series The Descendants as executive producer and showrunner. On the project, which received a straight-to-series six-episode order, Carpenter will work alongside writer/co-executive producer Aaron Guzikowski and executive producer…

EXCLUSIVE: Sundance Channel has greenlighted drama series The Descendants (working title), from writer Aaron Guzikowski (Prisoners) and producer Sarah Condon (Bored To Death), with a six-episode straight-to-series order. As Sundance is stepping up its original scripted efforts, the cable network also is expanding its…

After all the money the studios and independent distributors poured into campaigning, what was actually winning an Oscar really worth? If you go by pure box office results in the heat of the publicity and mass audience viewership of the Academy Awards, then probably not as much bang for their buck as they would…

UPDATE, 5:32 PM: Oscar clearly proved lucrative for The Weinstein Company and Sony Pictures Classics. Best Foreign Language winner A Separation added 160 locations in its first post-Oscar weekend outing, grossing over $1 million for the Farsi-language feature, averaging over $4,000 per screen. Best Picture winner The A…

WGA Awards: 'The Descendants', Woody Allen Big Winners Eddie Awards: 'The Descendants', 'The Artist', 'Rango' Win When the awards season kicked into gear at Telluride and Toronto, it appeared the movie to beat was going to be Fox Searchlight’s The Descendants. But then along came the big momentum for the…

The Descendants screenwriters Alexander Payne, Nat Faxon, and Jim Rash won the USC Libraries Scripter Award tonight. It honors “the screenwriter/s of the year’s most accomplished cinematic adaptation as well as the author/s of the written work upon which the screenplay is based.” The winners used as source material…

Perhaps a victim of too many participants and too little time, a panel featuring the WGA screenwriting nominees Thursday night at the guild’s Beverly Hills theater was heavy on niceties with only traces of insight. Three Moneyball writers — Aaron Sorkin, Stan Chervin and Steven Zaillian (who also wrote The Girl With Th…

Alexander Payne, the director/co-writer/co-producer of The Descendants, hates road-trip movies even though he keeps making them; he doesn't give a damn if people don't like voice-overs; and he doesn't think he's a brand — at least not yet. He spoke with AwardsLine’s Ari Karpel about his George Clooney-starring drama D…

Even though Fox Searchlight co-presidents Steve Gilula and Nancy Utley have turned “challenging films” like Slumdog Millionaire, Black Swan, Crazy Heart, Once, Juno, and 127 Hours into awards-season successes, they are the lowest-profile indie moguls you will find. At a time when they are steering two Best Picture…