Posts Tagged ‘Billy Ray’
The producers of Fox’s hit action serial television series 24 have been talking about doing a big screen movie adaptation for years now. I just assumed that it was one of those things that would never happen, and that the made for television movie prequel they did last season was an easy out. Well it looks like star/producer Kiefer Sutherland is serious about bringing Jack Bauer to the big screen, as he has convinced Fox to hire Billy Ray to pen the screenplay adaptation. All we know about the planned story for the feature film is that it will be set in Europe. Sutherland and producers have said that the big screen movie would be “a two-hour representation of a day.”
Ray’s filmography includes State of Play, Flightplan, Suspect Zero, Hart’s War, Volcano and Moon director Duncan Jones’ upcoming much-buzzed about project Source Code. He both wrote and directed Breach and Shattered Glass.
But studio insiders cautioned Variety (who broke the story) that a 24 movie “is still very much in the preliminary stages,” and that there are “a number of factors influencing how quickly it moves ahead, including the fate of the TV show.”
Fox has not yet decided if they want to order a ninth season of the series, although it is expected that this will be the final season. According to EW, 24 is down versus last year by 10% in total viewers (11.9 million versus 13.3 million) and by 15% in adults 18-49 (3.9 versus 4.6). It is hard to imagine that Fox would spend the millions and millions required for a big screen feature if they weren’t impressed with the ratings enough to renew the television series for a tenth season. Stranger things have happened (Arrested Development was canceled and will eventually become a big screen feature).
A big screen movie would probably guarantee that Bauer will survive his ninth crazy day. Since first discovering the series in 2001, I had hoped that Bauer would someday die on screen, in the possible biggest twist the series could possibly pull. I know a lot of fans would hate for that to happen, but I think it would be the ultimate way to conclude the series — with CTU and Jack’s friends having to save the day without him, in his honor. Sutherland and 24 producers have always said that Bauer’s death was an extreme possibility.
It would be nice to see a big screen 24, with a big blockbuster budget. But without the real-time structure, won’t it just another action film, but with the characters we’ve gotten to know from television? I wonder how it could/would be different.
Set for production in the first quarter of next year is sci-fi thriller Source Code with Duncan Jones (Moon) set to direct and Jake Gyllenhaal in the starring role. This puts Mute and Escape From The Deep to one side, at least for a while but it at definitely seems like a fascinating story and well worth Jones’ attentions as well as being in-step with his noted inspirations.
The Source Code script has had some revisions done by Billy Ray but was originally written by Ben Ripley. Having read Ripley’s draft, I can give you some information on the film’s clever premise.
None of this is spoiler material, I’d argue, as it all comes clear in the first fifteen minutes or so.
In the first scene, a man named Colter - Gyllenhaal’s character - wakes up on a train headed through the New Jersey countryside. He has no idea how he got there and nobody he speaks to can offer him any clues, though he is told that, to his surprise, he has taken this train every day for the last three months.
After some interaction with the various characters in his train car, many of whom become more important as the story unfolds (particularly Christina… but I won’t say why, and mention her in part to just raise the question of who the female lead might be), Colter heads to the bathroom where, quite surprisingly, he finds a bomb. Unfortunately, just after Colter finds it, a cell-phone detonator is triggered and…
…he’s killed. In fact, the entire train explodes. There’s a big ball of fire and, for just eight frames of film, some other cryptic goings on that only make sense later. We’re now seven or eight minutes in and about to be shocked.
…Colter awakens again, this time in an Isolation Unit where he’s being debriefed by a man named Goodwin, perhaps symbolically so. It seems that Captain Colter Stevens has just been living through a virtual simulation of the incident on the train in order to discover who it was that bombed it.
The cellphone maguffin is a smart one because everybody on the train will have one but finding the right one will also identify who the terrorist is. Simple, but sweet.
As the story goes on, there are only two types of scene - those that show Colter’s next journey into the same few simulated minutes on the train, and those that take place in the rather austere Isolation Unit in which he’s expected to report his findings and some unexpected twists come into play. Pretty soon there’s a suggestion that there’s more to the simulation than meets the eye and Colter may even be able, somehow, change history and prevent the train from exploding. It’s not unike a video game in which he’s stuck on the same level, dying over and over, repeated and repeated with a new approach to playing every time.
