As we said earlier in the year, David Fincher is moving away from feature films and is diving deep into the world of prestige cable TV beyond his foray in “House Of Cards” (he remains an exec producer by title, but doesn’t have much to do with that show now). The filmmaker is also getting in deep at HBO. He’s directing every episode of their show “Utopia” which he developed with “Gone Girl” writer Gillian Flynn, that should air sometime next year. Fincher is also developing a 1950s crime noir series with James Ellroy at HBO, called “Shakedown” (which we revealed back in September, and was just confirmed today) and he’s got other projects in the works too.
“This TV show I’m doing about music videos in the 1980s and the crew members who worked on them — they’re not Big Macs. I don’t make Big Macs," he said in a lengthy Playboy article. Today, The Wrap reveals, as you likely expected, that it’s another show at HBO and it now has a title: “Living On Vide0.” (Update: The Wrap corrected their previous report about the title).
The trade reveals that Fincher will direct the pilot episode which would be a half-hour show about the world of making music videos in the 1980s — a milieu that Fincher was deeply entrenched in during that decade. Casting is evidently underway, but no names have been revealed. Fincher will executive produce “Living On Video” with Cean Chaffin and Joshua Donen. The director helmed a ton of iconic music videos back in the day, and earlier this year for our own amusement we ranked all of Fincher’s music videos from best to worst.
As for “Shakedown,” it’s a resurrected concept for a show Ellroy was previously developing at FX back in 2012. The project shares the same name as the author’s novella, also published that same year, but it apparently bears no relation to it or the protagonist of that project Fred Otash (who has appeared in two of his other novels), according to Deadline.
