Monday, March 20, 2006
Goin' Hollywood
Paramount Pictures has set The Pianist screenwriter Ronald Harwood to write a feature about last fall's Dover, Pa., courtroom decision in which a federal judge denied a school board the right to force educators to teach intelligent design instead of evolution.
Lynda Obst will produce.Obst and Harwood say the trial had the level of emotional drama present in the 1925 Scopes Monkey trial, the subject of the 1960 film Inherit the Wind, which was based on the 1955 Broadway play.
"Our aspiration is to make a film that powerful," Harwood said. "We have a highly emotional case that divided a town right down the middle, and a judge whose summary was spectacular."
Oscar-winning Harwood, who most recently scripted New Line's Love in the Time of Cholera and Focus Features' The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, will start writing as soon as he completes a rewrite of Baz Luhrmann's untitled film for Fox, which shoots later this year with Russell Crowe and Nicole Kidman starring.
