(Kevin Costner introduced the Daniel Craig popsicle to the American Indian.  Most historians say it caused their downfall.)

Collider recently broke the news that Daniel Craig, fresh off his AIDS mustache tour with Hugh Jackman, would replace Robert Downey Jr. in Cowboys and Aliens for Jon Favreau and Dreamworks.

Craig would play Zeke Jackson, the lead character in a story about Apache Indians and Western settlers who must lay their differences aside when an alien spaceship crash lands in Silvery City, Arizona. Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci (“Transformers,” “Star Trek”) adapted the script.

Still no word on whether this too will be in 3D, but at a recent script meeting, execs asked Kurtzman/Orci, “Could this Zeke Jackson fall in love with a Pocahontas Cat Monkey?  Audiences really seem to respond to that.”

Cowboys and Aliens is your basic aliens-as-metaphor-for-imperialism graphic novel, and has been in development for quite some time.  But sh’t got real back in June when Robert Downey Jr. signed on to star, and sh’t's about to get mega super real now that Jon Favreau has signed on to direct a script written by Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci, and Damon Lindelof.  If you’re keeping score at home, that’s the writer/director team behind Iron Man plus the writers of Star Trek and Transformers, plus one of the top dogs at Lost.  If hotness were bricks, this project would have plenty.

The story centers on an Old West battle between the Apache and Western settlers, including a former Union Army gunslinger named Zeke Jackson (Downey), that is interrupted by a spaceship crashing into the prairie near Silver City, Ariz.  The story draws a parallel between the American imperialist drive to conquer the “savage” Indians with its advanced technology and the aliens’ assault on Earthlings, who must join together to survive the invaders’ attack. [THR]

Kurtzman, Orci & Co. (Kortzi) are taking over scripting duties from Iron Man writers Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby (Fergby), which is interesting, as it’s well known in Hollywood circles that Kortzi/Fergby is a professional rivalry the likes of which some say hasn’t been seen since Beatles/Stones, or Brando/Schwarzenegger.  The dueling duos frequently attend the same parties, and after a few Zimas, have been known to engage in some heated chicken fights.

[via HeatVision]

After having previously reported on studios going forward with movies about Candyland and Bazooka Joe, nothing should surprise me at this point.  And yet, when I first heard the rumor of a View-Master movie, I thought it had to be a joke.  That’s right, a View-Master movie.  And it’s not a joke.

Remember View-Master, the Fisher-Price toy with those little 3D picture discs of mountains, rivers and caverns that you could rotate through a viewfinder? Well, DreamWorks is in negotiations to acquire movie rights to the toy from Mattel (which owns Fisher-Price) and has asked Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci to do some “Transformers”-style magic on it. [THR]

Transformers style magic, huh?  I’m not sure what they’re picturing.  I think maybe they thought Orci and Kurtzman could just walk in, set off a smoke bomb and go, “Ta da! Now this idea isn’t f-cking retarded!”

(“Yesterday we had a pillow fight and gave each other haircuts.”)

Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci wrote Star Trek ($246 million so far), Transformers 2 ($201 mil in five days), and produced The Proposal ($69 mil in two weeks), so you could say they’re having a decent year.  In related news, I bought pillowcases.  Today Variety reports on their next project, producing License to Steal.

Shane Salerno (Armageddon, AVP: R) will pen the script. Project is loosely based on Marc Weingarten’s Salon.com article about the high-end repo business, in which agents travel all the world to reclaim play toys including private jets and speedboats.

I heard Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci settle script disagreements with tickle fights.  True story. From the Salon article:

For the past three decades, Nick Popovich has been one of a secret tribe of big game hunters who specialize in stealing jets from the jungle hideouts of corrupt landowners in Colombia, Mexico and Brazil and swiping go-fast boats from Wall Street titans in Miami and East Hampton. Super repos have been known to hire swat teams, hijack supertankers and fly off with eastern bloc military helicopters. For a cut of the overall value, they’ll repossess anything.

And times have never been better. When lenders opened the sluice gates of easy credit throughout the last decade, high rollers went out and splurged on Gulfstreams and yachts. When the job goes away, the bonuses dry up and the stock market tanks, it’s a long and nasty downward spiral that leads to Popovich’s door.

So basically, he’s a modern-day Robin Hood who steals from the rich and gives to the banks. Topical!  I plan to protest this film by mailing myself a teabag. It won’t really solve anything, but by the time I figure that out, my troubles will have melted away in a flood of soothing chamomile.

(“We sleep in bunk beds.”)

Michael Bay has been taking a lot of heat lately for his jive-talking, illiterate, gold-tooth wearing minstrel bots, and FilmSchoolRejects recently got a chance to ask Transformers screenwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman about it.

FSR: I heard that the gold tooth was Michael Bay’s idea, but do you have any response to those who found The Twins offensive?
Orci: Number one, we sympathize. Yes, the gold tooth was not in the script, that’s true.
Kurtzman: It’s really hard for us to sit here and try to justify it. I think that would be very foolish, and if someone wants to be offended by it, it’s their right. We were very surprised when we saw it, too, and it’s a choice that was made. If anything, it just shows you that we don’t control every aspect of the movie.
FSR: Were you offended by them?
Kurtzman: I wasn’t thrilled. I certainly wasn’t thrilled.
Orci: Yeah, same reaction. I’m not easily offended, but when I saw it, I thought, ‘Someone’s gonna write about that.’”

If you’ve ever seen a press-tour interview, you know it’s almost impossible to get anything out of movie people other than glowing, unoriginal, embarrassing praise.  In the movie business, acknowledging a disagreement and saying “I wasn’t thrilled” is tantamount to calling someone a devil-worshipping holocaust denier.  But that’s why it’s nice to work with Michael Bay.  You know you can say anything you want about him in a print interview, because he’ll probably be too busy shopping for gold teeth to see it, and anyway he can barely read.  True story.