Paul Verhoeven's Paperboy

Paul Verhoeven's next project to actually get before cameras is to be an adaptation of Pete Dexter's The Paperboy. Set in and around Moat County Florida in the 1960s, the novel is a murder investigation/crusading journalist/serial killer mystery and Verhoeven seems like a great choice - or, more to the point, it seems like a great choice for Verhoeven. It has a whiff of The Mean Season about it, and that's not a bad thing.

About ten years ago Pedro Almodovar chewed the project over for a long while and, for some reason, never got the ball rolling.

We can expect The Paperboy to shoot early in 2008, while Verhoeven's "19th Century Basic Instinct", The Winter Queen and another Dutch production, an adaptation of Jan Siebelink's Kneeling on a Bed of Violets are apparently still on course, and likely to follow in the next couple of years.

In case you don't know Dexter, he also wrote the novel Paris Trout and also adapted it into a sadly forgotten Stephen Gyllenhaal film starring Dennis Hopper and Barbara Hershey.