john grisham Tagged Articles at Cinematical

After resisting overtures for a decade, a best-selling author received an offer he couldn't refuse. John Grisham has finally allowed his 1999 novel The Testament to be optioned, according to Variety. Grisham will have "the right to provide creative input, which he didn't always have in the past -- one of the factors that pushed him away from Hollywood until about three years ago, when his fans prodded him to end his self-imposed movie moratorium."

The Testament revolves around a self-made billionaire who leaves his entire fortune to his illegitimate daughter, a young woman who lives and works "with a primitive tribe of Indians in the deepest jungles of Brazil." An attorney who's seen better days helps her battle the billionaire's relatives for the fortune. Producer Mark Johnson says: "It had the best of the courthouse stuff that John writes so well, plus this exotic adventure in deepest Brazil."

It's been six years since Runaway Jury hit the screens, so is the time right for more big-screen Grisham? I jumped off the Grisham bandwagon after The King of Torts, which had a smug, off-putting, moralistic tone; his formula -- idealistic young hero / heroine fights the corrupt system -- felt stale and predictable. If nothing else, Grisham's books offer the comfort of familiarity. Legal thrillers, the more formulaic the better, are a Hollywood staple, and usually attract a dependable audience. Shia LaBeouf is attached to The Associate, his latest best-seller, and others are in development. Will Grisham's creative input on The Testament result in a better movie?

Hey – remember when I correctly pointed out that Dan Brown's Angels & Demons was wretched, insulting nonsense, and everyone yelled at me? The consensus seemed to be that I didn't know from good populist entertainment; that I expected everything to be brainy, couldn't appreciate a good action-packed mystery, and basically should just shut up. (My favorite was when people informed me that I was wrong because Dan Brown is richer than I am.)

I stand by what I said about Angels & Demons, but I should have mentioned a counterexample to Dan Brown: an author who writes simple, unabashedly goofy page-turners that sell like hotcakes but are actually readable, with characters who aren't obviously morons, sentences that don't make grown men cry, and messages that are coherent, if not nuanced. One such author is John Grisham, whose books are preachy, ludicrous, and simplistic – but also absorbing and breathlessly entertaining. You scoff, but all the while you're furiously flipping pages.

Grisham's newest, The Associate, has already been tapped for a feature-film adaptation, starring Shia LaBeouf as a Yale Law School grad bound for a low-paying but noble public interest law career but who is blackmailed into taking a prestigious, soul-sucking law firm job by nefarious types who want access to some ultra-secret documents for corporate espionage purposes. The novel covers some of the same ground as Grisham's classic The Firm, except this time grounded in what Grisham perceives as the reality of life for young, bright law school graduates seduced by the high-paying but miserable jobs as associates in corporate law firms. It's hugely silly and hugely entertaining in the best Grisham tradition; with the right director and screenwriter, it could take a place of honor in the less-than-illustrious history of Grisham film adaptations.

He's had the honor of being the on-screen offspring of names like Harrison Ford and Carrie-Anne Moss. He's faced a few different types of robots. And now, well, he's following the likes of Tom Cruise, Denzel Washington, Matthew McConaughey, and Matt Damon.

Variety reports that Shia LaBeouf is going to star in the next John Grisham flick cooking up at Paramount, The Associate. If it doesn't sound familiar -- that's because it's an upcoming novel slated for release in January. The film will focus on a student (LaBeouf), heading towards graduation at Yale Law School, who somehow gets manipulated into taking a job with a prestigious law firm. This gig gives him "privileged information about a multibillion-dollar lawsuit." After that, I guess thrilling twists ensue.

It looks like the Shia train has no signs of stopping quite yet. Could the fiery world of law do it? I don't know... I liked him more when he was a wee tyke, and I can't picture him as a Yale smartie. Can you?

When you think John Grisham, you usually think of legal thrillers, right? Well, that and the term 'airplane reading', but you probably don't think pastoral sports stories (I know I don't). The Hollywood Reporter announced that Phoenix Pictures has purchased the rights to Grisham's 2007 novel, Playing for Pizza, and the company is already on the hunt for a writer and director for the sports dramedy.

Pizza centers on a third string quarterback for the Cleveland Browns named Rick Docker. After blowing his team's championship shot, Rick is dropped from the team and blacklisted from the NFL. Luckily for him, his enterprising agent finds him a spot in the Italian football league playing for the Parma Panthers. From then on the story is probably a compendium of 'fish out of water jokes', and general cultural misunderstanding -- I'm thinking something along the lines of Under the Tuscan Sun, but with a lot more tackling.

One of my favorite living directors, David Gordon Green, is in final negotiations to direct the adaptation of John Grisham's The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town, which we told you about in December when it was set up with George Clooney's and Grant Heslov's production company. The film will be distributed by Warner Independent Pictures, which also announced it had picked up distribution duties for Green's latest, Snow Angels. That film will be released sometime next year (why must they wait so long?), while The Innocent Man may take awhile to begin. Green just started filming the stoner comedy The Pineapple Express (Seth Rogen and James Franco reunited!) and he has also written an adaptation of Brad Land's memoir Goat, which is in the pre-production stage, so it isn't clear where Green will fit the Grisham project in.

It is interesting to see such an amazing writer as is Green tackle more projects that aren't original concepts, especially since I haven't yet seen his first adapted work (Snow Angels). Our own James Rocchi wrote of Snow Angels that, "It's still a film that's identifiably his, even as it has the potential to turn him from a lesser-known indie director into an A-level dramatist." That is reassuring enough for me. I do have worries that Green will be too limited to confined spaces like prison cells and courtrooms with the Grisham, but I'm just being a brat because I love his outdoor cinematography so much. Additionally I continue to be saddened every time I hear of another project Green becomes attached to that isn't A Confederacy of Dunces.