If you feel like you haven’t heard anything in a while from “Superbad,” “Adventureland” and “Paul” director Greg Mottola, you have no need to worry. He’s been very busy, working on the forthcoming Aaron Sorkin-scripted HBO show “The Newsroom.”
To refresh your memory, the show features a ridiculously stacked cast — Jeff Daniels, Emily Mortimer, Alison Pill, John Gallagher, Jr., Olivia Munn, Dev Patel, Thomas Sadoski and Sam Waterston — in the story set in a cable news room, following the exploits of an anchor (Daniels), his new executive producer (Mortimer), his newsroom staff and their boss (Waterston) as they set out on a patriotic and quixotic mission to report the news well in the face of corporate and commercial obstacles, and their own personal entanglements. It sounds fantastic. There was been little word on what his next feature film effort might be, but Mottola recently gave a little hint.
The Kid In The Front Row recently caught up with the helmer who revealed, “Campbell Scott and I — we’ve spent a million years working on it, but we wrote a script together that I may try to get made in the next year.” And well, that’s it. No word on what it is, or what it’s about but clearly Mottola and his “The Daytrippers” star have kept in close contact.
This isn’t the only project brewing for Mottola as he still has the adaptation of Leanne Shapton‘s “Important Artifacts and Personal Property From the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion and Jewelry” in development, which at one time was attracting both Brad Pitt and Natalie Portman. Last spring at SXSW he told us the book has a sort of Charlie Kaufman style experiment, though he questioned whether a studio would be willing to take it on.
Time will tell, but for now we’re looking forward to “The Newsroom” — which he describes as “a real comedy-drama. I mean, some of the drama is very serious but there’s a ton of comedy. Every episode it goes through major tonal shifts” — and we hope his next movie gets going soon.
