MOVIES
Dublin author Ava McCarthy signed a deal with Hollywood production company Polaris Pictures to adapt her debut novel The Insider for film. The book centers on a female former computer hacker named Harry Martinez, who has shifted careers to become a private eye.
Ex-James Bond actor Pierce Brosnan has joined Owen Wilson to star in John Erick Dowdle's political/spy thriller The Coup. The story follows an American family who moves to Southeast Asia and gets mixed up in a violent coup where merciless rebels are attacking the city. Brosnan will play a mysterious government operative.
Oscar-nominated actor John Hawkes has signed to star in the indie thriller Too Late, about the tangled relationship between a troubled private investigator (Hawkes) and the missing woman he's hired to find. Hawkes has also joined the cast of Switch, a prequel to Jackie Brown, based on the Elmore Leonard novel.
Producer David Barron (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows) optioned film rights to UK author Howard Linskey's crime novel The Damage, set in Newcastle's gangland.
Author Walter Mosley is teaming up with producer Diane Houslin to form a production company called B.O.B. Filmhouse that will help adapt Mosey's novels for the big and small screens. The company is already working on projects including The Long Fall, based on Mosley's Leonid McGill novels (for HBO). It also has plans to create a feature film based on Mosley's psychological thriller Man in My Basement.
TV
"Ducky" fans can relax. Actor David McCallum signed a two-year deal to continue in the popular CBS series NCIS.
TNT has given a fifth season order to Southland, its Los Angeles-based crime drama. (Hat tip to Omnimystery News.)
AMC has given the greenlight to two new scripted drama pilots, including Low Winter Sun, based on a British miniseries to be adapted for the U.S. by Chris Mundy (Criminal Minds). The show is "a contemporary story of murder, deception, revenge and corruption that starts with the murder of a cop by a fellow Detroit detective." The other project is an untitled legal thriller about on a District Attorney who uncovers new evidence prompting the reopening of a sensational murder case.
NBC may premiere its fall season in August, including shows like the supernatural police procedural Grimm, to take advantage of the Olympics ratings and ad boost.
Stockholm production group NICE Drama has snatched up rights to a trio of novels by young crime writer Kristina Ohlsson, planning on a six-episode TV series and three 90-minute films. Ohlsson was a counterterrorism officer with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe before turning to writing.
Canada's ION Television network announced that the upcoming fifth season of the police drama Flashpoint will be its last. Executives added, "While the series is still at its creative apex, we've decided to end the series on a high note, and give those fans the satisfaction of a fitting series conclusion in our 75th episode."
William Shatner will star in the Season 3 premiere of the ABC drama Rookie Blue, playing a drunk driver.
THEATER
This year's Tony Award nominees include Bonnie & Clyde: the Musical (with music by frank Wildhorn and lyrics by Don Black), for best original score and Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Musical (Laura Osnes).
Alfred Hitchcock's 1940 film Rebecca starring Joan Fontaine and Laurence Olivier (and based on Daphne Du Maurier's famous mystery thriller) is being turned into a Broadway musical this fall. Karen Mason, Howard McGillin and James Barbour have been cast in lead roles, with Tony Award-winning Michael Blakemore in charge of staging and Francesca Zambello as director.
Playwright Simon Stephens spoke with the London Evening Standard about his new play Three Kingdoms being staged at the Lyric Hammersmith May 3-19. The play follows an investigation by two British police officers into the European sex trade after the discovery of an Estonian prostitute's severed head in the Thames at Chiswick.
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