Tradecraft: Queens And Ghosts

Variety reports that former Fox executive turned producer Peter Chernin has come aboard as a producer on Queen & Country, the film based on Greg Rucka's stellar series of comic books and novels. Other than that, the story doesn't tell us anything about the project that we didn't already know. , but I like to report any time that Queen & Country is mentioned in the trades as this is a project I'm really, really rooting for. It's one of my very favorite spy series ever, in any media, so I want to see the film done right! The trade reiterates the same logline the used last time, reinforcing my belief that the current screenplay appears to be based on a combination of the first comic book arc and the first novel. According to the story, Chernin will also produce a new Travis McGee based on the first book in John D. MacDonald's classic detective series, The Deep Blue Goodbye. Leonardo DiCaprio will star and co-produce. Hm. It will be cool to see Travis McGee revived on the bigscreen, and while DiCaprio seems a somewhat odd choice, I think I can see it... maybe. (Apparently, Bish feels differently!)

Meanwhile, The Hollywood Reporter reports that Pierce Brosnan's next spy movie, The Ghost, has been delayed by the arrest of director Roman Polanski in Switzerland. According to the trade, "Polanski's agent, ICM chief Jeff Berg, said Polanski had completed much of the editing on The Ghost. But other postproduction work, including music scoring and sound mixing, had yet to be done, Berg said." The film does not yet have a US distributor, which Polanski usually lines up after he finishes. Robert Harris, author of the novel upon which the movie is based, reiterates why he thinks Polanski is the perfect director for the material: "There's a lot of psychological intrigue in the story, as well as espionage and politics, and most of the action takes place in an oceanfront house during the middle of winter -- all of it classic Polanski territory." Brosnan stars alongside Ewan McGregor, Tom Wilkinson, Olivia Williams and Kim Cattrall.