Paul1957

And it's a comedy.


In what will be his first trip behind the camera since 1998's Bulworth, Warren Beatty has committed to direct and star in an untitled comedy for Paramount Pictures. Paramount chairman and CEO Brad Grey has announced the deal for Beatty, who wrote the script and will also produce. Casting is underway right now. Beatty made both Heaven Can Wait and Reds for Paramount, collecting 21 Oscar noms between them. Beatty won Best Director for Reds. He also received the Irving Thalberg Award.

“Warren’s script is quintessential Beatty, elegantly written and wonderfully entertaining,” said Grey. “It is our privilege to have one of the great artists in the history of the film industry come home to Paramount.” The movie is expected to go into production later this year.


Deadline told you Monday that Warren Beatty was getting behind the camera for the first time since Bulworth. Paramount and Beatty are keeping details under wraps, but here's what I've heard: He will play Howard Hughes, but it's not really a biopic; part of the plot involves an affair he had with a young woman in the later years of his life. I've heard that he's going top shelf for the ensemble cast he is putting together. Here is who he's meeting with: Andrew Garfield, Alec Baldwin, Annette Bening, Shia La Beouf, Jack Nicholson, Evan Rachel Wood and Rooney Mara. Beatty has wanted to play Hughes forever. The courtship of Baldwin is particularly intriguing, since in Martin Scorsese's superb Howard Hughes movie The Aviator, Baldwin played Hughes' main adversary, Pan Am World Airways founder Juan Trippe. We'll see which actors end up making the movie, but it certainly sounds like this project that Beatty wrote and has ruminated on for years is going to happen in a most ambitious way.

http://www.deadline.com/2011/06/para...-next-picture/

http://www.deadline.com/2011/06/warr...cast-circling/

Ash Ketchum

I'd be a lot more excited if Howard Hughes was finally making a Warren Beatty movie...

...and auditioning starlets to play Beatty's various paramours.

PopcornTreeCt

I like this idea better.

Groucho

The Aviator 2: Kleenex Box Boogaloo

Hokeyboy

He's meeting with Annette Benning about a role? Oh how wonderful.

Funny how every time Beatty tries to do comedy, I frown, but when he's attempting to be dramatic, I guffaw...

Solid Snake

yeah...that'd be more interesting.

Decker

It's actually shooting now!
Warren Beatty is one of my favorites of all-time and I was pretty worried I'd never see him in anything again. Heaven Can Wait is my all-time favorite movie and I've loved the other three he directed as well.
Obviously, looking forward to this.



Warren Beatty’s Untitled Howard Hughes Pic Finally Takes Flight Financed By Billionaire Boys’ Club; Ehrenreich, Collins To Star In Love Story; Bening And Broderick Also In

