“Nerd Camp”
The writer/director penned a “stoner-counselor-at-nerd-camp comedy” for Seann William Scott. “I’m writing, a high-concept studio comedy,” Green told Indiewire in April 2006. The premise was dead-simple. “It’s about a summer camp for geniuses.” It’s possible that this script, which was being written for Universal, made the rounds before Judd Apatow had decided on a “Pineapple Express” director, and when the two met on the set of “Knocked Up,” the mayor of comedy may have likely anointed his man. Whatever happened to this project? “They took it away from me and Danny [McBride] before anybody knew who we were and had some other guy write it,” Green told us in a 2011 interview.
“The Precious Few”
A very, “Smokey And The Bandit“-like pic, the demolition derby movie was written with friend and ‘Real Girl’ actor Danny McBride and was set to re-team the director with his longtime friend Paul Schneider (star of “All The Real Girls“). “Eventually it’s going to cost a lot of money because I’ve got a lot of cars to wreck,” Green told Moviechicks in the fall of 2004. Would it ever get made? “I would love to [make it],” Green told us in 2011. “We’ve been around for a couple years trying to get it financed. Yeah that would be our flagship film if we can find a great international financier. I wrote it with my buddy when I was all drugged up on painkillers after having jaw surgery and somehow, in six days, we cranked out something we were really proud of.” Maybe one day…
John Grisham’s “Innocent Man”
Part of his now-ancient deal with the now-shuttered Warner Independent to pick up “Snow Angels,” was agreeing to write and direct a drama based on John Grisham‘s non-fiction book “The Innocent Man.” The book tells the true story of Ron Williamson, a man wrongly convicted of murder who spent more than 10 years on death row in Oklahoma. But that project was shuttered because of “legal problems,” according to Green.
“Freaks of the Heartland”
In 2008, Overture Films tapped Green to direct the horror thriller “Freaks of the Heartland,” a Dark Horse graphic novel written by Steve Niles, written by freshman screenwriters Peter Sattler and Geoff Davey. ‘Freaks’ was a series about the horrible secret of a rural Middle American town involving a teenager’s attempts to protect his “monster” of a 6-year-old younger brother and other “freaks” from their parents’ worst instincts. It never came to pass, either. “I want to do it as an animated movie now,” he said around the time of “The Sitter.” “I’ve been talking to the writer and illustrator of the comic book.” Who knows what happened there. At any rate, Green scratched his animation with the MTV comedy “Good Vibes,” which wound up getting canceled rather quickly.
“The Secret Life of Bees”
He described his adaptation of the 2004 NY Times best-seller as a period piece similar in tone to “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Green explained ‘Bees’ as a much-needed breath of fresh air to MTV in 2004. “It’s a chick flick,” he said, “Which for me [would be] interesting because [‘Undertow‘] was so masculine and heavy and full of dudes. It might be nice to hang out with some ladies and have some fine china.” Producers thought otherwise and while Dakota Fanning was touted as his lead circa 2004/05 when he wrote the screenplay, the movie was made without him in 2008.
“Fat Albert”
“I’ve had two goals as far as movies are concerned forever that I can remember. One of them was to [make] ‘Dunces,’ and [then] more than anything in the whole world, I really wanna do ‘Fat Albert,’ ” he admitted to MTV in the early aughts. “I got really depressed because they were about to go into production on ‘Fat Albert’ a year ago with Forrest Whitaker directing, so I was super pissed.” Green didn’t get the project and it was made in 2004 much to his chagrin.
“One in the Chamber”
“I’d also like to start a straight-to-video action company that just does genre movies. Me and my friend Darius [Shamir] just finished the script called ‘One in the Chamber,’ ” he told STYD in 2008. “It’s just a guy going to get his kidnapped son out of prison. Give me a couple million bucks to go explore some schlock. I’d like to be the next Roger Corman. He would have his hand in freakin’ ‘Piranha‘ but also in Fellini. I like that idea. I would love to do some genre stuff but also some crazy intimate, no-budget movies. That’s my problem. I only have one me, and I have a limited number of years before I die, and the biggest problem is that I like to do a lot of stuff that has nothing to do with movies and movies are very time-consuming, so you have to make choices, and that’s really frustrating.”
