Runt Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Following his better-than-expected success this past weekend with Wild Hogs, writer-director Walt Becker is the "it" man in Hollywood. And he's got plenty of projects in the pipeline to show for it, including a re-team with John Travolta called Old Dogs, which we told you about last week, and now the twin-rivalry comedy Runts, which he just set up at Dimension. The movie, being co-written by David Drew Gallagher, is about twin brothers who are complete opposites. As in one is a tall, muscular goody-goody with an Austrian accent and the other is a short, balding crook with a Jersey accent? Sounds original.

Sure, I'm being hard on the idea without hearing the entire pitch, but it's hard to take Becker seriously. He claims that he sees things in trailers, meaning his ideas are solely about what can be sold to an audience in a few minutes. On the other hand, Becker and Gallagher came up with the idea for Schooled, a project set to happen at Touchstone that the two pitched in 2005 (probably shocked that nobody had already thought of it.) Schooled sounds like your basic John Hughes comedy, yet it is seen through the eyes of and concentrates on the lives of the teachers. Here's hoping Ben Stein plays a nerdy teacher who tries to woo the popular hot teacher.

According to an interview with MTV.com, musical yeller Fred Durst is very serious about starting a film career - and he wants to direct, dammit. Despite the fact that people are apparently lining up to have him in act in their projects (he was in NBC's Revelations miniseries, and also appeared with Jeremy Sisto in Population 436, and indie film that just finished shooting in Canada), Durst is determined to be behind the camera. Sure, so far his only non-video directorial work was on Unquestionable Truth, a 30 minute short that appears on a Limp Bizkit release. But he does have a couple of full-length features in the works. Though he won't name the films, Durst has long been associated with Runt, a drama "about a high-school outcast," and a thriller called Joe.

And make no mistake: the man is setting his sights high. "I want to make timeless movies. I want to be beside Martin Scorsese and Wes Anderson and Paul Thomas Anderson and Francis Ford Coppola. I'm a real director." Dang. Well, you certainly can't accuse Durst of lacking ambition.