EXCLUSIVE: It took two decades, but it’s finally getting off the ground thanks to billionaires Ron Burkle and Steve Bing, Windsor Media’s Terry Semel, Arnon Milchan’s New Regency and James Packer’s and Brett Ratner’s RatPac Entertainment. The heavies have come together to finance Warren Beatty’s long-gestating Howard Hughes-based project. The roughly $26.7M production, which Beatty will direct and star in as Hughes, will revolve around Hughes’ assistant (Alden Ehrenreich, Beautiful Creatures) and his love interest (Lily Collins, Mirror, Mirror). New Regency, Beatty and Ratner are producing, with Packer executive producing. Regency will handle foreign through Fox. They’ve already shot a small amount of film on the picture, but it starts rolling in earnest today. Beatty’s wife Annette Bening and Matthew Broderick and other surprises are expected (a la Jack Nicholson, maybe? One can only hope). The focus of the film is the love story of the two younger characters.
The public knows Beatty as a talented actor, but he is a heck of a director and writer, too. Two of the pictures he wrote and directed – the love stories Heaven Can Wait (co-director Buck Henry) and Reds — were Best Picture Oscar nominees. The cult favorite Heaven Can Wait (based on the stage play Here Comes Mr. Jordan and better than the original 1941 film) was nominated for nine Oscars, though it won only for art direction, and Reds, earned 12 Oscar noms and won three, including best director for Beatty. He also directed Dick Tracy. He hasn’t helmed a film since 1998, when he produced the critical fave Bulworth about a politician who, for once, tells the truth. It was an enormous undertaking in that he also produced and starred from his own script (with co-writer Jeremy Pikser). The picture, which co-starred Halle Berry, also contained a love story. The new, untitled project, which would be his fifth time at the helm, was written solely by Beatty. “We all love Warren, so we all got together to support him,” said one of the investors.
From a business standpoint, if Beatty can keep the cap on the budget and a handle on overages, it actually could do quite well. In 2004, The Aviator, which was based on Hughes’ life, took in as much overseas as it did domestically for a total worldwide gross of $213.7M. Of course, it was a Martin Scorsese film and did have Leonardo DiCaprio starring as Hughes. The Aviator was nominated for 11 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and won five. Sources say Beatty’s film is not Hughes-centric, but with the kind of star power he will be able to pull in, it could be a really nice ensemble piece.
Beatty will play a man who was as brilliant as he was eccentric. Hughes was born in 1905 to an inventor father and became an inventor himself. He would inherit millions but was a keen businessman and investor whose love for aviation prompted him to start his own aerospace company — Hughes Aircraft, which became a big defense contractor, would later sell to General Motors for $5.2 billion nine years after his 1976 death. He broke several air speed records and most famously was known for the Hercules H-4, aka the Spruce Goose, which was the largest cargo plane ever constructed. It was a sight to behold with a wingspan longer than a football field, 17 propellers and eight engines. Hughes was always the test pilot on his own creations, and he flew his 300,000-pound gorilla only once for one mile on a test run. Testing his own planes would almost cost him his life in 1946, when he crashed a newly engineered plane into a home in Beverly Hills. Hughes sustained serious injuries — including a broken leg, multiple broken ribs, a fractured skull, third-degree burns and a dislodged heart — and was lucky to survive.
In later years, his mental stability faltered, and he was said to have deteriorated into paranoia and germaphobia. His name then became synonymous with reclusiveness. So Beatty will be portraying such a fascinating man. Hughes also was a film producer and dated movie stars of the day such as Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis and Ava Gardner. He owned several Las Vegas casinos, including the Desert Inn and The Sands. Politically, he was a big anti-communist and a severe Republican.
______________________________________________________________

EXCLUSIVE: Martin Sheen has joined the cast of Warren Beatty‘s untitled Howard Hughes project, the script of which is being kept tightly under wraps. Sheen and Beatty are old friends but this is the first time they’ve worked together. Sheen, who will next be seen opposite Rooney Mara in Stephen Daldry’s Trash, been on and off the set for director Beatty, who is also producing and plays Howard Hughes. The story centers Hughes’ assistant (played by Alden Ehrenreich) and his love interest (Lily Collins). The pic, known around town as the untitled Warren Beatty project, also includes Annette Bening and Matthew Broderick.

The project was funded by billionaires Ron Burkle, Steve Bing, Windsor Media’s Terry Semel, Arnon Milchan’s New Regency and James Packer and Brett Ratner’s RatPac Entertainment. It’s a $26.7M negative. Ratner and Beatty are producing with Packer exec producing.
Sheen, who audiences will remember as Uncle Ben in The Amazing Spider-Man, also completed the low-budget children’s film The Boxcar Children, based on the beloved book of the same name (actually, the first book I ever read as a child, written by Gertrude Chandler Warner). Daniel Chuba, who did the visual effects on Prometheus, directs, and it is produced by Mark Dippe, known for visual effects on Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Jurassic Park. The filmmakers just got word the film will screen at the Toronto Film Festival’s Kids International fest that takes place April 8-21. Sheen also has a recurring role on his son Charlie’s show, Anger Management. He is repped by ICM Partners.

Ash Ketchum

Hughes died at 70. Beatty turns 77 at the end of this month. At least he's not playing Hughes as a young mogul in Hollywood, which he might have done well 40 years ago.

Solid Snake

Forgot about all this.

Decker

I remember reading that the Hughes film would be his next project after Reds back in the 80s. For some reason, he couldn't get it off the ground (hey, unintentional Spruce Goose joke!), so he went ahead with his Dick Tracey project instead. I figured once the Aviator got made, whatever he had been gestating would never see the light of day. I wonder how long this story has been a romance about his assistant instead of the story of the mogul himself.

Personally, while I liked a lot of The Aviator, the third act felt like a cheat -- trying to drum up a happy ending in a biography where there clearly wasn't one in real life

EddieMoney

77 years old? Heaven can't wait much longer.

Groucho

When will we see Bullworth 2: Still Rappin'?

