March 30, 2009

A comedic version of Minority Report coming soon?

Not quite, but then again maybe, according to The Hollywood Reporter:

Screenwriter Chris McCoy is on one heck of a streak.McCoy just sold his second project this month to DreamWorks. The studio picked up "Good Looking," an original romantic-comedy script with a novel twist, to go along with an untitled college comedy pitch the studio plucked from McCoy's portfolio three weeks ago.In a funky tweak on "Minority Report," McCoy's newest project posits a future dating service that matches soulmates around the world without fail. The story line follows a guy who has the audacity to reject the person chosen for him.McCoy developed the idea last year while on a working vacation in London, where he noticed the city's near-universal coverage by surveillance camera to deter crime. He started musing on alternative uses for that collected personal information."If someone could organize that information and know what everyone in London was doing and eating and who they're dating and who they're going home with, then that's an incredibly powerful tool," McCoy said. "I think I have an oddball brain or something, but then I started thinking about how all that stuff could be applied to matchmaking. It would totally subvert Match.com and eHarmony, (where) I think people lie about who they are or they say what they think people will want them to be. But 'Good Looking,' my service, knows who they are and can put them together."Double Feature Films' Michael Shamberg and Stacey Sher are producing "Good Looking" as well as McCoy's college comedy. Holly Bario and Jonathan Eirich are overseeing for the studio.The newly independent DreamWorks suddenly has accelerated its acquisition of material. This month, the studio also purchased film rights to the book "The Big One: An Island, an Obsession and the Furious Pursuit of a Great Fish" by Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Kinney for "Eagle Eye" producers Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci to produce. And last week, it picked up Michael Gilvary's sci-fi action spec "Nonstop," with Patrick Tatopoulos directing and Len Wiseman producing.McCoy is a graduate of NYU's Tisch School of the Arts and worked on the editorial staff of Francis Ford Coppola's magazine Zoetrope: All-Story."Zoetrope was an awesome experience because the material that those guys would get in was so high-end," McCoy said. "It was a blast working for them, but I always knew I wanted to do my own stuff. So this is one of the better feelings a person can have, I think."McCoy is repped by CAA and Anonymous Content, which is producing his script "Get Back" with Chris Palmer directing. Knopf will publish McCoy's first novel, "Scurvy Goonda," in October.
-Definitely an interesting concept...now, to properly execute it....

3 comments: