Is Frank Darabont going to be three for three in Stepen King adaptations? It certainly looks like it. Rob Reiner: the gauntlet has been thrown down.
Check out the very encouraging trailer for The Mist in middling, biggish and large sizes, as well as 480p, 720p and 1080p.
Right click and rename the file something like themajesticisunderrated.mov or (.wmv for the smaller ones) or similar to ensure it works.
I've heard three separate Frank Darabont rumours in the past two days or so. Here they all are - the law of averages states that precisely one and a half of them will be false, I suppose - but these do come from (generally) trustworthy sources.
Rumour one: Ben Kingsley is to play Captain Beatty in the upcoming Darabont adaptation of Fahrenheit 451. Shooting is to start towards the end of the year and the script is 'dynamite'. Truffaut used spoken credits to give a flavour of a non-literate world, Darabont intends to go even further.
Rumour two: Darabont is 'in some way' involved in the Tintin trilogy. Either that means he's writing one or more of the films, I'd guess, or he's the missing link, the third director. Or he's producing. Or making the tea. Or they're using his beard as the basis for Captain Haddock's.
Rumour three: amongst the many commentary tracks on the upcoming Blade Runner DVD set is a conversation between Darabont and Ridley Scott.
An old rumour about Indiana Jones was given a fresh burst of speed when Slashfilm reposted it earlier in the week. Now half of the internet is hopping up and down about it - but not me.
For one thing, the story dealt with a now discarded draft of the Indiana Jones 4 script - at least, Frank Darabont's version as nixed by George Lucas. That pretty much renders any fuss irrelevant because this isn't even the version set to go before cameras. But, even if it didn't nullify the whole argument, there would still be no need to get alarmed.
The rumour is this: that Darabont's script involved Indiana Jones investigating UFOs in 1950s America - Roswell, New Mexico, no doubt. And people don't like that idea. Oh no. They don't want any aliens in Indiana Jones.
Why on earth not? He's looked for the lost Ark of the Covenant, the Holy Grail and some magic stone things - what's wrong with him looking for alien artefacts? The only difference I can come up with is that there's no reason to believe the Ark of the Covenant, the Holy Grail or these crazy stones exist but, in any realistic evaluation, there's bound to be some kind of alien life in the universe somewhere, even if it is just some puffy gas bag rolling around in an all liquid planet surface (or whatever).
Is this alien lifeform flying to Earth in shiny saucers, crashing and then getting filmed while being dissected? Of course not. But that's just the specifics - that's like me arguing about the design or location of the Holy Grail, rather than the simple fact that it doesn't exist...
I could care less what Indiana Jones goes looking for because whatever it is it will be something faintly silly and clearly fantastical. I'm sure Frank Darabont's script was much better than the shooting draft by Jeff Nathanson and David Koepp - it's exceedingly obvious which of the three is the better writer - and isn't that really the key factor?
If the basic premise of Darabont's script was really what gave Lucas his problem, he could have been decent and interjected at an earlier stage. When Darabont called his year working on this film 'wasted' I was in total agreement.
And while we're on the subject, I think the latest Indiana Jones story at Aint it Cool is a fake that they've been duped with. The inclusion of John Rhys-Davies on the cast list should have been enough to alarm them. I guess Harry just didn't want to be scooped.
Poor Joe Hill, everybody wants to name his father when they discuss him. So I won't. I'm not really a fan of his dad's books... though they have been turned into some great films over the years. DePalma, Kubrick and Rob Reiner - twice - have all done sterling jobs in hadling Joe's dad's stuff, Romero and Darabont made pretty good second-tier efforts too.
Now the signs are looking great for the first adaptation of a book from junior, as Neil Jordan has signed a deal to direct and script. It's a ghost story about a rockstar who buys a haunted suiton e-bay. The title suggests a certain rock star, but I've not read the book, so I honestly don't know.
I have read about the ghost's tendency towards possession however: he takes control of a car radio, a ouija board and - brilliantly - the electric voicebox of a laryngectomy patient. Spooky.
There are plenty of excerpts on Hill's website, but I think I'll check out the local library's copy instead.
No news if Jordan will tackle this before A Killing on Carnival Row for sure, but I'd expect this to come later as the script appears to be further from being ready.
