MilesMillar Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Even Michael Bay needs a break from explosions, robots, and Megan Fox. As Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen was demolishing the box office, DreamWorks and Bay bought up the rights to James Frey's I Am Number 4. Variety now reports that they've secured the rights, and have now set Alfred Gough and Miles Millar to work on penning the script. Bay is attached as producer, but is still dancing around the idea of directing the film for DreamWorks.

I Am Number 4 is the first book in a series of six. It's centered around a group of nine aliens who flee their destroyed planet, and crash on Earth. They disguise themselves as teenagers (of course -- why would you be a supermodel or a sports star when you could go back to high school?), and Number 4 realizes they are still being hunted by those who destroyed their homeworld. There's some dashes of the television show Roswell there, and probably a few dozen other sci-fi teen tales.

The teen-out-of-water story of Number 4 is familiar territory for Millar and Gough, who are probably best known for their stint on Smallville, though they also had a hand in Spider-Man 2. What I find the most remarkable about is the continued success of Frey. Who says lying about your memoirs will damage your writing career and option prospects? This is America, baby!

Is there room in Hollywood for more than one giant robot franchise? Well, Warner Bros. certainly seems to think so. The long-gestating feature film version of the classic anime Robotech isn't dead in the water yet -- and to prove it, WB has hired two new writers to give the script another polish. The Hollywood Reporter has announced that Alfred Gough and Miles Millar have signed to write the live-action adaption.

Robotech originally aired during the '80s in North America (and was compiled from three different series' released in Japan); the film is being described as "A sprawling sci-fi epic" and takes place in a not-too-distant future where humans have developed giant robots from an alien technology. When another invasion looms, mankind hops in their giant robots to fend off the alien hoard, and the fate of the human race is left in the hands of two young pilots. Tobey Maguire will still produce, but it remains to be seen if Maguire will star -- and at the rate this project is moving, Maguire is going to be in his 40's by the time this film hits theaters.

Gough and Millar aren't the first writers to take a stab at the anime classic. Back in June, we reported that Lawrence Kasdan was drafting a script, but the project seemed to stall after that. According to THR, Warners is keen to get the film into production, and the hiring of Millar and Gough could give the film a needed boost of "geek cred" since both worked on Spider Man 2 and The Mummy Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, as well as a stint writing for Smallville.

It looks like it could be some time before Robotech finally makes its way to the big screen, but here's your chance to sound off on whether you would actually want to see it on the big screen ...

New screenwriter Justin Ware is just rolling in the successful pitches and writing gigs these days. He's the pen behind American Summer, the comedy I told you about in February. Remember the oh-so-charming premise? A pool cleaner (Matthew Lillard) slacks around cleaning the pools of the rich while his parents think he's going to school at Harvard. When his apartment is fumigated, he moves into an empty mansion and pimps out an escort he knows. That production just wrapped, and he already has three other projects in the works -- Adrenaline, Amazing Girls, and Handymen.

Now The Hollywood Reporter has posted the next project added to his ever-growing list -- an original comedy pitch called Wake Up Call, which will be produced by Smallville creators Al Gough and Miles Millar. Unfortunately, they say almost nothing about the plot, other than describing it as "a high-concept comedy along the lines of Wedding Crashers." Does that mean a similar wedding-crashing premise, or just the general idea? Perhaps the flick will focus on some guys who don't crash weddings, but instead randomly give wake-up calls to people in the neighborhood? Or people who make the wake up calls at a hotel. Or maybe some dudes who need a wake up call about their stagnant lives. Considering the writer and the title, what's your best guess?

The guy's apparently done a whole lot of TV work in the past several years, but actor Luke Ford is pretty much a nobody to the movie geeks of the world. That'll change soon, because the guy was just cast to play the 20-something son of Brendan Fraser's Rick O'Connell character in The Mummy Part 3. (Although I highly doubt it'll be called The Mummy Part 3 when it hits your local theaters ... and no, Rachel Weisz still isn't interested in stopping back for a third mummy-go-round).

It looks like Universal's long-term plan is to have the Mummy series morph into a father-son franchise, and director Rob Cohen couldn't be happier with the 26-year-old Australian actor: "He tested against four much more established actors, and he was magic when he read with Brendan," is what he told Variety. The same source indicates that six different actresses have been tested to play the role of "Evie," although that might just be a last-ditch effort to get Ms. Weisz back on board. Frankly it'd be a whole lot smarter to just write the character out completely than to re-cast it with a different actress. It always feels weird when producers do that. If they really wanted to play hardball they could say Evie died and that's why Rick O'Connell's new girlfriend is played by Elizabeth Banks.

The Mummy 3 plot involves adventures in the Himalayas and battles with crazy shape-shifting mummies and freaky witches played by Jet Li and Michelle Yeoh. Production begins on July 27, and the flick is scheduled to hit multiplexes precisely one year later. (OK, maybe not to the day.) And if you're extra-skeptical about this project, keep in mind that the screenplay comes from Miles Millar and Alfred Gough -- and you could certainly do worse on a "Part 3" than that particular writing team.