david mckenna Tagged Articles at Cinematical

In the same way that higher-profile actors are jumping on the video game ship sans shame, so too are movie writers like Wanted's Chris Morgan. Morgan has signed up for a rather daunting task – working as the story director for the massive and practically holy sci-fi series The Wheel of Time by the late Robert Jordan.

Variety reports that this job entails "overseeing the writing on the titles, working with executive producers and writers to help develop story arcs and helping to digest the book series' 10,000 pages and over 1,700 characters."

(Of course, Morgan and the other two screenplay writers, Derek Haas and Michael Brandt, were taken to task by fans for not sticking to the original comic book story all that much. However, compared to comic book purists, the wrath of Robert Jordan fans can be deadly. Or so I hear.)

Morgan isn't the only screenwriter who has dipped his toes into the pixellated pool. Saw director James Wan is one of the writers for the Saw video game, which surprisingly got some good gamer feedback from its preview at SDCC. And David McKenna, who wrote American History X, Get Carter, Blow, and Bully, wrote Scarface: The World is Yours, which got generally mixed reviews.

You aren't anybody unless you're famous enough for rival biopics. I hope you all celebrated the holiday yesterday by watching both Gérard Depardieu and Georges Corraface in their respective, rival Columbus films. Coming in the future, we may also get competing movies about Harvey Milk, Philip K. Dick, Sammy Davis, Jr. and now Pablo Escobar. We've long followed news regarding Joe Carnahan's movie about the Colombian drug lord, who will be played there by Javier Bardem, but now Variety reports another Escobar pic in the works. This one will be produced by Oliver Stone, directed by Antoine Fuqua and is simply titled Escobar. It's based on the book "Mi Hermano Pablo", written by the cocaine king's brother, Roberto Escobar Gaviria, who worked as accountant and confidant to Pablo.

So, this looks like it will be more of a life-encompassing biopic. It also appears to be going into production ahead of Carnahan's film, Killing Pablo, since Carnahan is first working on White Jazz while Escobar is fully financed and ready to begin shooting in Colombia and Puerto Rico in early 2008. All that needs finishing is the script rewrite, which is being done by David McKenna, who already wrote a bit about Escobar in his screenplay for Blow (he was played by Cliff Curtis). Variety doesn't mention who Stone and Fuqua have or are casting in the title role of their film, which means it may not be secure. I'm sure some people would like to see Adrian Grenier play the part, as he does via his character Vinnie Chase on the show Entourage, but that would actually be a terrible idea. Personally, I'd like them to go back to Curtis, but for a long-term biopic they'll likely want someone younger, as well as someone more familiar to audiences.

I also wish that Stone was directing this himself -- even if he really annoyed the heck out of me recently -- because he seems to know the territory. And because he thanked "Ari Gold" (Jeremy Piven's character on Entourage) when talking to Variety about the project. But he should do just fine overseeing Fuqua's direction, a job he's sharing with former Malcolm in the Middle older brother Justin Berfield, Jason Felts and James Reach.