When the new year hit, and the strike continued, the interim agreements started to get made. Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner's United Artists made one with the WGA, and now The Hollywood Reporter has listed the first deal to be signed since that agreement was reached. UA has picked up the remake rights to the Spanish film Los Cronocrimenes. Scribe Steven Zaillian, who won an Oscar for his work on Schindler's List, is set to produce the feature, although sources say that he probably won't be writing it -- just overseeing, and possibly preparing the outline.

Now, the film, which translates into Timecrimes, was written and directed by Nacho Vigalondo, and THR describes it as "a jigsaw-style thriller about a man who accidentally travels back in time one hour and finds himself facing multiple dangers, including his own doppelganger." You'd think that between old-school challenges like dinos and samurai, and the butterfly effect, bigger jumps would be riskier, but I guess that's not the case! If the flick doesn't sound familiar, that's because it's all sorts of new. Cronocrimenes is scheduled to play at Sundance, and will get North American distribution by Magnolia.

The Bucket List stars Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman as two terminally ill men who escape from a cancer ward determined to complete everything on their "Bucket List" -- a list of things to do before they "kick the bucket." The film, directed by Rob Reiner, was just named one of the Ten Best of the Year by the National Board of Review. Cinematical spoke with the film's screenwriter, Justin Zackham.

Cinematical: You sit down to write The Bucket List, do you ever dream that you're going to get Rob Reiner to direct, Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman to star...

JZ: Of course not! I'd have to be an idiot! Not even close. I wrote it with Morgan Freeman's voice in mind, somehow thinking maybe I'd find a way to get it to him. But no, nothing like this.

Cinematical: And how did you get it to these huge names? What were the steps that brought this movie to the screen?

JZ: I went to film school at NYU. I did a TV pilot that I wrote and executive produced in New York with Paul Sorvino years ago. And then I came out here (Los Angeles) and was dicking around for a while. I made Going Greek, which was a very sort of crappy fraternity comedy that I did back in 2000. I wrote, produced, and directed, and that took so much out of me that I spent another couple years dicking around. And then I just sat down one day and wrote my own "Bucket List" just to kind of get my head organized. On that list was like "Get a movie made by a major studio, marry the perfect woman," all that kind of stuff. A lot of the stuff on there wound up in the movie. I had always fantasized about going to the Pyramids, the Great Wall, I've always been sort of obsessed with the whole notion of Everest. All those things were on it, and I just stuck it on a bulletin board.

About a year later, I just came up with this quote one day, a line that's actually in the film -- "You measure yourself by the people who measure themselves by you." Stuck that up on the bulletin board. And then another year went by before I had the idea "What about making this into a script?" And I thought if it were about me, at the time I was about 34, it wouldn't be that interesting. So I decided to make it about two guys who had lived a full life, and they only have a few months left, and suddenly there's a ticking clock, and the things that do have real importance, at least in their minds. The story really became about the one thing neither of these guys puts on their list but is the thing they most want. And that's a best friend. I have this ridiculous process, and I wrote the actual script really quickly, in about two weeks.

Mmmm! There's nothing quite like a helping of George W. Bush to get the blood pumping and fill your head with visions of lust and romance...right? No? Okay, maybe only if you're Laura Bush. Nevertheless, a documentary made about his 2000 presidential campaign, Journeys with George, is going to be made into a fictional movie. Reuters reports that filmmaker Alexandra Pelosi, the daughter of Nancy Pelosi (Speaker of the House), is going to adapt her doc into a romance, at the urging of Steven Zaillian -- the Oscar-winning writer of Schindler's List. I guess if there's anyone to convince someone of writing something, it'd be him!

Zaillian says that he saw a Devil Wears Prada tone to the documentary, and convinced the filmmaker to make her screenwriting debut with the material. "Alexandra is a talented documentary filmmaker and a great raconteur. She's been places and seen and done things few of the rest of us have, and I'm excited she's decided to share her insider perspective and gift for storytelling with us in a screenplay." The movie will focus on "a young, impressionable news producer who finds herself dealing with the challenges of life and love in the midst of covering a presidential campaign." It's even scored itself a first-look deal with Sony Pictures, so this could become a big deal if the script works out. Good luck, Pelosi!

There's no doubting Steven Zaillian's talents as a writer. He won an adapted screenplay Oscar for Schindler's List and also was nominated for Gangs of New York and Awakenings. As a director, too, he's had his share of accolades. Remember Searching for Bobby Fischer? Not bad at all. But considering he last gave us the long-delayed, much-condemned remake of All the King's Men, he has a lot to prove with his next go behind the camera. According to Variety, he's announced his follow-up, and it's a project that will be judged with extra scrutiny since it happens to be an adaptation of one of this year's most popular books. Zaillian will write and direct the screen version of Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns. Maybe you heard of it; the novel only held the top spot on the New York Times Bestseller List for most of the summer. Personally, I noticed more people reading Hosseini's previous (and debut) novel, The Kite Runner, but still, it's clear the author is the Dan Brown of 2007.

A Thousand Splendid Suns tells the story of two Afghan women married to the same man and their alliance against their abusive husband. It also covers the last three decades of Afghan history, through the Soviet invasion, the civil war and the Taliban rule. It was so highly anticipated after the success of The Kite Runner, that producer Scott Rudin picked up the rights five months before it was even released. It should be pointed out that Rudin produced Zaillian's first two directorial works, Bobby Fischer and A Civil Action, but did not produce All the King's Men. The movie version of The Kite Runner, which was directed by Marc Forster (Finding Neverland) and will be in theaters in November, should be good enough to also build interest for Zaillian's version of A Thousand Splendid Suns. Meanwhile, Zaillian's latest script-work (rewriting himself) will be on display in November's American Gangster, from director Ridley Scott, who also helmed Zaillian's much-panned adaptation of Hannibal.

If you're someone who grew up in the 1970s and early '80s, then you definitely know who Jackie Earle Haley is. If only for his performance as Kelly Leak in the Bad News Bears trilogy (and his great turn as Moocher in Peter Yates' Breaking Away), Jack Haley made for a memorable little character actor. After co-starring with a then-unknown actor named Tom Cruise in 1983's Losin' It (which was directed by none other than Curtis Hanson), Haley kind of fell off the Hollywood radar -- in a big way. Aside from a few quick moments in Murder, She Wrote and MacGyver episodes, Jackie Earle Haley could be seen in titles like Dollman, Nemesis and Maniac Cop 3. And unfortunately he didn't work often enough to gain much of a Campbell-type cult following.

So imagine my pleasant surprise when I sat down to watch All the King's Men and noticed that -- hey, isn't that Jackie Earle Haley playing Sean Penn's ultra-tough bodyguard dude?!? How cool to see him back in a movie again! Granted, he didn't have many lines, but it was still great to see an old pal after so many years. And then I headed off to see a dark comedy / suburban drama called Little Children ... and there was Jackie again, this time with a much meatier role: He plays a convicted sex offender who moves into a cushy suburban neighborhood that most definitely doesn't want him around. And the guy gives a great performance in a really difficult role.

So who knows what's next for Mr. Haley? This New York Times article does a fine job of summing up the guy's comeback, and I think that both of the directors involved (Steven Zaillian and Todd Field) deserve a hearty round of praise for pulling Jackie Earle out of obscurity and giving him another shot in the spotlight. Based on the two performances I just witnessed, I suspect Haley will be popping up a lot more frequently in the near future.