Script Sales For - 10/24/1999
October 24th, 1999
Hollywood script deals
Michael Crichton's ''Timeline'' has been sold to Paramount
Pictures for ``nothing down.'' Ah, Michael, ah, are you
f-ing nuts?
In so doing, Paramount beat out competing bids from Warner Bros.
and Disney. The latter purchased the rights to Crichton's
penultimate novel, ``Airframe,'' for $10 million in 1996.
The groundbreaking deal with Paramount will pay 15% of the
first-dollar gross of the picture to Crichton, his rep
Artists Management Group and attached producer/director
Richard Donner until they receive a $3 million producing fee.
Wow, after that milestone, the payoff becomes tied to the
film's box office performance. The catch? An automatic $1
million deal termination fee if the movie is not made in
a certain amount of time... ah, so he's not nuts.
The novel, due out in mid-November from Knopf, focuses on an
amusement park tycoon who becomes trapped after traveling
back to 14th century France.
``Timeline'' is expected to begin production as early as
ext summer, though it's not clear if Crichton himself will pen the
screenplay.
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Sony Pictures Entertainment has snatched up a pitch for ''Extinction''
from the creative team of Laura Harckom and Chris Leone.
In the world of the proposed film, 300 years have passed since the human
ace became extinct, wiped out by a plague. Left behind was a powerful
civilization of intelligent robots.
But when a computer virus threatens the robots' survival, a rebel robot
decides to genetically reconstitute a human by using digitally archived
human ``minds'' in service of saving robot-kind.
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Columbia Pictures has picked up $700,000 for a pitch from scribes Mark
Levin and Jennifer Flackett.
The untitled pitch is described as a modern Cinderella story, with a
draft expected to be forthcoming in the next few months.
Levin and Flackett's first and only collaboration had been ''Madeline,''
the kidpic laffer released by Sony in 1998.
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New Line has bought an 18-month option on ''Mucho Mojo,'' a novel
by Joe R. Lansdale that was published in 1995.
``Mojo'' -- put out by Mysterious Press, an imprint of Warner
Books -- is one of several books by Lansdale that describe
the adventures of Hap Collins and Leonard Pine, a pair of rough-
and-tumble friends from East Texas, the author's home turf.
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