Now this is an intriguing movie premise. Variety reports that Paramount and Brad Pitt have grabbed up the rights for Lost City of Z, David Grann's yet-to-be-published manuscript about a group of lost explorers. Brad Pitt will be producing with his Plan B shingle as a potential starring vehicle.

Grann's book uncovers the forgotten story of British explorer Col. Percy Harrison Fawcett, who set out in 1926 with a group of explorers to find a legendary "City of Z" in the Amazonian rainforest. They disappeared without a trace, and over the next 70 years numerous explorers have tried to retrace their steps, including Grann himself. No one has ever succeeded.

The book, which will be published by Doubleday in February 2009, is an expansion of an article Grann wrote on Fawcett for the New Yorker. (There's an abstract available on the New Yorker site, but one needs access to Lexus-Nexus to obtain the whole thing.) It sounds like a page turner of a story -- rumors of Fawcett being held in captivity, murdered by native tribes, even a theory that the City of Z was a portal to another dimension. The early years of the 20th century were such a hotbed of exploration, too. Everyone wanted to find tombs and lost cities. There haven't been many serious movies set around the heyday of the tomb raiders, so this could be really promising. Or it could completely stray from nonfiction and jump into the realm of the metaphysical -- maybe Pitt is sorry he passed up The Fountain and wants to tackle Mayan spirituality after all?

Say what you will about David Fincher's work, but I've been with him the whole way. Yeah, I even liked Alien³, at least at the time. Okay, I have to admit a lot of my attraction to Fincher's movies is actually to the cinematography of Darius Khondji and Harris Savides (now that I look back, I'm surprised to see they only shot two Fincher titles each). But hey, at least the guy can pick a DP, right? Well, I do appreciate Fincher's directorial talents, as well, and regardless of how few films I've seen this year, I continue to consider his Zodiac to be the best of the year. Fincher recently wrapped his next feature, The Curious Case of Benjamin Buttons, which reunites him with Brad Pitt. Now that that's done, he may choose to direct an adaptation of a French graphic novel titled Le Tueur (The Killer). According to Variety, Paramount has bought the rights to the comic, written by Matz and illustrated by Luc Jacamon, with Fincher in mind. Producer Allesandro Camon (American Psycho) is writing the screenplay, and Pitt's company, Plan B, and Alexandra Milchan (Chapter 27) are producing.

Despite the need for a title change, and the fact that we have too many hitman movies coming out these days, the graphic novel should make for an interesting adaptation. Publisher's Weekly compared it to the films of Godard and Melville and the illustrations of Darwyn Cooke and even addressed Jacamon's placement of the camera (maybe Fincher should recruit him to be the film's DP). So, it already sounds like a cinematic story. Unfortunately, PW also claims there's too much "self-consciously cool narration," which can really ruin this type of pic. Another opinion of The Killer, this one from The Comic Book Bin, relates the graphic novel to American Psycho (nice, then, for Camon's involvement) and Leone/Eastwood westerns. Dark antihero with a gun? We see them every day. But with Fincher at the helm, I have higher hopes than usual.

There has been no shortage of news coming out of the NYCC this past weekend (including from our very own Ryan Stewart). Now, IGN reports that Paramount and Brad Pitt's Plan B Productions are partnering to produce a film version of the novel World War Z: An Oral History of The Zombie War by Max Brooks (son of Mel). Brooks seems to have a flair for the subject of the "living challenged" as he also wrote the Zombie Survival Guide. Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski is adapting the book but there is no confirmation yet that Pitt will star, Straczynski kept it pretty non-committal saying the script was, "For Brad Pitt potentially -- we'll see what happens. He might be the star in it."

Adapting the book won't be easy, since the novel is an anthology of man's survival during the "great" war with the undead. The structure of the book has no main characters and jumps time and place with recollections of the survivors of the decade long fight. During a panel discussion, Straczynski described the story as "very political, very smart, very cagey". Straczynski seems confident that if all goes to plan with the script, production wouldn't be far behind. The project sounds promising, but considering Pitt's plate looks pretty full, I'm not counting on him getting in front of the cameras for this one.

Eight years after forming Section Eight to make films for Warner Bros. as cheaply as possible in exchange for minimal creative interference, George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh have closed the door on Section Eight for good. Their last picture under the banner will probably be the sequel Ocean's Thirteen, to be released next summer.

