kurt eichenwald Tagged Articles at Cinematical

• Every time I hear about the upcoming Mark Waters flick The Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, I think of a run-in I had last year. I hadn't seen someone in a few months, and when I ran into him, he said: "If it isn't the Ghost of Christmas Past!" What on earth do you say to that!? I've no clue, but it did give my friends a lot of laughs later. Anyway, there's not a present ghost added to the Matthew McConaughey mix. Variety reports that Noureen DeWulf has picked herself up a lead playing both Matthew's assistant and the Ghost of Girlfriends Present. It's not a bad jump for the actress, who was "'Nuff Said Expo Girl" last year. (Although she also had a role in The Comebacks as well.)
• One year and one day ago, we found out that Leonard DiCaprio was going to star in the big-screen adaptation of Kurt Eichenwald's Conspiracy of Fools. Since so much time has passed, it's not certain whether Leo will still head the feature, but Variety reports that Robert Schwentke, the man behind Flightplan, is going to helm it. The director is really making a name for himself lately -- he just shot the adaptation of The Time Traveler's Wife as well. If you're not familiar with Fools -- it's a drama that focuses on the Enron scandal, and as Variety describes it, the film will focus on "a tax attorney who joins the Houston-based energy company and peels back the layers of greed and fraudulent accounting to expose a financial scheme.

A deal has been 'preemptively' sealed between Warner Bros. and Leo DiCaprio for him to star in Conspiracy of Fools, based on the book by Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald about the collapse of Enron. Variety reports that the studio paid seven figures for the book option and screenplay. DiCaprio will play a new employee at Enron who slowly uncovers the fraud that led to the company's collapse in 2001. The script is being written by Sheldon Turner, who wrote The Longest Yard as well as the forthcoming Magneto, an X-Men spin-off. "Kurt made the factual stuff read like a thriller, and it felt right to tell the story from the point of view of an outsider," Variety quotes Turner as saying. "The goal was to take it away from feeling like a staid look at a corporation and turn it into a character study."

DiCaprio currently has his name on a few other projects, including a much-talked about project that would explore the early days of Theodore Roosevelt and an adaptation of the Robert Ludlum thriller, The Chancellor Manuscript. If the Conspiracy deal goes through, it would continue the successful collaboration between DiCaprio and Warner Bros. that spawned last year's smash-hit The Departed.