Decker

Still rappin' over a decade after he was gunned down? What is this, the Tupac Shakur story?

GreenVulture

But The Aviator ended on a down note?

Decker

Yeah, it did. But not nearly as down as the last 20 years of his life actually were and after a public triumph.

Decker

After literally months of Google searching, I have finally found an update -kinda- on this project, courtesy of the New York Times :



If Warren Beatty Is Directing, Shooting Can Wait. For Years.

LOS ANGELES — An incurable tinkerer, Warren Beatty was at work again last weekend, shooting a scene for a 40-year passion project whose status is almost as mysterious as its subject: the industrialist Howard Hughes.

By habit, Mr. Beatty often returns to an almost finished film to pick up some detail, even a small one — say, the image of a dog walking past a door. This time he was back, working on a picture, still untitled, that he began in 1976 and for which he is the writer, director, producer and star.

That film, so far invisible and largely shot nine months ago, may be nearing completion and could be ready for release this year.

When it finally reaches an audience, the film could crown a storied career for a wily Hollywood operator — in his prime, Mr. Beatty was nicknamed the Pro — who became known for bedding starlets, pursuing Oscars and defying the conventional wisdom with wildly unconventional pictures like “Reds” and “Bonnie and Clyde.” Or it might become a bizarre footnote to his foibles, alongside misfires like “Ishtar” and his last major acting effort, “Town & Country,” released 14 years ago.

If, in fact, this filmmaker-star, still baby-faced at 77, ever stops tinkering with a film that features stars like Lily Collins; Matthew Broderick; Martin Sheen; Mr. Beatty’s wife, Annette Bening; and Mr. Beatty himself as Hughes. Reached through his hilltop office on Tuesday — he runs his production company out of a nondescript professional building behind a strip mall near Mulholland Drive — Mr. Beatty declined to discuss his progress on the movie. As ever, it was a charming turndown.

“I would appreciate if you would say Mr. Beatty good-naturedly declined to comment,” he said.

Mr. Beatty’s project has proved almost as elusive as Hughes, who died in April 1976. But that was not before he had captured the attention of Mr. Beatty, who, a few years earlier, had observed secretive comings and goings around Hughes’s rooms at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Eleven days after Hughes’s death, the trade publication Variety reported that Mr. Beatty was at work on a biopic.

“Good luck to him!” Jane Russell, who starred in various films for Hughes, told the columnist Army Archerd. “But I won’t go see it.” (And she won’t: Ms. Russell died, at 89, in 2011.)

According to the Internet Movie Database, a widely used log of film information, the long-promised Hughes movie — or, more properly, its spiritual descendant — is finally to be released on May 21. Yet the date is inaccurate, perhaps reflecting speculative reports that Mr. Beatty would have it ready for the annual spring festival in Cannes.

People involved with the production, speaking on condition of anonymity because of confidentiality strictures, say the movie instead may be done late this year, possibly in time for the coming Oscar season. Mr. Beatty, nominated 14 times, has won once, as the director of “Reds,” in 1982.

How the new movie will be distributed is still unsettled. New Regency Pictures, which is producing it with Mr. Beatty, releases its films through 20th Century Fox or the awards-oriented Fox Searchlight unit. But people briefed on the situation said decisions about the scope, timing and precise vehicle for the film can be answered only when the movie is finally seen.

Continue reading the main story
Of financial backers, Mr. Beatty has no shortage.

Though “Town & Country” was a resounding flop — it took in only about $10 million at the worldwide box office after New Line Cinema released it in 2001 — the new film, with a budget of roughly $30 million, has drawn contributions from a sluggers’ row of billionaires, savvy media executives and scions of wealthy families.

Those investors include the New York fund manager John Angelo, the Hollywood moguls Ron Burkle and Arnon Milchan and the producers Jeffrey Soros and Sarah E. Johnson, both members of affluent families with film production credits that, in Ms. Johnson’s case, include this year’s best picture, “Birdman.” Also in the lineup are Brett Ratner and the Australian billionaire James Packer, through their RatPac Entertainment company.

The various backers declined to comment or did not respond to queries.

Another backer is Terry Semel, who had reason to know this could take a while: In 1989, Mr. Semel, then a top film executive at Warner Bros., was ready to shoot a version of the Hughes film, which involved the screenwriter Bo Goldman, when Mr. Beatty, then 52, became occupied instead with a Disney film, “Dick Tracy,” in which he starred with his love du jour, Madonna.

