Duelling pre-strike Pablo Escobar projects race to production
Jeremy Kay in Santa Monica
02 Nov 2007 05:00
Bob Yari and Oliver Stone are locked in a race to bring their rival Pablo Escobar projects about the infamous Colombian drug lord to the screen.
Both projects are being sold at AFM in Santa Monica and reportedly registering strong interest ahead of their potential pre-strike shoots in early 2008.
In one lane is Yari Film Group's $40-50m Killing Pablo, a five-year labour of love for Yari and Joe Carnahan based on Mark Bowden's book Killing Pablo: The Hunt For The World's Greatest Outlaw.
The action–oriented project was initially set up at Paramount with Tom Cruise to star, but Yari re-acquired the rights after it went into turnaround and installed Javier Bardem as the kingpin and Christian Bale as the leader of the US Delta Force squad sent to Colombia to kill Escobar in 1993.
Yari is scouting for locations and has tentatively set a March 2008 start date. The company hopes Carnahan will make Killing Pablo his priority in the wake of George Clooney's departure from his James Ellroy adaptation White Jazz.
Carnahan hinted that Killing Pablo might be his priority when he said on his blog this week: "I don't know that, given the current climate of competing Escobar
tales, I can afford to wait." Yari's sales chief David Glasser reported heavy interest in the project.
Should the start date get pushed back, Bardem would have to exit the project because of his commitment to The Weinstein Company's musical Nine. Yari has reportedly lined up an A-list replacement should that happen, and sources at the company stressed that Bale will remain regardless of the start date.
Lining up against Killing Pablo is Escobar, J2 Productions' low-$40m project that will be produced by Oliver Stone and directed by Antoine Fuqua and is being sold here by Jere Hausfater's Essential Entertainment.
Edgar Ramirez is in final talks to star as Escobar. Hausfater has been showing buyers David McKenna's re-write of Hakim Quest's draft adaptation of Escobar's brother Robert's more personal novel Mi Hermano Pablo and said yesterday that buyers were "going crazy over it."
The project is set to go in late February/early March 2008 in Puerto Rico.
A third project from Hannibal Pictures, also called Escobar, is being pre-sold here.
Career
Vincent "Vinnie" Chase is a young Hollywood movie star described as potentially the best young actor of his generation. His breakout role was as the lead in the film Head On, co-starring Jessica Alba. After Head On, he was offered a role in the action film Matterhorn, but he passed. Instead he chose to star in the independent film, Queens Boulevard, based on the advice of his manager and best friend "E". The film is about a man, presumably, running from the law in Queens, New York. It was directed by egotistical filmmaker, Billy Walsh. Queens Boulevard (or Q.B.) was submitted to The Sundance Film Festival upon completion, where it was well received, and even winning the Grand Jury Award that year.
After the success of Q.B. Vince was offered the title role in the film Aquaman, which was to be directed by the master of big budget films, James Cameron. The movie became a massive success, making $116 million in ticket sales on its opening weekend, breaking the record set by Spider-Man.
After the success of Aquaman, Vince was offered the role Pablo Escobar, in the bio-pic, Medellín, a film he discovered and wanted to do before Aquaman, and was set to be directed by Crash director Paul Haggis. But conflict arose when a sequel to Aquaman was greenlit with the exact same start date as Medellín. Medellín was the film Vince wanted to do, and while he did attempt to work out a deal to do both movies at once, the head of Warner Bros. reneged on his earlier promise to allow Vince to do Medellin. Vince held to his principles, and was subsequently replaced by Jake Gyllenhaal for the Aquaman sequel. During his trouble getting out of his Aquaman contract, Vince finds that he has already lost his role in Medellín to Benicio del Toro, now leaving him jobless.
Vince then found a new project entitled I Wanna Be Sedated, a biopic about punk-rocker Joey Ramone and his band The Ramones. But after turmoil with the films producer, Bob Ryan, and Vince's agent, Ari Gold, the project was sold to Warner Bros., who refused to offer Vince another film for the rest of his career. This also led Vince to fire Ari Gold.
His new agent, Amanda, found him a new project entitled The Glimpses of the Moon, an adaptation of the Edith Wharton novel, and to be directed by Sam Mendes. But soon Vince found that Medellín might still be possible to get from his former agent Ari. So in hopes of getting his dream project, Vince begins procrastinating on Glimpses.
After officially receiving an offer for Medellín at the very last minute, complications in negotiations caused by them falling in the holiday of Yom Kippur, the film was dumped by the producer. After feeling Amanda let him down on this, Vince re-hires Ari Gold as his agent. This leads to negotiations of Vince buying the script for Medellín, which he was only able to do after selling his home. After having bought the script, this leads to negotiations with film producer Nick "Nicky" Rubenstein, to finance the project for $30 million dollars. Vince then chose Billy Walsh to direct, who at the time was now directing pornographic films under the alias Wally Balls. After the project was completed, Walsh submitted the movie to the Cannes Film Festival where it was accepted.
After a trailer of Medellín made and leaked onto YouTube, people began to rave over the film. Hype began to build so greatly, that Vince and Walsh were offered the film adaption of the novel Lost in the Clouds.
Preproduction on the film Lost in the Clouds began with Vince planned to star and Walsh to write/direct. But when Walsh wasn't able to adapt the novel, he began work on a script called Silo, a post-apocalyptic film set in the year 2075. After Ari somehow managed to sell the studio on the new project, Lost in the Clouds was dumped, and pre-production on Silo began.
When the Cannes Film Festival finally came around, the hype for Medellín has grown so large that upon arrival, Vince and Walsh were receiving multi-million dollar offers for the film before it even premiered, the highest bidder being Yair Marx at 75 million dollars. But after the movie finally premiered, the reception in the theater was overwhelmingly negative. Marx withdrew his offer, but Harvey Weingaurd decided to buy, for 1 dollar. Adding a small bright side to things, Ari told Vince, "you should have seen Shakespeare in Love before Harvey got his hands on it." Vincent and the Boys along with Billy Walsh will be making Silo during the break between season 4 and season 5. Most likely we will see a premiere of it in the first few episodes or the premiere of Medellin fixed in threaters around the world.