Careful with that sword, Mr. No Depth Perception.

Richard Pryor is rightly recognized as one of, if not the best stand-ups of all time, and people have been trying to make a movie about him for going on 20 years now. Do you realize we almost got one produced by Happy Madison starring the guy from White Chicks? We actually have Twilight to thank for killing that one, when the project fizzled after director Bill Condon left to go work on Breaking Dawn, so don’t say those dead-eyed milk babies never did anything for you. Even Hitler had a good idea now and then.

Now, Deadline reports that Forest Whitaker, the old Ghost Dog himself, is teaming up with Pryor’s widow, Jennifer Pryor, to bring a Pryor biopic to screens. I sure hope it’s better those prior Pryor biopic ideas. (*bow tie spins*)

Whitaker is  teaming with the late comedian’s widow, Jennifer Pryor, to produce the film through his Significant Productions shingle. Whitaker will develop a new script with input from Jennifer Pryor, and Significant Productions’ Nina Yang-Bongiovi, will also produce.
This was just the latest of many prior incarnations. The first was a Martin Scorsese-directed drama to star Damon Wayans, this well before Pryor died in 2005. Later, there was a Showtime pic that was to star Eddie Griffin and another attempt at a feature that was to star Mike Epps with Kasi Lemmons directing. Condon’s first flirtation had Eddie Murphy briefly interested, and then Chris Rock was briefly in the conversation. Pryor had an unbelievable life, from growing up in a brothel, rising to become comedy’s biggest stage star, pushing the envelope on an edgy TV show that was subversive and ahead of its time, transitioning to film stardom, and nearly dying when he accidentally ignited himself while freebasing cocaine.

They keep trying to cast comedians in comedian biopics, the idea I guess being “well this guy’s funny too!” But that’s dumb. If you want a guy who can act like a comedian, hire an actor, the jokes are already written. You’ll want someone who can copy Pryor’s mannerisms, not inject his own personality into the project. And the best actors are all like Patrick Bateman in American Psycho or the Bug Man in Men in Black, where they can just open up their inner void and wear their subjects like a skin suit. That’s why I’ve long advocated locking them all in a padded warehouse somewhere when they’re not making films. Out-of-work actors are almost as dangerous as people who pronounce “BYE-oh pic” “by-OP-ick.”

I didn’t follow the Phil Spector murder case all that closely when it happened, and I admit I just assumed it was another Robert Blake/OJ Simpson case, where a dude murdered a female acquaintance and then tried to use the “but I’m famous!” defense. But David Mamet’s Phil Spector movie on HBO, which I watched at least half of the other night, seems to suggest that maybe Spector didn’t do it, and he was just lumped in with Blake and OJ, and people wrongly assumed he was a murderer on account of him being weird old A-hole. With Spector currently serving 19 years for second-degree murder, you’d think his people would be happy with any publicity of the Phil-Spector-not-being-portrayed-as-a-murderer variety, but it seems his wife, Rachelle Spector, is actually none too thrilled with HBO and Mamet. Her big beefs? Party invites and improper wig depictions, it seems. Seems like a real stable lady.

Mrs. Spector claims she explicitly was not invited [to the March 14 screening the cable network participated in at LACMA].
She tells THR that her PR rep received an invite for another client, prompting the rep to call HBO, which said it couldn’t accommodate her. That’s when Rachelle, who married Spector in 2006, did what any self-respecting wife of an incarcerated music legend would do: She crashed it.
“Pretty amazing I had to sneak into a screening of a movie about my husband,” the 32-year-old posted March 14 on Facebook. Seems she didn’t realize the screening was public. But she walked out while director David Mamet spoke. “Mamet said that he had access to my husband’s hair, which he calls wigs, and he measured them so he could get the height right,” she says. “I’m like, ‘Wow, that’s interesting, I didn’t know somebody snuck into my house and had access to my husband’s hair.’ ”
An HBO rep says Mamet used photos to gauge Phil’s hair size, as he said at LACMA, and that Rachelle was offered a private screening. [THR]

So who are you going to believe, HBO, or the lady who came up with the idea of sporting this hairstyle and outfit to murder court in the first place?

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It’s all but gospel now that Stanley Kubrick once conceived a perfect movie called AI, but died before he could make it, at which point Steven Spielberg took over and added an ending that was just him raining a warm piss stream on Kubrick’s dead face. Hey, that’s what people say. Well now, Spielberg tells French TV that he’s taken over another Kubrick project, working with Kubrick’s family on Kubrick’s famously ambitious but never executed screenplay about Napoleon, of which Kubrick once said “I expect to make the best movie ever made.” Interestingly, Spielberg plans to do it as a miniseries. Say what you will about AI, if this is half as good as Band of Brothers, I will watch until my eyes bleed.

