We're back on the job

From E-script Gofer Editor Frank Moher: I've been off on a directing project and neglecting my E-script Gofer duties. My bad. To make up for it, I'm going to break my rule about posting only very recent articles, and upload the best of the stories that have piled up over the last few weeks. Here we go . . .

 

No more Mr. Not-Nice Guys for this screenwriter

From Entertainment Weekly: Richard Nixon. Idi Amin. The Queen. Screenwriter Peter Morgan has been hanging around with some less than cuddly characters lately. Maybe that's why he passed up the likes of Martin Scorsese and Mike Nichols in order to make his next movie with Hollywood nice-guy Ron Howard.

 

Film's failure leaves writer feeling his subject's pain

From The Houston Chronicle: With Sean Penn and Anthony Hopkins in the cast, All the King's Men was supposed to be one of the big Fall films. Instead, it got punked by Jackass: Number Two. Its failure has left writer-director Steve Zaillian identifying even more strongly with the old politico who's the model for Penn's character: "I feel like Huey Long must have felt -- you try to do good and they shoot you for it."

 

The tale of two Trumans

From The Hollywood Reporter: Writer/director Doug McGrath asks a great question in discussing his film Infamous, and the fate of Truman Capote after In Cold Blood was published. "You think, 'What happened to you? You come and have your greatest success and thereafter almost nothing goes right.'"

Well, maybe it had something to do with New York society discovering that Capote wasn't just an adorable little trinket, but actually a great journalist -- and hence dangerous. Anyone who read the four chapters of Capote's unfinished last novel Answered Prayers published in Esquire magazine in the mid-'70s knows that the problem wasn't that the book was no good. It was too good, in its gimlet-eyed depiction of of Capote's elite friends. The pile-on that started then has continued to the present day, most recently in the film Capote, with its depiction of the author as an unethical leech. It's good to see that, in his own take on the subject, McGrath regards this great American writer with something actually resembling sympathy.

And, of course, we can hope that trend will continue now that, as datelinehollywood.com reports, 23 more films about Truman Capote have been announced.