Vanity deals in Hollywood used to be handed out by Hollywood to everyone with a SAG card it seemed. However, once the belt-tightening of spiraling production costs and sagging box office receipts began to hit in the mid-90s, those deals evaporated faster than swag bags around Lindsay Lohan. High profile deals have been hitting skids lately, with Tom Cruise's Cruise/Wagner Productions being let go by Paramount, and Section 8 shuttering this month. Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston's own Plan B Entertainment seems to be surviving, after Aniston left the company and Pitt (the more bankable of the two) signed a new deal with Paramount, no surprise since they formed the company with Brad Grey, the current president of the studio.

Ironically, for a company that set out to make films as cheaply as possible in exchange for minimal creative interference, their only real financial successes were the very expensive (and highly profitable) Oceans's Eleven series, which has spawned two sequels and grossed over $800 million worldwide. Although they enjoyed plenty of critical success with Syriana and Good Night and Good Luck, they did not turn large profits for the studios, and failed to break into television despite repeated attempts.

Clooney and Soderbergh are both extremely talented, with Clooney being just as versatile behind the camera (see his own Confessions of a Dangerous Mind), and will have no problem continuing being successful. However, this was one of the most unique combinations of film talent in recent years, and I for one would have liked to see them continuing to put out the types movies that they were slowly but surely becoming known for; smart films that made you think well after you'd left the theater.

Related stories:

Clooney and Soderbergh: The Demise of a Vanity Shingle?

Clooney, Soderbergh Break-Up Official: Aug. 1

Yet another unpublished novel has been the subject of a Hollywood bidding war: The rights to World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, a very serious work about a wars with zombie (That old story again? Yawn.), have been picked up by Paramount Pictures for Brad Pitt's Plan B to produce. The only financial information available about the deal is that the end amount was in the "high six-figures," and Paramount's main opposition in the battle was Warner Brothers, which wanted the rights for Leonardo DiCaprio's Appian Way to bring to the screen. Whether either of the superstars actually intends/intended to appear in the resulting film is anyone's guess, but it's nevertheless fun to imagine DiCaprio slamming the phone down in his lavish Johannesburg (or where ever they're filming The Blood Diamond) hotel room and swearing revenge on Pitt. (It would also be fun to picture the scene with a Scarface-style pile of coke on the coffee table, since that's so frightfully Hollywood and all, but since Leo's lawyers probably wouldn't get the humor, we won't do that.)

The novel comes out this fall and is "a sober telling of the aftermath of a war fought against a legion of humans who were inflicted with a virus, died and were reanimated into flesh-eating zombies," presented through interviews with survivors of the war.

Things were pretty crazy for Dana Adam Shapiro last summer. Not only was Murderball, his first directorial effort, finally going into national release after rocking festival nation-wide, but his debut novel was also being unleashed on an unsuspecting public. (The book was published just two days before the movie went into limited release - that must have been an intense week.) Entitled The Every Boy, Shapiro's novel explores the life of a drowned 15-year-old, whose death "[leaves] behind a mother who's a little obsessed with ant farms, a father devoted to his jellyfish and boxing, and five years' worth of diary entries written on 2,600 pages of loose-leaf graph paper." The book tells the boy's story though his diaries (he's very weird, but happy about it) and, though some reviewers found it a precious and cliched, Amy Sedaris says it's "Profound, not precious", and "A magical, haunting, hilarious debut." Take that, haters.

Apparently someone at Paramount also liked the book, because (through Brad Pitt's Plan B) they've optioned the rights and hired Shapiro himself to write and direct the film. Man. It's one thing to have a crappy movie made out of your book when someone else does it, but when the whole thing is in your hands? Talk about pressure.

The rights to The Sparrow, a sci-fi novel by Mary Doria Russell, were recently allowed to lapse by Universal, and Warner Brothers snatched them up. The goal at Warner's is to produce the film through Industry Entertainment and Brad Pitt's own Plan B Entertainment, and it's hoped that Pitt, who has a long-standing interest in the project, will star.

Though it wasn't particularly well-reviewed, Russell's book, which tells the story of contact with alien civilizations in the near future, has proved quite popular in the nearly 10 years since its release. Set in both 2016 and 2060 (that's not the sci-fi part, it's just a split narrative), The Sparrow tells the story of human contact with the planet Rakhat, the existence of which is first noticed when one of Jodie Foster's big dishes picks up singing in space. "While United Nations diplomats endlessly debate a possible first contact mission, the Society of Jesus quietly organizes an eight-person scientific expedition of its own." Though "the aliens never come across as more than variations of primitive earthly cultures," all sorts of conflict and interaction evidently occurs, and the reviewers at Amazon are wild about the thing. The Jesuit mission is led by a messianic figure named Father Emilio Sandoz, who is presumably the character Pitt would play, if his scheduled worked out, and the script (currently being drafted by North Country scribe Michael Seitzman) met with his approval.