Hollywood is littered with stories about film projects that fell apart before they could come to fruition.

Today on his Facebook page, Kevin Smith tells us of how his planned relaunch of the Fletch franchise, based on the comic mystery novels of Gregory McDonald, which he hoped to feature his Mallrats and Chasing Amy star Jason Lee in the lead role of investigative newspaper reporter Irwin M. Fletcher, fell apart through various Hollywood factors beyond his control.

I’d adapted an insanely-faithful-to-the-book FLETCH WON script (which tells the story of a young Fletch’s first big story at the newspaper), and I wanted to make the flick with Lee as the lead, but Miramax head honcho Harvey Weinstein didn’t get Jason Lee at all. I’d say “Jason Lee IS Fletch!” and he’d say “Jason Lee doesn’t have an audience.” Even when he was headlining MY NAME IS EARL, Harvey maintained Jason Lee was never big enough to play the lead in FLETCH WON.

And it all came to a head in 2003, while I was in post-production on JERSEY GIRL – when Ben Affleck had been offered the lead in a movie at Disney. (This is in the days before Ben had ever realized his true, Oscar-caliber calling, mind you.) Ben asked if I wanna direct this movie in which he’s gonna be the lead. Exciting: I’d never directed someone else’s feature script before. I read the script and it was fun – but making it with my friend would make it even more so, I figured. So with Ben’s encouragement, I say “Okay.”

Now, this is back when Harvey was running Miramax, which was then owned by Disney. So I figured it’d be no big deal: s’all in the family anyway. But this was also when the split between Harvey and Disney was brewing – which would come to a head with Fahrenheit 911 a few years later.
So when I tell Harvey “I’m gonna direct a movie that Ben’s in over at Disney” it went over pretty poorly.

I had an overall deal with Miramax in which they got a first look/crack at anything I wrote and directed. This new Ben gig was a directing-only opportunity, so no prob: I’m well-within my overall deal rights to do so. But I guess the thought of a pair of Miramaxkateers working for Michael Eisner didn’t rest well with Harvey. I was told to sit tight while the Brothers Weinstein talked to the Mouse.

Harvey told Disney their proposed Ben-starring/Kevin-directed movie would now be a co-prod, based on my Miramax overall deal. Disney declined the “offer”, so I was then instructed by both Harvey and Bob to turn the gig down. I pointed out that my deal allowed me to direct for somebody else, but there were a metric shit-ton of guilt-ridden “family” and “us” and “them” terms thrown at me.
And that’s all it took: because as much as I loved Ben, I was 100%-Miramax in those days. I was in the coolest gang in town and I’d die for my colors.

But I wasn’t LEAVING the family; just working with Ben – who was also family. We were just gonna do it elsewhere for a minute. So while I’m trying to point out that my deal allowed for me to direct for others, Harvey hits me with a verbal right hook out of nowhere.

“Fine,” Harvey said. “Drop that Disney movie and I’ll let you make your FLETCH movie…” I was ready to hug him when he added “With BEN as Fletch.”

“What about Jason Lee?” I asked. Harvey said that was never going to happen. If I wanted to make FLETCH WON, I had to get Ben to be Fletch. I argued that Ben was still gonna wanna do the flick at Disney, so I was told to convey a message to him: Miramax would match Ben’s Disney offer.

So for about two weeks in 2003, we almost rushed my FLETCH WON flick into production with bloated, studio-like salaries – all to beat Disney. Harvey’s play was kinda brilliant: he knew the only thing that’d give me pause about working elsewhere was working with a friend back home.
Ben read and dug the script and the money was as big as what he was gonna get for the Disney movie. So suddenly, FLETCH WON was possible. An office was opened. Preliminary scouting began. And when shit needs to suddenly happen fast in the movie biz, that costs MONEY, son! Lots!

But mercifully, before the proposed $50 million version of FLETCH WON could happen (their budget, not mine), Ben mercifully passed. He said he didn’t feel right about flat-leaving Disney and was gonna stick around to make that flick. I didn’t go with Ben to Disney. Ben was cool about it: he said he’d never understand my loyalty-thing to Harvey but he still respected it.

See, Harvey knew he had me regardless. Being Miramax MEANT something to me – a code I lived by. We were a gang of NY. It was Us vs All Them.

But ironically, I’d never make another movie for Miramax: Harvey & Bob split from Disney a few years later, creating The Weinstein Company. The next flick I made was CLERKS II. And while I love that film, it never felt right having a Weinstein Company logo at the head of it instead of the NY skyline of the Miramax logo.

See, that’s why it’s easy for me to leave the movie biz now: When that era of Miramax died, a big piece of my passion for film died with it…

So now I’m mostly a podcaster.

Ben went on to win an Oscar for Best Picture this year.