Mr. Goldman, who wrote “Melvin and Howard,” an earlier Howard Hughes movie, said he is watching carefully to see whether anything from his own contribution to the Warner project — now owned by Mr. Beatty, according to Warner — will appear in the current film. “We weren’t sent a script, but that’s Warren,” said Mr. Goldman, who is 82.

In truth, according to one person briefed on the evolution of Mr. Beatty’s film, it has changed considerably with the years, and is no longer entirely about Howard Hughes.

Instead, this person said, it has become a somewhat lighthearted story about a young woman, played by Ms. Collins, who, like Mr. Beatty, was raised by Southern Baptists, and who — again, like Mr. Beatty — found her way to Hollywood in 1958. There, she is put under contract by Hughes, by then a film mogul. Together with another young arrival from the heartland, played by Alden Ehrenreich, she experiences the collapse of an old moral order and the rise of a new one in the early 1960s. Again, as Mr. Beatty did.

Seasoned actors populate the film. In addition to Mr. Broderick, Mr. Sheen and Ms. Bening, they include Dabney Coleman, Candice Bergen and Oliver Platt. Alec Baldwin appears in a cameo role as the Hughes associate Robert Maheu.

Much of the film was shot around Los Angeles last March and April, both in Sunset Gower Studios in Hollywood, which housed Columbia Pictures through the 1960s, and on locations, among them the downtown Millennium Biltmore Hotel, that are redolent of the Hughes — and Beatty — era.

During his years out of the limelight, Mr. Beatty has raised four children with Ms. Bening, at whose side he will occasionally appear in public, as he did last November at the Governors Awards banquet of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

But, like the heiress Sarah Winchester, who never stopped working on her famous mystery house, Mr. Beatty has also been occupied with his favorite work in progress.

Last week a public relations representative said the filmmaker would happily talk when he finishes.

The author Peter Biskind recalls being told the same thing when he was completing his book “Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America,” a biography first published in 2010.

The Hughes movie “is still not out, may not appear until next year, who knows?,” Mr. Biskind noted in an email.

“Had I listened to him, my book would still not have seen the light of day.”

Mabuse

The quote is old but it's worth repeating, "It is our privilege to have one of the great artists in the history of the film industry come home to Paramount.”

Truly no hyperbole there. Right up there with Capra and Sturges and Kubrick, the star of fucking Shampoo and the director of Town & Country. When Bullworth is your best film...you have problems.

Ravenous

Has anyone here read the Beatty Bio "Star." Great read

Numanoid

Surely "The Aviator 2: Eccentric Boogaloo" is a much cleverer play on words.

Always happy to improve upon a four year-old joke.

Solid Snake

It'd suck if this was a bad movie w/ how much history he's had w/ it.

Decker

Peter Chelsom was the director of Town & Country. Beatty has only ever directed four films before now (Heavan Can Wait, Reds, Dick Tracy and Bulworth), he has produced and/written several more. Reds and Bonnie & Clyde (AFI #27) were his best films, though Heaven Can Wait is my personal all time favorite movie. When he received Oscar nominations for Writing, Directing, Acting and Procucing both Heavan Can Wait and Reds, he became the first person since Orson Wells made Citizen Kane to be so honored - I don't think anyone has since. Perhaps it is you that has problems.

Decker

Yeah. Gets a little too bogged down with finances especially in relation to the Reds production, but otherwise a fascinating read.

Solid Snake

I actually have very little exposure to his work. Only Bonnie & Clyde and Dick Tracy. I KNOW of his history in the film but haven't seen any movies of his out of those 2.

Recommendations?

Hokeyboy

The Parallax View - My GOD, see that movie now.
McCabe & Mrs. Miller - Altman in his prime
Ishtar - For real. Massively underrated movie, and really damn funny.
Splendor in the Grass - Excellent 1961 Elia Kazan melodrama co-starring Natalie Wood.

Shampoo is considered to be a "New Hollywood" classic but I never particularly cared for it. Nowhere near as clever as it thinks it is.

Decker

Reds - long, sweeping epic. Just gorgeous.
Heavan Can Wait - really funny romantic comedy. Streams on Amazon Prime, iirc.
The Parallax View - good Seventies political thriller
McCabe and Mrs Miller - Altman directed seventies reactionary Weatern
Shampoo - a sex comedy with serious undertones about sexual politics