I was put in mind of Twelve Monkeys and the end of the story definitely has a few echoes of something from Brazil, but aside from the Gilliam resonances, there’s perhaps a mild whiff of Tony Scott’s Deja Vu too, as well as the House episode House’s Head, a certain bit of the UK version of Life on Mars and, I’ll say it so nobody else has to, Groundhog Day and Jack Sholder’s 12:01. The beginning certainly has a Final Destination vibe too, though the film heads off into completely distinct territory once the train has exploded.
I’ve just made a fairly original script seem like nothing but a horrendous patchwork. Ooops.
I’d be very interested to read Billy Ray’s draft of the screenplay, not least because I’m quite the Bill Ray fan, but I think Ripley’s pass actually goes a long way in suggesting a rock solid thriller. According to El Mayimbe of Latino Review, all that Ray has done is a little bit of third act polishing. Perhaps there was room for a few more nips and tucks that El Mayimbe is suggesting, but I agree that Ripley’s script is a very exciting read. And, of course, Jones is a really great pick for director too.
Screen Daily report that Mark Gordon will produce the picture and Summit will release it in the US, Optimum in the UK and a whole slate of other companies have nabbed it for their respective international territories. Source Code has definitely been one of the really hot sales at the AFM this year and to me, it sounds easily like one of the most exciting genre projects set to shoot next year.
Earlier today, Russ told you that Billy Ray will be writing a ripped-from-the-headlines movie about Captain Richard Phillips vs. Somali Pirates. That’s not Ray’s only new writing gig, however, as he’s also taking a crack at the Gears of War movie. Last we heard, director Len Wiseman was collaborating with Wanted scribe Chris Morgan on the project, superceding an ill-liked Stuart Beattie draft. Like that fellow with his One Red Paperclip, this sounds like a constant series of uptrades.
So, how did Billy Ray get the gig?
I’d imagine it’s a case of who he knew, not what he knew. Ray has been working with director Wiseman on Motorcade recently, and it looks like that must have been a fruitful and pleasurable experience for the two of them to choose to do it all over again.
I agree with Russ’ position that Ray is a very talented filmmaker but that the films he shares scriptwriting credit on, which is to say those he didn’t direct himself, turned out less well than those he saw across the finishing line himself. All the same, I think it would be completely pointless to wish for one second that he’d ever take up directing Gears of War from Wiseman. Besides… doesn’t he have better things to do?
I would imagine that Joseph Kosinski would be the fanboy’s choice for the Gears of War gig after his phenomenally popular TV commercials for the games. Myself… I guess I’d have to get a better idea of what Gears of War really entails before I could make a qualified judgment. Something about pressing buttons and things going bang, right? You can tell me if the man behind Breach, Shattered Glass and bits and pieces of State of Play and Flightplan is a good candidate for the Gears of War script or not.
I do know that the game features characters called things like Marcus Fenix, Dizzy Wallin and General RAAM. That must make script meetings a real barrel of laughs.
Story read in Variety.
The movie of the week business used to be the province of television and cable, but with these tougher economic times, big studios are getting into the game, too. Or trying to. Earlier this year Columbia bought the rights to the story of Richard Phillips, the captain held hostage by Somali Pirates this past May before being rescued by Navy Seals. Now the film finally has a writer.
The good thing is, the writer is Billy Ray, and if there’s anyone who can make this thing work as something more substantive than a movie of the week that’s 18 months too late, it might be him. Shattered Glass was great, and Breach was even better. OK, some of his writing gigs haven’t panned out perfectly — how about Flightplan and to a lesser extent State of Play — but it’s difficult to say that the work he’s credited for is what ended up problematic onscreen, so I’ll take his two directing gigs as better evidence of talent.
Columbia has the rights to both the general story of Phillips’ experience with the pirates this past may, and specifically to his memoir A Captain’s Duty: Somali Pirates, Navy SEALs and Five Dangerous Days, which Variety says will be published in April. Without having read the book I can’t predict where Ray’s script will go, but there’s a much larger context to tell in this story that would help push it out of pure topical territory. Specifically, many of the Somali pirates have said they were pushed into piracy by illegal foreign fishing off Somali coasts, which depleted their legitimate means of income. That’s hardly a justification for many of the actions taken, but it is a part of the larger context. If you’re going to tell the story of Phillips and the hijacking you don’t have to tell the Somali story as well, but doing so would probably make for a more interesting film.
