Fiasco Heights Tagged Articles at Cinematical

The man who brought us the videos for "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and "Bullet with Butterfly Wings," and who was at one point turning Scarlett Johansson into a diamond thief, is getting ready for a different feature. The Hollywood Reporter posts that Sam Bayer is teaming up with Michael Bay for the action thriller called Fiasco Heights.

Said to have shades of film noir, the film focuses on a gunman who heads to the crime-filled city of Fiasco Heights. There, he "teams with a degenerate gambler/private eye on the run from a syndicate to look for a beautiful femme fatale and a mysterious briefcase." Oh, those pesky briefcases and sexy women. THR says that there has been a few drafts of the script, but the most recent was penned by Kyle Ward. This is actually his spec, that was picked up last year in April, so I guess he got to bring his pen back to it after some rewrites.

So far, the project is moving along slowly, and time will tell if this Bayer feature fares any better than Brilliance, the ScarJo piece, which seems to have faded into the oblivion.

It's like Pulp Fiction meets Sin City, with a twist of Michael Bay. At least that's what I got out of the following Variety article, which goes on to say that Universal has just snagged the spec script Fiasco Heights (which kind of sounds like a steamy mid-season high school drama on Fox) from writer Kyle Ward. Bay will produce through his Platinum Dunes banner, along with partners Andrew Form and Brad Fuller, as well as Chris Bender, JC Spink and Mason Novick. Script sale marks the first for Ward, who is currently an assistant over at Dreamworks. (I assume he promptly vacated that position once the sale was finalized.)

With no director attached yet (yes, as of now Bay is only producing), pic is described as taking place in a "stylized hyper-real environment" much like the one created for Sin City. Story apparently revolves around a hitman who must team up with a failed private eye in search of a missing woman and a very important briefcase. No word yet on what's in the briefcase (could it be the extra $15 million Grindhouse should have made this weekend?), but I'm sure we'll find out soon enough. This will mark the fifth pic for Bay's Platinum Dunes (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake, The Amityville Horror remake, The Hitcher remake and Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning being the first four), which was set up as a genre company to help launch the careers of new directors while spitting out fairly low-budgeted flicks. Thankfully, Fiasco Heights (am I the only one who hates that title?) is not some crappy remake, but is actually an original -- yes, original! -- thriller.