Kubrick wrote the script in 1961 but ultimately abandoned the Napoleon biopic in the ’70s because of budget and production challenges. The late filmmaker is famed for his obsessive perfectionism, so his estate should find comfort working in the able hands of Spielberg. [THR]

Kubrick’s Napoleon project was so well-known that it even inspired an 1100-page coffee table book called “The Greatest Movie Never Made.” Impressive, considering a script is only about a hundred pages. ThePlaylist offers their cliff’s notes:

Originally proposed as his next project after “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Kubrick pitched the movie as a $5 million production (roughly $100 million in today’s dollars) with extraordinarily ambitious plans that included upwards of 30,000 men as extras for the battle scenes (remember, this was before CGI) as well as utilizing front projection techniques that he had recently used on ‘2001.’

The research was extensive and meticulous, with Kubrick using Felix Markham’s 1966 biography as a launching pad for his in-depth study that eventually grew to include extensive index cards kept on everyone in Napoleon’s life, and cross referenced to an exacting degree.

MGM had initially greenlit the movie, and United Artists were offered the project, but both grew wary after similar epics like “War & Peace” and “Waterloo” struggled financially.

Kubrick once contracted Anthony Burgess, who wrote A Clockwork Orange (the novel) to write a novel which would become the basis for his Napoleon movie. Kubrick rejected Burgess’s work, saying “Despite its considerable accomplishments, it does not, in my view, help solve either of the two major problems: that of considerably editing the events (and possibly restructuring the time sequence) so as to make a good story, without trivializing history or character, nor does it provide much realistic dialogue, unburdened with easily noticeable exposition or historical fact.” Burgess published the book anyway, Napoleon’s Symphony.

Meanwhile, I’m told, Spielberg has found a novel way to approach the material, in that he plans to tell the entire story from the perspective of Napoleon’s horse. I’d actually be most interested in the period of Napoleon’s life when he was exiled on Saint Helena way the hell out in the middle of the South Atlantic. But as long as they cover the day he spent at Raging Waters I’ll be happy.

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Steven Soderbergh’s film, Behind the Candelabra, starring Matt Damon and Michael Douglas, is set to hit HBO this Spring, and according to Soderbergh, speaking at the Television Critics Association press tour over the weekend, the only reason it’s not getting a theatrical release is that every studio in town told him it was “too gay.” This despite it costing only $5 million to make, having a name director, and starring Matt Damon and Michael Douglas. (*spits out coffee*) Hold on, Liberace is GAY?!

“Nobody would make it. We went to everybody in town,” the “Traffic” and “Ocean’s 11″ director told TheWrap on Friday, at the Television Critics Association winter press tour. “We needed $5 million. Nobody would do it.”

“They said it was too gay. Everybody. This was after ‘Brokeback Mountain,’ by the way. Which is not as funny as this movie. I was stunned. It made no sense to any of us.”

“They’re great and they’re really good at what they do, and ultimately I think more people will see it, and that’s all you care about,” Soderbergh said. “Studios were going, ‘We don’t know how to sell it. They were scared.’” [Yahoo/TheWrap]

Considering all the gay stuff studios release – Milk, Brokeback, Pitch Perfect, Fast and Furious – and how hot gay-themed projects are generally considered to be these days, you wonder if “they said it was too gay!” is just a convenient excuse for a movie that had bigger problems, not to mention a great way to curry sympathy. But Steven Soderbergh seems like a pretty straight shooter, so if he says it, I believe him. Plus it’s hard to be surprised by stories of business execs doing something shortsighted anymore. It’s just weird that the American public could be almost universally obsessed with super gay stuff – find me a network show that isn’t about singing and/or dancing, for instance – but only if the gayness isn’t spoken outright, like this, or I Love You Philip Morris (which had similar problems). You can crowbar some gay stereotypes into every sitcom after Modern Family, but God forbid you try to depict an actual gay relationship.

Incidentally, “too gay for theater” was the meanest thing my guidance counselor ever told me.

Gay? These guys?

As soon as Steve Jobs died, everyone wanted to make a biopic, including, reportedly, Aaron Sorkin, whose version will undoubtedly end with Jobs recanting on his death bed, sorry he ever helped inadvertently invent those meanie blogs (“No, seriously: I have a blog??!?”). Oh, but there’s another Steve Jobs biopic, independently financed by a guy who makes real estate textbooks and starring noted thespian Ashton Kutcher. It may or may not have been rushed into production to beat the other one, and oh, according to ScreenRant and CultofMac, the actual title is “jOBS.”

No way this is real, right? This seems less like a real movie than it does a hypothetical idea for a movie to use in an iMovie tutorial.  I’m counting down the days until a rights issue forces them to re-write Kutcher’s character as Steep Occupations, revolutionary inventor of the I-Mod. This is the Jackie Jormp-Jompest thing I’ve ever seen.

[pics via X17]