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Posts Tagged ‘Sam Mendes’

Joe Penhall heading west to ‘Butcher’s Crossing’

December 8, 2009 - 8:00 pm

By Jay A. Fernandez

Joe Penhall is following the road to “Butcher’s Crossing.”

The screenwriter who adapted Cormac McCarthy’s novel “The Road” has been hired to adapt John Williams’ 1960 Western novel for Focus Features. The project is part of a two-year, first-look deal that Focus cut with Sam Mendes, who might direct.

product1 188x300 Joe Penhall heading west to Butchers CrossingSet during the 1870s, the adventure tale centers on a man who drops out of Harvard and heads west to the small Kansas town of the title. There, he joins the search for a great buffalo herd.

Mendes and his Neal Street Prods. partners Pippa Harris and Caro Newling are producing with Polsky Films’ Gabe and Alan Polsky.

Penhall, repped by Endeavor and the Curtis Brown Group in the U.K., also is working on the Fox 2000 adaptation “Deep Water” and an adaptation of his own play, “Landscape With Weapons,” for “Road” director John Hillcoat.

He also wrote the screenplays for “Some Voices” and “Enduring Love.”

Away it goes

March 18, 2009 - 1:42 am

If Zach Braff decided to do make a sequel to “Garden State” and have everyone grow beards and get pregnant, if Nick Drake could come back to life and imagine the precious thirty seconds of his posthumous, late-90’s Pink Moon Volkswagen commercial extended into a full-length movie, if “Revolutionary Road” flashed forward fifty years to a time of modern mores and forms of transport, if the dude who wrote “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” spent one too many nights with his little brother watching “Parenthood” back there in their San Francisco apartment (the last two we think may actually have some grounding in reality) it would probably look something like John Krasinski-Maya Rudolph pic “Away We Go,” this year’s summer specialty counterprogrammer, from Sam Mendes and Dave Eggers, which Focus will release right after Memorial Day. Dysfnctional-family comedy? Yuppie can-do heartwarmer? Planes, Trains and Automobiles for hipsters? It’s got it, um, all.

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