With Steve Carell’s stint as the Scranton regional manager on “The Office” coming to an end, the actor, who managed to find time to fit in two or three movies a year in his TV schedule anyway (he appeared three times in four months this year, in “Date Night,” “Despicable Me” and “Dinner for Schmucks”), looks set to get even busier. He’s got the dramedy “Crazy Stupid Love” due next April, which looks to be pretty excellent, and a fistful of other projects in the works, including “Mail-Order Groom,” “Raised By Wolfs” and “A Boyfriend For My Wife,” with “Anchorman 2” hopefully in there somewhere too. If our sending-anthrax-through-the-mail-to-Paramount-executives plan works, anyway.
He signed on to magician comedy “Burt Wonderstone” last week, and has now recruited the writers of that project to pen another of the films he’s been developing. The in-demand duo of Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley (the latter of whom starred in Judd Apatow’s “Freaks and Geeks” as a kid and currently stars on “Bones”), will write a film based on the life of Dennis Lambert, a hit songwriter who wrote the likes of “Rhinestone Cowboy” and “We Built This City” for other artists, but never managed success under his own name. After 20 years out of the business, he discovered he had a huge following in the Phillippines, and set out there to gig in 10,000 seat arenas.
The project, based on the 2008 documentary “Of All The Things,” which was directed by Lambert’s son Jody, has been in development since May, but the hiring of Goldstein and Daley suggests that it’s a priority for Warner Bros. The pair are more-or-less the hottest comedy duo in town; aside from “Burt Wonderstone,” they’ve got “Horrible Bosses” set for release next summer, a remake/sequel to “National Lampoon’s Vacation” in the works, and Robert Downey Jr. is apparently circling their script “The $40,000 Man.”
With Carell not set to wrap on “The Office” until next spring, don’t think that it will keep away from films. He apparently has some downtime in October which he hopes to slot with something, and he certainly has plenty to choose from.
