Variety reports that HBO Films will bring the Barry Bonds story to their network. San Francisco Giant Bonds recently broke baseball's all-time home run record, "allegedly" lied to a jury under oath concerning his use of performance-enhancing drugs, and was indicted on federal charges. Say it ain't so, Barry! HBO has purchased the rights to Game of Shadows: Barry Bonds, BALCO and the Steroids Scandal That Rocked Professional Sports, which is said to paint Bonds as "a gifted player who made a Faustian bargain to increase his power." Ron Shelton will adapt the book with John Norville (co-writer of Shelton's Tin Cup) after the WGA Strike. Shelton is also set to direct.

Ron Shelton is a terrific writer/director of sports movies when he's on, but he doesn't have the greatest batting average. Bull Durham, White Men Can't Jump, and Tin Cup are classics of baseball, basketball, and golf film, respectively. But Cobb? Play it to the Bone? The dreadful Hollywood Homicide (not a sports film I realize, but so bad I had to mention it)? Hopefully the Bonds film will be one of his "hits." I always find it interesting when movies are made about figures who are not only still alive, but still going strong. It just seems like it'd be...awkward for all involved. Who do you think should play Barry Bonds? Shelton regular Kevin Costner? I kid, I kid. Do you think they should get a newcomer or go for a star? And which star?

It has been a couple years since Wim Wenders' last feature film (Don't Come Knocking), as the director has been busy working on shorts for three different compilations (including the Cannes showcase, To Each His Cinema). And now it appears that instead of immediately heading back to a full-length of his own, he will be very closely producing Michael Meredith's second feature, Open Road. Meredith wrote Wenders' Land of Plenty and previously directed the little-seen 3 Days of Rain, an interlocking of six Chekov adaptations, which starred his father, former Dallas Cowboys quarterback Don Meredith, and Peter Falk, who also starred in Wenders' best film, Wings of Desire.

The film is a father-son reconciliation tale (after The Thing About My Folks, also starring Falk, I could do without another) about a man who heads out on a road trip with his girlfriend and his estranged father, a former sports pro. Although this sounds like it could be autobiographical, the father in the film will be a baseball legend, not a football legend. Still, even if the elder Meredith is not cast in the role, it will be easy to make the assumption. As an added attraction for sports fans, there is a chance that real baseball legends, such as Yogi Berra and Johnny Bench, will have cameos. Wenders is apparently holding Michael Meredith's hand on the film, serving as a visual consultant and seemingly a liason to German cinematographer Franz Lustig, who shot Land of Plenty and Don't Come Knocking. The collaboration should begin shooting this summer in Louisiana.

Last season, Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden had a career year -- the kind most young filmmakers dream about when they're first starting out. Thanks, in part, to a superb Oscar-nominated performance by Ryan Gosling, their Half Nelson went from tiny indie film to major awards contender in the span of only a few months. Now, Fleck and Boden are looking for another break-out performance -- this time, they're heading to the Dominican Republic to find a star. The two will write and direct Sugar, to be produced by Journeyman Pictures and Hunting Lane Films (the two shingles behind Nelson), with HBO Films possibly interested in coming onboard as well.

Pic will delve into the world of minor league baseball, shown through the eyes of a young Dominican prospect snatched from his home country and brought to the United States to play ball. Though the film will be based on a fictional character named Miguel "Sugar" Santos, there's no doubt Fleck and Boden will look to expose the often shady world of baseball scouting by taking an innocent kid and dropping him in a cutthroat, competitive environment. With production set to begin later this summer, Fleck and producers are currently searching for their cast (which could include nonpros) and scouting locations in the Midwest and Dominican. Aside from Sugar, Fleck and Boden have also signed on to write and direct It's Kind of a Funny Story for Paramount.

Not many films take us inside the world of minor league baseball, especially from the vantage point of a foreigner asked to compete with and against a group of guys who have been training their entire lives to land a spot on one of these teams. Fleck chose a very claustrophobic style for Half Nelson, partly because the majority of scenes took place indoors -- thus, I'll be curious to see if he spreads things out a bit now, utilizing the open-aired environment of a baseball diamond as his canvas. Needless to say, I cannot wait for this one.

