Hollywood studios angling to produce Julian Assange film July 7, 2012 - 16:38 AMT PanARMENIAN.Net - Julian Assange is a hot get for Hollywood studio executives hoping to bring his life story to the big screen, The Hollywood Reporter said. That's a given, considering Assange's made-for-the-movies backstory: the WikiLeaks founder appears to relish his persona as the enigmatic hacker mastermind who launched the leak of confidential U.S. State department cables two years ago. At the moment, however, he is seeking asylum at the Ecuador embassy in London to dodge extradition to Sweden, where he faces questioning over alleged sexual assault. According to the Wall Street Journal, several studios are angling to produce an Assange biopic: Universal Pictures; for one; as well as Time Warner's HBO Films; DreamWorks Studios; and Annapurna Pictures, the buzzy company headed by Megan Ellison, the twentysomething entreprenuer daughter of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. There are some delays as execs wait to see how a number of Assange-related events pan out: there's his Swedish fate; the potential leakage of Syrian government emails; the pending case of Bradley Manning, the U.S. Army soldier who is suspected of providing classified information to WikiLeaks. "It's been tricky because there's so much of the story that's yet to be told," Holly Bario, DreamWorks's president of production, told the Journal. Dreamworks, which optioned rights to a former WikiLeak member's memoir called Inside Wikileaks: My Time With Julian Assange at the World's Most Dangerous Website, has stalled production as Assange's real-life drama evolves. Still, HBO Films has been developing a movie based on a New Yorker profile of Assange with Inside Job director Charles Ferguson attached; Universal's documentary from Alex Gibney, who won an Oscar for directing Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, is nearly completed. CAA, meanwhile, scrapped the film and TV rights to Assange's yet-to-be-written autobiography because he did not finish a manuscript as part of a botched book deal with Random House. Partner news  Top stories The winner, Denmark, and the runner-up Azerbaijan have found themselves in the center of a scandal which put their victory in question. “Love and War” is planned as a three-part love story about a woman and a man at war, with the latter eventually becoming a monk. The drama centers on the relationship between Assange and Domscheit-Berg, which became increasingly fraught as WikiLeaks' influence grew. Manzarek formed the band with lead singer Jim Morrison in 1965 after a chance meeting in Venice Beach, Los Angeles.   Partner news |  Latest news Russian expert rules out Karabakh war renewal by Armenia  Alexander Krylov: the possibility of the renewal of Karabakh war should not be exaggerated in the face of the balance of power.OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs won’t visit Artsakh French Co-Chair of the OSCE Minsk Group Jacques Faure said the co-chairs are not planning a visit to Nagorno Karabakh.Penguin reaches $75mln agreement in iBooks price fixing lawsuit In a press release, Penguin's parent company, Pearson, noted it had made a $40 million provision for settlement in its 2012 accounts.Baku says OSCE Minsk Group activity yielded “certain results” Bahar Muradova says the report of the political committee of the OSCE PA summer session comprises provisions on the conflict. |