And Harvey won the rest of the awards with SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK and DJANGO UNCHAINED.

FLETCH wound up at Warner Brothers years later. My only regret is a flick never got made before Fletch creator Greg McDonald passed away.

That Disney movie – the one that caused so much contention and friction? The studio pulled the plug on it mere weeks away from production because it didn’t believe in a $60million dollar budgeted Ben Affleck movie (ironic, considering that’s kinda what ARGO cost).

So Ben didn’t wind up doing the movie anyway – which was called GHOSTS OF GIRLFRIENDS PAST.

It was made years later… starring Jen Garner.

Only in Hollywood…

Ben Affleck added another trophy to his shelf last night as his film Argo secured him the Best Director award at last night’s Directors Guild Awards, beating out Steven Spielberg, Kathryn Bigelow, Tom Hooper and Ang Lee.

Affleck and the film have already won top honors at the Producers Guild Awards, the Golden Globes and the Critics Choice Awards.

This of course further cements Argo into the lead position in the race for Academy Award gold at the end of the month. Historically, the winner of the DGA has had a better than average chance of winning the Academy Award for Best Director. In fact, over tha DGA’s 65 year history only six winners have not gone on to win the Oscar as well. Unfortunately, Affleck will be the seventh, as he did not receive a Best Director nom.

The hitch here comes down to a recent change in the Academy’s rules governing that nominations for Best Picture which allow anywhere between five and ten films to make the list while the Best Director category remains locked at five names. So while Argo was one of the nine named for Best Picture consideration, Affleck was not one of the five named to Best Director.

This leaves the Best Director category a bit of a wild card now, with no established predictors for it in play. Of the other DGA nominees, Spielberg and Lee are both in the OScar’s Best Director category so I would suppose that the smart money would be on them.

Last night, Ben Affleck’s Iranian hostage thriller Argo won top honors at the Producer’s Guild Awards, continuing its awards season sweep started with the Critics’ Choice Awards and continued through the Golden Globes.

The win positions the film as a major contender for the Academy Award’s Best Picture prize, squaring off against such heavyweights as Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln and Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty.

The Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Picture have often gone hand-in-hand historically, with only a small number of directors who have won an Oscar not seeing their film similarly rewarded. However, due to the recent Best Picture category rules change that allows anywhere between five and ten nominees while the Best Director category is still locked in at five nominees, Affleck found himself squeezed out of the director’s competition while his film was not. As such, Argo was not considered having as much of a chance at Best Picture as those films whose directors did manage to get a nomination.

But the Producers Guild Awards has emerged as a strong indicator as to who will win the Best Picture Oscar. In the last five years, it has accurately presaged what film was going to go home with the golden statuette. In the past ten years it has predicted seven out of ten winners and has a 16 out of 23 accuracy overall.

So what’s next? This coming Saturday will be the Directors Guild Awards, which Oscar prognosticators have often used as an indicator for who will win Best Director at the Academy Awards. If Affleck continues his winning streak, it would certainly cement Argo‘s lead for Best Picture. And if Argo were to win an Oscar, it would become only the third film in Academy Awards history to have ever won a Best Picture Oscar without even having even a nomination in the Best Director category.

Of course, the problems with percentages is that unless they are 100 per cent, there’s still room for the possibility that things will go another way. We’ll find out which way things fall on February 24th when the Academy Awards are awarded.

1. Argo (Warner Brothers, 3,250+ Theaters, 120 Minutes, Rated R): Based a formerly classified, hard-to-believe-if-it-was fiction true story, the film tells the tale of a rescue mission set in the days of the Iranian Hostage Crisis. Six embassy members managed to escape the embassy take over and take residence in the Canadian Embassy. The CIA hatches a plan to get them out–they’ll pose as a Canadian film crew scouting locations. The embassy workers will pose as part of the Canadian crew. The only problem is that the Iranians are very suspicious and if the embassy workers are caught, they are dead.

While ”Argo” is fake,the CIA based it on an abandoned adaptation of Roger Zelazny’s novel, Lord of Light. It got to the pre-production stages, with comic book legend Jack Kirby doing design drawings for the film. So, while Ben Affleck won’t be directing the Justice League film, he at least has done another film with a connection, tenuous though it may be, with comics.

2. Here Comes The Boom (Sony/Columbia, @3,000 Theaters, 105 Minutes, Rated PG): Kevin James is turning into a thinking man’s Adam Sandler. Now, wait! Hear me out on this!

Paul Blart: Mall Cop, for some, was a silly exercise in seeing a fat man trip over stuff. I saw it as a witty parody of the Die Hard-type films with Kevin James as the fat guy who trips over stuff recast in the Bruce Willis role. If it was just the former, I probably would have joined the naysayers who didn’t like it. As the latter, I liked it quite a bit.