If you are, know or live with a sports nut, then chances are you've been subjected to the trials and tribulations of fantasy baseball or football at one time or another. "Sorry, can't make it this Saturday, I've got my fantasy draft." If you've ever actually made it to a live fantasy draft, you can see how serious these games get. More than 16 million people play fantasy sports, and it's a no holds barred, take no prisoners, every man (or woman) for themselves. When you come out with a key player tucked under your arm, then it was all worth it. With the popularity of computers and the internet, it is so much easier than it was in the pen and paper days to get involved with fantasy sports. Easier to get involved, yes, but not easier to win given my losing baseball team, which finished my brief fantasy baseball career in seventh place yesterday.

Now, Matthew Berry and Brenda Spoonemore want to bring that same fervent gameplay to the movies. They are launching Fantasy Moguls, a website-based fantasy game where you make the decisions as the head of your "studio." On the site, players join a public or private league, choose half a dozen films via a "draft" and then keep track of scores in four categories: domestic gross, weeks in the top five, per-screen average and reviews.

The game is free to play, and launches sometime in October. You too can be Robert Evans and decide if the kid stays in the picture.

Does Richard Linklater ever take a break? The Austin filmmaker seems to prefer to line up his film projects one after another, or even overlapping. Earlier this week, Linklater announced he's working on a new feature film, Chesney, one of the Chet Baker biopics. Now the latest news is that he's been producing a documentary about the University of Texas baseball team.

Although the Texas Longhorns have won six national college baseball championships over the years, the team has never won consecutive championships. That might change this year, depending on the team's showing in the NCAA regional tournament currently taking place in Austin. Linklater was interested in the team's recent efforts to win back-to-back championships, which will be the focus of the documentary. Linklater's crew has been filming the team for the past seven months. No one is certain where the film might eventually play -- PBS, cable, or theaters -- and the fate of the movie may rest in the fate of the Longhorns in upcoming games.

[via Matt Dentler's Blog]

More odds and ends than you can shake a stick at:

• I have to admit that I'm sort of amused by this concept: a movie about someone who actually followed through on their threat to move to Canada when Bush was elected. Entitled Blue State, the film stars Anna Paquin as the mover (which is funny, what with her being from Canada and all) and Breckin Meyer as the token male, and will be produced by Paquin Films - bet you can't guess who owns that sucker.

• You know that movie Woody Allen is going to make in Paris? Well, he's taking a Brokeback wife along: Michelle Williams has reportedly agree to star. She'll be playing, well, one of a bunch of Americans. In Paris. For the love of God, Woody -- throw us a plot-bone!

• Because we can never get enough heartwarming stories (Has anyone actually tested that? Personally, I hit my limit about 13 misunderstood youths ago.), Aaron Eckhart has ridden the Thank You for Smoking wave into yet another one. Eckhart's personal story of redemption is called Bill, and he'll star as "a man fed up with his job and marriage who bottoms out when he catches his wife cheating. He finds a catalyst for a resurgence when he reluctantly mentors an unruly teen." Ah, the unruly teen. How many lives have they saved? The movie starts shooting next  month.

• When I tell you that Universal has acquired a story about a small town "saved by baseball," what do you imagine? A touching, period piece? Or perhaps a story about a town triumphing unspecified tragedy by coming together behind an underdog high school team? Ah, but you'd be wrong -- gloriously, bizarrely wrong! In fact, Time of the Their Lives is about people who literally DON'T DIE because they play baseball. (I hope this doesn't mean that they actually play 24/7. How impractical would that be? Not to mention boring.) Then, somehow, a misguided kid gets the town involved in "a winner-take-all game between townsfolk and the devil's ringers" for his own soul. While I admit the whole thing doesn't make a lot of sense, it sounds more than weird enough to be interesting. Right?
  

Man, Walden Media is going sports crazy! Yesterday it was football and Jim Thorpe, and now it's a fictional baseball story. Heat is a not-yet-published children's novel by sports journalist Mike Lupica about a pair of baseball-obsessed, Cuban-immigrant brothers (Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, unfortunately, are not involved). Living in "the shadows of Yankee stadium," the younger brother "dreams of playing in the Little League World Series until a rival accuses him being older than the league limit." Gee, that sounds familiar.

Though the real-life story ended sort of badly, one assumes that the fictional one is slightly more uplifting, particularly because it's both aimed at kids and has been optioned by a studio that makes family films. If it's not, however, I'm sure Walden will be able to convince screenwriter Robert Moresco to change the ending - that's why they call it a Hollywood ending, kids. (Though we are talking here about the guy who co-wrote Crash. Jeez, I hope Walden checked his resume - otherwise, they might be a little shocked by the scope of the hardship over which their hero has to triumph.)