rick reilly Tagged Articles at Cinematical

The lovable and hilarious Steve Carell is a bona-fide TV star, but his big screen career has never taken off quite the same way. There were plenty of successes along the way, and he hasn't had an honest to goodness flop (actually, Evan Almighty lost a whole lot of money), but he just hasn't had that movie role that makes you think "Uh-oh, I think Scranton is going to get a new branch manager," you know? I don't know if Carell's latest will be the role that makes him into a full-fledged movie star, but The Hollywood Reporter's Risky Business Blog is reporting that the comedian is in talks to star in the golf-comedy Missing Links.

Links is based on Sports Illustrated writer Rick Reilly's novel by the same name, and it centers on a group of working class friends who scheme to sneak into an elite country club to escape their crappy public golf course. Reilly has some experience as a screenwriter, having already written the period sports comedy Leatherheads, but for Links, The Break Up's Jay Lavender will be in charge of the script. Carell has yet to commit to Warner Bros for Links, and he already has a pretty tight schedule with his role on The Office, the upcoming sequel to Get Smart, and Brigadier Gerard, so I guess we will have to wait and see if he signs on the dotted line.

After the jump; moments from other great golf comedies -- and no, I didn't include Dorf...

No sooner do I write an adulatory post about George Clooney than I come upon this story about the trouble he's been having with the Writers' Guild of America over credit for the Leatherheads screenplay. He's so upset at the way he's been treated that he's gone "financial core" at the Guild, which is an irreversible decision making him a limited, non-voting, dues-paying member. He says he would have quit altogether, but that would have basically prevented him from working as a screenwriter in Hollywood.

According to Clooney, the original Leatherheads script by Duncan Brantley and Rick Reilly had been bouncing around for almost two decades before he took it, rewrote it as a screwball comedy, and got the project greenlit. He believes that he wrote all but two scenes of the resulting film. But when the credit squabble went to arbitration before the WGA last fall, the guild determined that Clooney didn't deserve screen credit for his work. That was the end of the line for him (he declined to appeal), though he kept the matter quiet at the time because of the ongoing writers strike.