MOVIES
Sad news just announced today: Producer Tony Scott (brother of Ridley Scott), is dead of an apparent suicide. Tony Scott served as producer and/or director on such movies as Prometheus, The A-Team, Spy Game, and many more, as well as TV shows including Numb3rs, The Good Wife and the upcoming series Coma.
CinemaBlend reported that actor Willem Dafoe is taking on two different crime dramas. The first is Whiskey Bay, where Dafoe will play a veteran cop who teams with a former white supremacist (played by Matt Dillon) to go undercover to reveal the Aryan Brotherhood's illegal activities. The other project is A Man Most Wanted, the latest adaptation of a John Le Carre spy novel, which already has Philip Seymour Hoffman in the cast and Robin Wright also in negotiations.
Winona Ryder in talks to join James Franco and Jason Statham in Homefront, a film written by Sylvester Stallone about a ruthless drug dealer and a former DEA agent who go head to head in a small town.
A movie adaptation of the graphic novel The Boys was reportededly picked up by Paramount. The plot of the graphic novel follows a CIA team whose role is to police the superhuman community and prevent them from misusing their powers.
The British Film Institute's comprehensive tribute to Alfred Hitchcock continues into October, with films and special events coming up including panels and talks from actors Bruce Dern (Family Plot) and Martin Landau (North by Northwest).
Another obit of note: Biff Elliot, the actor who first starred as hardboiled private eye Mike Hammer on the big screen, died August 15 at his home in Studio City at the age of 89.
TV
TNT renewed freshman drama Perception for a second season. The drama stars Eric McCormack as a schizophrenic professor-turned-FBI sleuth.
BBC One is planning a remake of Alfred Hitchcock's classic 1938 thriller The Lady Vanishes as a 90-minute made-for-television movie. The remake will star Keeley Hawes as wealthy young socialite Iris Carr, who finds a woman has disappeared from her train while travelling across Europe. (Hat tip to Omnimystery News.)
Actress Jodie Foster is developing a female-led mob drama for Showtime. Titled Angie's Body, the series will follow "a hardened but beautiful woman who's responsible for the wellbeing of an entire crime syndicate." Although Foster has directed for the big-screen, this will be her first small-screen project. There's no word on whether she'll also play a role in front of the camera.
Michael Grant Terry, a former Bones squintern (one of the rotating interns on the show), is set to join NBC's supernatural cop drama Grimm for a multi-episode arc. He'll play a "wide-eyed and enthusiastic student" who is (appropriately) starting an internship with the Portland Police Department, looking to model himself after one of Portland's finest: Nick Burkhardt, played by David Giuntoli.
ABC is in negotiations with UK showrunner Simeon Goulden to adapt his Sky 1 comedy Spy for American TV. The original series followed hapless single father Tim (Darren Boyd) who quits his job as a junior sales assistant in a computer shop to impress his son but accidentally gets recruited into the British intelligence agency MI5.
PODCASTS
This week's Crime in the City series on NPR featured Robert Crais, with a revealing, inside look at how he creates the L.A. where Elvis and Joe live. Author Sean Chercover stopped by WGN-Radio to talk about his new novel, The Trinity Game.
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