I don’t recall the 1994 Pauly Shore/Andy Dick effort In the Army Now being a “huge box office success and fan favorite,” but I’m happy to take the co-stars’ words for it if it means leaving well-enough alone and not foisting In the Army Again on an unsuspecting population still reeling from a decade of war abroad. Even if it means not seeing them save “Katey Parry [sic] from a USO show gone bad” — our national psyche has endured enough, has it not? That’s all I’ve got for this announcement , which unfortunately coincided with Memorial Day weekend and will not be ignored : Beverly Hills (MMD Newswire) May 23, 2012 — (www.FilmOn.com) – Yesterday, over looking Cannon Drive in the heart of Beverly Hills, Pauly Shore was a guest on Andy Dick Live, a weekly live internet TV show filmed at FilmOn.TV Studios. Among girls in bikinis and Andy Dicks [sic] usual group of crazies, Andy and Pauly discussed their past films including their huge box office success and fan favorite, In The Army Now . “I’ve always said we should do In The Army Again ,” said Andy Dick. “We should rescue Katey Parry [sic] from a USO show gone bad or something.” Pauly Shore loved the idea. “We just need a script and someone to back the project and I’m in.” Billionaire and FilmOn.TV CEO Alki David jumped in, “I’ll back it if both of you star in it.” Right there streaming live, film history was made. Andy Dick says a treatment is already written and they will be writing the script as soon as possible. Good grief. I mean, where’s Judicial Watch to investigate these guys’ military-flick aspirations when you need them? [ MMD via AV Club ]
It’s always a thrill to read about some upstart, young first-time screenwriter catching a lucrative break in Hollywood with a spec script, so let’s hear it for Cormac McCarthy! The New Mexico-based writer has reportedly sold a thriller called The Counselor , about a successful, respected lawyer who gets in over his head during a dalliance in the drug underworld. Steve Schwartz, one of the producers who made the acquisition as part of a “sizable deal,” told Deadline’s Mike Fleming : “Since McCarthy himself wrote the script, we get his own muscular prose directly, with its sexual obsessions. It’s a masculine world into which, unusually, two women intrude to play leading roles. McCarthy’s wit and humor in the dialogue make the nightmare even scarier. This may be one of McCarthy’s most disturbing and powerful works.” Fleming adds that the script is “contemporary, and set in the Southwest” — also unusual for McCarthy, who is previously best known for a slightly obscure oeuvre of novels including Blood Meridian , All the Pretty Horses , The Road and No Country For Old Men (the latter of which sparked a brief but ultimately fruitless flirtation with the film industry in 2007). The writer has even entered a representation agreement with ICM. When it rains it pours! Nice work, kid. [ Deadline ]
The conservative “watchdog” group Judicial Watch has sued the CIA and the Defense Department, alleging a failure to comply with requests to know what was discussed in consultations with Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal about the Hurt Locker duo’s follow-up charting the hunt for Osama bin Laden. Great. In a nutshell: JW sent a Freedom of Information Act request about the meetings — themselves merely alleged at this point — to determine what classified details (if any) about the bin Laden mission were shared with the Oscar winners. Both organizations failed to respond in the 20-business-day window required by FOIA, and so… yeah. Now there is a lawsuit. I can’t even deal. Here, from TheWrap : As of January 12, the DoD and the CIA “have failed to produce any records responsive to plaintiff’s requests or demonstrate that responsive records are exempt from production,” the suit says. “Nor have they indicated whether or when they will produce any responsive records.” In addition to information regarding the alleged meetings and communications, Judicial Watch is also seeking compensation for attorneys’ fees and other legal costs related to the lawsuit. The filing of the suit comes less than two weeks after Congressman Peter King, senior Republican on the Homeland Security Committee, said the Office of the Inspector General at Defense was launching an investigation over the alleged meetings. Washington! Getting Things Done Since Never.™ Anyway, Bigelow and Boal have specifically responded to King’s pseudo-pissed hotdogging before, and this is all just another compulsion of the “small-government” elite to control everything, up to and including the Stop Online Privacy Act, in the name of national security and jobs jobs jobs that 10 percent of you don’t even have and won’t even have as long as the Dept. of Defense is shuffling FOIA requests about Kathryn Bigelow movies in with all that private contracting it still has yet to do abroad (think of the hundreds of personnel who’ll be hired to install much-needed porta-potties in hot spots in and around Afghanistan) and the House of Representatives has some jowly wraith from Long Island stomping all over D.C. inveighing against God only knows what irrelevant bullshit while the culture at large seethes with resentment and while today’s sprawling Web blackouts remind you how helpless you are to see, create and share anything without some mega-institution first authorizing it, whether it’s Wikipedia or the CIA or Congress or some bozo-cabal calling itself “Judicial Watch” pinning its legitimacy to whether or not a Defense Dept. intern bothers to make a few photocopies before his shift ends and he runs off to get high and play video games or whatever it is kids do these days when they’re not shamelessly conscripted into war or debt or The Devil Inside or the next new hopelessness of 21st-century American life. Seriously — just feel safer already! Someone’s looking out for you! And by “someone,” I mean “not a fucking soul.” [ TheWrap ]
