Media Murder for Monday

MOVIES

Leonardo DiCaprio's Appian Way Productions has acquired screen rights to the true crime book, The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair That Changed America, by Erik Larson. DiCaprio will play serial killer Dr. H.H. Holmes, the type of role he's been wanting to do for some time.

Lionsgate has acquired the U.S. distribution rights to Dredd, a new film adaptation of the dark, gritty Judge Dredd comic books that featured the one-man judge, jury, and executioner.

Will they Bond or won't they? The latest is: maybe. If it works out the way MGM wants, there will be a new James Bond film released every second year starting in November 2012.

Aaron Eckhart will star in the thriller The Expatriate, playing a CIA operative who leaves the agency to start a new life as a security consultant in Belgium and to spend time with his estranged teenage daughter. His plans go awry when the duo end up on the run after the discovery that the security company no longer exists and his assistant is an assassin out to kill him. 

TV

It's a bit of a shock to many that NBC cancelled the J.J. Abrams freshman spy drama The Undercovers, starring Boris Kodjoe and Gugu Mbatha-Raw as a married couple of spies. It wasn't as much of a surprise to Popwatch, which offers up three reasons why the show didn't make it.

CBS has purchased a pilot for a series based on the Harper Connelly books by Charlaine Harris, whose True Blood series already has a home over at HBO. It will be overseen by screenwriter Kam Miller. 

Camille Sullivan has joined the cast of the series Rookie Blue, playing detective Jo Rosatin the second season, and Lauren Holly (of NCIS fame) will guest star in an upcoming episode. 

Hawaii native Mark Dacascos (Iron Chef America and The Crow: Stairway to Heaven) has been cast as Wo Fat, the long-time nemesis of Steve McGarrett, in Hawaii Five-0. 

Kurtwood Smith (formerly of That 70’s Show) has joined the cast of the CBS midseason drama Chaos, playing a covert government agency director, and replaces Stephen Rea (The Crying Game) in that role from the original pilot.

CBS and Canadian broadcaster CTV are developing a joint Canadian crime drama together, set in a Canadian-U.S. cross-border town.

Hardcover Mysteries continues on Investigation Discovery tonight, in an episode featuring author Sara Paretsky talking about the inspiration for one of her novels, the true life murder of Carmin Ross, who was found stabbed to death in her Lawrence, Kansas home.

THEATER

An evening of stories by the late Chilean master Robero Bolaño (The Savage Detectives, 2666) and writers who inspired him takes place at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater in New York this Wednesday at 7 p.m., including pieces by Javier Marías, Nicanor Parra, and Jorge Luis Borges. Bolaño "is known for a particular noirish, atmospheric, dangerous, edgy, cool, engrossing style that immediately draws you in to a world of writers, policemen, prostitutes, politicians, militants, lovers and dreamers." Performers include Michael Stuhlbarg, Felix Solis, Ivan Hernandez and Charles Keating.