I did not see The Zookeeper, so I can’t comment on that one, but this film appears to be a return to form. Come to see the fat guy get pummeled repeatedly, stay to see a subversive parody of the “Inspirational Teacher” and “Underdog Sports” genres.

3. Sinister (Summit Entertainment, @2,500 Theaters, 110 Minutes, Rated R): Hey, horror fans! Stop me when this sounds familiar. A family moves into a new house and…

What? Stop there? But I haven’t even gotten to the fact that dad’s a writer and the evil box of film he found which releases an evil entity that threatens his family!

Yeah, this film is Frankenstein construction of parts of better films. You don’t need a screenwriter for this, all you need is a computer program. And not even a new computer. You can run it on a dusty old Commodore 64 from the 80s.

The reason why films like The Cabin in the Woods and Scream take such a hold in the horror fandom is because the conventions they mock are ground into dust by films like these. Sure, there will probably be scares in this film, but only because the scene was scary in an earlier film. We need sick bastards to create original horror, not people to rip off the sick bastards that came before them.

4. Seven Psychopaths (CBS Films, @1,475 Theaters, 109 Minutes, Rated R): Speaking of sick bastards, let me present you with Martin McDonagh. I believe me when I say that in this case I mean “sick bastard” as the highest compliment.

McDonagh is one of my most favorite writers. I followed his writing from the stage to the screen, and have been impressed by his talent and ability all along the way. His writing is not for all tastes. He blends the wacky with the gruesome, the pathetic with the fearsome, into a dark comedy brew with great characters, excellent dialog and more than its fair share of heart.

If you are adventurous, and can see only one film this week, and if it playing near you, go see this film. If it wasn’t for a little thing called New York Comic Con, I would be seeing it at Friday’s first showing. But even without seeing, I know it has the best potential to be the best film this weekend.

Warner Brothers looks to have a hit on their hands with Ben Affleck’s Argo and may be looking to cash in on that. The studio is in discussion with the actor/director to star in writer/directors’s Glenn Ficarra and John Requa upcoming Focus.

Ficarra and Requa are the duo behind the romantic comedy Crazy, Stupid Love and they were first interested in bring back that film’s stars Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone for this new project about a veteran grifter who becomes romantically involved with a newcomer to the con game he is training. It sounds as if the studio is looking to get the film in front of cameras as quickly as possible, so I would expect a casting announcement for the role fairly soon.

Via Deadline.

Ben Affleck has confirmed that he is not working on Warner Brothers superhero team adaptation Justice League. It had been previously reported that the actor/director was going to be approached by the studio to helm the film, but while speaking to Canadian site 24 Hours, he denied any involvement saying-

I’m not working on the Justice League. One of the problems with entertainment web sites is that they need to fill pages, and that’s how rumours get started.

Of course, the site then proceeded to try to generate some rumors of their own by parsing what Affleck said down to an almost Clintonian “What is your definition of the word ‘is’?” level. But I think that we can safely take him at his word here.

So if not Affleck, then who? How about the masterminds behind one of Warner’s biggest franchise earners, the Wachowskis? Moviehole is reporting that the studio is very happy with the team’s latest film, Cloud Atlas, and have placed them onto the Justice League director’s gig short list. The pair certainly showed that they could handle staging big sprawling action sequences between superpowered individuals in The Matrix films and their names are frequently brought up when fans discuss who would be good candidates to sit in the director’s chair for the film.

Moviehole does note, and I would agree with this analysis, that the Wachowskis like to work at their own pace, relatively free from suggestions that might be passed down from executives. That certainly doesn’t sound like the working conditions that someone directing a project that the studio is putting a lot of pressure on to succeed and launch a series of live action superhero franchises for them.

We’ll see if there is any substance to this story as time moves along. But, I have a feeling that we’re only being to play whack-a-mole with this, so hang in there.

Will or he or won’t he? That’s the question surrounding actor/director Ben Affleck and Warner Brothers’ attempts to get a Justice League film on the silver screen.

Yesterday Variety broke the news that the studio was interested in having the director of The Town helm their comic book adaption, going so far as to sending the most recent draft exclusively to him. We talked about the story here.

However, later last evening, Deadline ran a story that poo-poo-ed the idea that Affleck would direct the film saying that they had been in contact with unnamed “Affleck reps” who stated “that it was not going to happen with him.”

Now it should be noted that Deadline’s report is not necessarily contracting Variety’s. If anything, it does state that the Variety piece was correct in stating that the script had been sent to Affleck and that he may be meeting with the studio about the project.

But Deadline’s post from contributor Mike Fleming tries to spin Variety’s story by saying that they were implying that Affleck was all but signed for the job when Variety neither stated nor implied anything of the sort.

