Today's Film News: Monahan Tracking Serial Killers

By Katey Rich

Along with Paul Haggis, William Monahan seems to be one of the most in-demand screenwriters working today. The Departed scribe is constantly signing on to new projects, and just joined a new one, based on a forthcoming Playboy article. The untitled project, writes Variety, is about a drug dealer who exchanges a prison sentence for an opportunity to go undercover in a mental hospital, where he tries to get a serial killer to confess to the locations of his victims. Departed producer Graham King is also on board.

Sandra Brown is just as popular a novelist as Michael Crichton or Tom Clancy, whose novels have been turned into multiple box office hits. But it's taken her until now to approve one of her novels for a movie adaptation, because, as she told The Hollywood Reporter, "Some excellent books have been made into excellent movies, but just as often the film renditions were bad." Fair enough. Her novel The Witness, about a Southern public defender, will be adapted as one of the first features from TwinStar Entertainment.

Currently teaching television a history lesson as the title character in HBO's miniseries John Adams, Paul Giamatti is joining the cast of Duplicity, as a corporate executive engaged in a game of one-upmanship with another exec (Tom Wilkinson, playing Benjamin Franklin in Adams). Variety writes that Billy Bob Thornton had also been considered for the role.

And finally, this is yesterday's news but worth reporting: Toby Emmerich, the former production executive for New Line, will now lead the company as it exists under the Warner Bros. arm. The Reporter writes that Emmerich will be the president and COO of the studio. Since Guillermo del Toro is now going around saying New Line hasn't offered him a contract to direct The Hobbit, as has been widely speculated, Emmerich's first order of business really ought to be getting that project off the ground.