The Shoedog And The Dead President

Another actor who became a more than competent director is Bill Paxton. Frailty was a solid cult hit (and if you haven't seen it yet, add it to your Netflix queue now) but The Greatest Game Ever Played hardly set the world on fire, despite being utterly respectable in every way. Thankfully, this lack of big box office doesn't appear to have derailed his career - he's working on a couple of new movies.

Shoedog is a crime thriller adapted by George Pelecanos from his own novel, and that's likely to be next; some time later, Paxton wants to make his own film about the asassination of JFK. It simply couldn't turn out any worse that Oliver Stone's overblown pantomime, and I'd expect, in fact, he could do a very nice job with this indeed.