When reading this type of reportage from Deadline – Well, others may engage in it on occasion, but this rule really applies primarily to Deadline – you have to keep in mind the volatile nature of its editor Nikki Finke. She is a woman who has warped from being a tenacious journalist to one with a sense of entitlement whose temper tantrums over an exclusive being given by a studio to any other outlet have only increased over the years. And while it is Fleming’s name on Deadline’s post, the vindictive, snide tone is pure Finke.

This is not the first time this week that Finke and her site have attacked a story from Variety. On Monday, Fleming denounced the trade’s report that there were some negotiations going on between Marvel Studios and Twentieth Century Fox over extending Fox’s film rights to the comic book hero Daredevil in return for allowing some villains from the Fantastic Four rights package which the studio owned. Never mind the possibility that he could have been fed a denial by the anonymous “Fox insiders” he quoted having an ulterior motive, like say the news possibly impacting the ongoing negotiations. The chance to take a cheap shot at a competitor and his former employer takes precedence over doing any type of journalistic follow up or analysis of the statement he had been given.

Not all of Deadline’s posts are as tilted as these have been, but it is always important to keep in mind when reading any site’s reportage, including ours, where the individual story stands in context with not only what other sources are reporting but what the individual site’s own reporting history is. And in doing so this morning, I can’t help but come to the conclusion that Deadline’s post is more a cheap shot than it is something that constructively contributes to the ongoing movie dialogue.

Hot on the heels of Marvel Studios announcement yesterday that Joss Whedon would be back to direct Avengers 2, Warner brothers appears to be making some aggressive moves to get their own superhero all-star team property, Justice League, up and running. Variety is reporting that the studio has approached actor/director Ben Affleck about the job and that they will be meeting to discuss the project later this week.

Affleck appears to be the studios top and only choice with Variety reporting that he is the sole person to whom they have sent a copy of the screenplay recently turned in by Gangster Squad scribe Will Beal.

Warners has been having some trouble jumping starting franchises based on the superhero properties owned by corporate sibling DC Entertainment. Outside of director Christopher Nolan’s Batman triptych, efforts such as Superman Returns and Green Lantern have met with less-than-enthusiastic responses from fans. A Justice League film would combine several of DC’s most recognizable superheroes including Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, Green Lantern and Aquaman. Warners does have a new Superman film, Man Of Steel, coming next summer from Zack Snyder.

Affleck has some previous superhero experience, having starred in Fox’s 2003 Daredevil. Following the film’s release he was less than enthusiastic about the whole experience and stated that he would not want to put on a superhero suit again. This flies in the face of Variety’s speculation that since he took roles in his last two directorial efforts – The Town and the upcoming Argo – Affleck would probably want a role in Justice League as well. Of course, there could be a non-superhero role in the script that may intrigue Affleck. The character of Max Lord, a businessman who at various times has been integral to the running of the team and one of their most ruthless opponents, springs to mind.

There are some that might say that doing a big screen version of Stephen King’s The Stand is a bit superfluous. After all, there was quite good six-hour ABC miniseries that did the tome justice back in 1994, one which could be bought at Amazon for $24.99 (and contains a copy of The Langoliers and The Golden Years as well).

However, Hollywood being what it is and the miniseries being almost 20 years old, Warner Brothers is dead set on bringing the novel to the big screen. At least they have gone in a good direction for…well…a director.

Deadline is reporting that Warner Brothers has tapped Ben Affleck to helm the big screen version of King’s seminal work. Harry Potter‘s David Yates was recently said to be in negotiations for the director’s chair.

While Affleck might have been the bomb in Phantoms, yo, he has made his name in recent years as a director, receiving good notices for Gone Baby Gone and The Town. Those good notices were well deserved, but he is entering new territory. The Stand is a sweeping epic that had trouble fitting into a six-hour TV miniseries. You can’t imagine Affleck having any more than half that amount of time to tell the same amount of plot. Good luck to you sir.

With the strength of two strong films on his director’s resume, actor Ben Affleck has found himself in the envious position to be getting offers for work on both sides of the camera. For the past couple of months, the two biggest projects he had been circling were the role of Tom Buchanan in Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby and directing the Iranian-hostage drama Argo. Since both projects were scheduled to shoot in the fall, the question was which one would the actor/director choose?

As you could probably guess from the headline, Affleck has decided to go with directing Argo. The film will be based on a Wired magazine magazine article on the 1979 Iranian Hostage Crisis titled “How the CIA Used a Fake Sci-Fi Flick to Rescue Americans from Tehran.” The article detailed how United States and Canadian intelligence services concocted a plan to rescue six diplomats from Tehran, Iran after Iranian militants seized control of the American Embassy taking its staff hostage.

Chris Terrio’s screenplay for the project landed at the number 9 position on last year’s Black List survey of the hottest unproduced screenplays currently circulating in Hollywood.

Via Deadline.