Diablo Cody sets up her next Original Screenplay...

...with the company that collaborated with her on Juno. The Hollywood Reporter has the details:

Diablo Cody is setting up a new original screenplay, titled “Young Adult,” with Mandate Pictures.

Mason Novick is producing along with Cody and Lianne Halfon and Russell Smith of Mr. Mudd. Mandate president Nathan Kahane and Mr. Mudd’s John Malkovich will serve as executive producers. Mary Lee will oversee the project for Mandate.

All the major players last collaborated on Cody’s Oscar-winning “Juno,” which turned into a $227 million-grossing phenomenon when Fox Searchlight released it in late 2007. Mandate, which optioned the “Young Adult” script, has the project on the fast track while it looks for a director.

The “Young Adult” storyline involves a thirtysomething, divorced, young-adult fiction writer in Minneapolis who returns to her hometown to chase the ex-boyfriend, who’s now married with a kid, that got away.

The Gersh-repped Cody has a “Taming of the Shrew” revamp set up at Paramount and an adaptation of the “Sweet Valley High” books in development at Universal. She last penned “Jennifer’s Body,” which Fox Atomic released last year, and she continues to write and executive produce the Showtime series “The United States of Tara,” which kicked off its second season Monday.

Mandate most recently produced “Whip It” and “Drag Me to Hell,” and the company has “The Switch” coming out in August. The WME-repped Mr. Mudd is developing Brian Tucker’s noir, “Broken City,” and Brent Forrester and Mindy Kaling’s romantic comedy “The Low Self Esteem of Lizzie Gillespie” with Mandate, with which it has a first-look deal.

-I like Cody's work, so I'm excited...thoughts?

The 2009 Black List is fully revealed!

The annual list of the best unproduced screenplays in the business hit a little while back, and now I bring it to you. The full list can be found here, and some films are already in production (like 'The Social Network', and a few others), but here's a bunch that have my eye:

The Muppet Man, The Voices, The Day Before, Mixtape, Book Smart, Betty's Ready, Take This Waltz, The Trade, Jimi, Smile Relax Attack, Good Looking, The Blind Rage of Peacoat Miller, Allies with Benefits, The Hand Job, Swingles, and The Spectacular Now.

-Which are you looking forward to?

The next Bond flick gets some writers...

...and Paul Haggis is not one of them, interestingly enough. Variety has the story:
Producers Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli of EON Productions and MGM are moving forward on the next 007 installment, hiring "Frost/Nixon" scribe Peter Morgan, Neal Purvis and Robert Wade to write the script for the 23rd James Bond film.
Purvis and Wade most recently worked on "Quantum of Solace" and "Casino Royale."
Daniel Craig is already set to reprise his role as 007, and Wilson and Broccoli are producing. No start date has yet been set, but sources said EON and MGM are eyeing a 2011 release.
"Peter, Neal and Robert are extraordinarily talented and we're looking forward to working with the three of them," Wilson and Broccoli said in a statement.
Both "Quantum of Solace" and "Casino Royale" were co-productions between MGM and Sony, with the latter distributing. The new film will be the first to return as a full MGM release. The first 20 pictures in the franchise were distributed by MGM.
Morgan, who wrote both the play and film "Frost/Nixon" and "The Last King of Scotland" and "The Queen," has most recently been working on "The Special Relationship" for HBO, and "Hereafter" for DreamWorks. He'll begin writing on the Bond film after completing those projects.
Aside from the Bond films, Purvis and Wade have been working on "The Brazilian Job," the sequel to "The Italian Job," on which they were also writers.
-Morgan will likely be there to make the story work, with the other two being Bond vets to make the action work...thoughts?

The author of The Hours has an interesting new project...

...which you can read about here, from Variety:
Screen Gems prevailed in a spec auction for "Beautiful Girl," a scary genre thriller from a most unlikely source: Michael Cunningham, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "The Hours."
Douglas Wick and Lucy Fisher are producing through their Red Wagon banner.
Story concerns a shy but brainy high school girl who returns for senior year after having slimmed down six dress sizes. She finds herself flirting with the handsome English lit teacher, but the mutual crush turns deadly when the teacher's obsession with the student compels him to exact maniacal revenge on everyone who was cruel to her.
Screen Gems president Clint Culpepper met Cunningham through Wick and was surprised to find a genre junkie, even if his love of blood-soaked movies didn't seep into his books, or scripts like "A Home at the End of the World."
Cunningham said he has always been a huge genre fan and, when sitting with Wick, would argue such basics as whether the second "Hostel" was as good as the first one.
"While I was writing about Virginia Wolff, my mind was never far removed from the idea of girls in bikinis being hacked up by guys wearing hockey masks, and I vowed that if I ever had a good idea, I would write one of these scary movies," Cunningham told Daily Variety.
"We've become such genre paisans, and when I showed the script to Doug, he showed it to Clint, and it was instant love," Cunningham said. "This summer, I will finish a novel where nobody gets anything gouged out of them, but my plan is to then write another idea I have for an actual monster movie. As it turns out, we sometimes find we can do more than one thing in our lives."
-Definitely something different...