The man who brought you the insanity of The Living End, Totally F***ed Up, and The Doom Generation is back. Director Gregg Araki is currently shooting Mysterious Skin, an indie drama based on gay author Scott Heim’s debut novel, about two young men who discover they share a dark secret from the past. Their baseball coach is involved somehow … but if I told you how, it wouldn’t be all that mysterious, would it? Third Rock from the Sun’s Joseph Gordon-Levitt—who’s proving himself to be quite the competent actor, if this year’s teen psych-ward drama, Manic, is any indication—plays one of the leads. Newcomer Brady Corbet (starring opposite Holly Hunter in Thirteen), Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Michelle Trachtenberg, and Oscar-nominee Elisabeth Shue are also on board for the moody gay ride. Look for it to bum you out some time next year.
Such a Good Listener
Finally, an Armistead Maupin book has made it past TV. After years of his fun, fluffy Tales of the City books becoming miniseries, Maupin’s somber novel The Night Listener is heading for the big screen. Maupin is working on the feature screenplay with former life partner Terry Anderson, while directing duties go to Patrick Stettner (The Business of Strangers). Listener centers around Maupin’s true-life, long-distance phone friendship with a dying boy whose real identity gradually became suspect. The events took place over a six-year period and wound up being investigated by The New Yorker. Basically, anyone who’s been duped by a fake online profile will be able to relate, right?
Sex (for Sale) and the City
It may be close to the end for everyone’s favorite Manhattan flesh travelogue, Sex and the City, but there’s more, um, coming. Sex creator Darren Star is taking on author Tracy Quan’s Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl for Sony’s Revolution Studios, and Julia Roberts is helping. Roberts’ Shoelace Productions will produce, while Star will adapt the novel and direct. Penned by former sex worker Quan, who started writing it while still a ‘working girl,’ the book is a funny, fast-paced look at selling sex to men who have too much money; Quan’s heroine, Nancy Chan, is kind of like a hooking Holly Golightly. There’s no telling who’ll step into Chan’s Manolo Blahniks, but wouldn’t Lucy Liu be a perfect choice? Of course she would.
Coolidge’s Wicked Ways
Ever since Best in Show and Legally Blonde, big, beautiful Jennifer Coolidge has been my personal fave. Now Coolidge has signed on to A Cinderella Story, in which she’ll play the modern version of the wicked stepmother. In this update of the classic, teen sensation Hillary Duff plays Sam, a chunky but plucky girl growing up in the San Fernando Valley. Her dad dies, leaving his diner to ex-waitress-turned-second-wife Coolidge, and poor Sam has to do all the work. When Sam loses her cell phone and begins talking to the mysterious man who finds it, she starts losing weight —just in time for the school’s big Halloween dance. A Cinderella Story waltzes into multiplexes next summer.
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