Media Murder for Monday

MOVIES

Robert Redford is getting back into the spy game on the big screen. He will direct and star in the political thriller The Company You Keep, based on a novel by Neil Gordon. Redford will portray a former Weather Underground militant wanted by the FBI, whose identity is exposed by a young reporter (Shia LaBeouf).

Harrison Ford has signed on to star as an aging Wyatt Earp in Black Hats, an adaptation of the Max Allan Collins novel that blends fact with fiction. Wyatt Earp is spending his last years as a private detective and movie consultant in Los Angeles when he learns his now-deceased friend Doc Holliday has a son who is living in Prohibition-era New York City and has gotten himself in trouble with mobster Al Capone.

The studio behind the Edgar Allan Poe movie starring John Cusack has put out some stills from the production. It's scheduled for release on March 9th in 2012.

TELEVISION

The TV series The Firm, based on the legal thrillers by John Grisham, is in some legal trouble of its own. CBS Television Studios filed a lawsuit against writer Lukas Reiter, claiming he  stole the idea for the TV adaptation from them and sold it to NBC.

TNT has signed Bill Pullman as the lead in Innocent, a two-hour TV movie based on the book of the same title by Scott Turow, a sequel to his bestseller Presumed Innocent. The project will be the first offering for TNT's recently announced Tuesday Night Mystery block launching in November. Pullman will play Judge Rusty Sabich, charged with the murder of his late wife twenty years after being cleared in the death of his mistress.

Kenny Johnson (The Shield) is taking over the role of boyfriend to the main female detective protagonist (Maria Bello) in the NBC reboot of the popular British drama Prime Suspect. The pilot originally featured Toby Stephens in the part, but as is often the case, the network wanted tweaking and cast changes before the pilot was promoted into a series.

Think you know your TV crime dramas? TV Guide has a trivia feature for you.

PODCASTS/RADIO

The Guardian's regular books podcast program has Irish writer Tana French talking about the importance of place to her Dublin-set novels and Sophie Hannah explaining why the term "psychological thriller" has to be taken with a pinch of salt. 

The Bat Segundo podcast chats with Megan Abbott with a wide-ranging discussion (for an hour, so clear your calendar) on writing crime fiction from missing-girl novels to so-called literary authors who "slum it up" by writing in genre fiction.

THEATER

Anthony Burgess, the author of Clockwork Orange (adapted into the Stanley Kubrick film in 1971) also created a stage version of his work to "assert his ownership," according to Dr. Andrew Biswell, director of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation. It was staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1990, although the songs Burgess wrote were replaced with music by Bono and The Edge. The original Burgess compositions are finally going to be performed next summer in Manchester and are said to sound surprisingly like they belong more in West Side Story.

Comments

[Yvette]

The Harrison Ford Wyatt Earp movie sounds like a great idea. We'll see what they do with it.

[BV Lawson]

I only wish there were more plum roles for aging actresses; in Hollywood, you're pretty much a has-been when you hit 40.