The Screen Actors Guild Awards were handed out last night, with winners including Daniel Day-Lewis and Tommy Lee Jones for Lincoln; Anne Hathaway for Les Miserables; Kevin Costner for Hatfields & McCoys; Bryan Cranston, for Breaking Bad; and Claire Danes, for Homeland. The award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture (essentially the SAG version of "Best Picture") went to Argo.
Meanwhile, at the Producers Guild Awards, Ben Affleck, George Clooney and Grant Heslov received the Darryl F. Zanuck Award for producing the film Argo, and Showtime's Homeland won its first PGA Award in the drama series category.
Director David Fincher (Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Fight Club) has expressed an interest in adapting Gillian Flynn's bestselling novel Gone Girl for the big screen. Flynn has written a screenplay for her novel, which centers on a wife who disappears on her fifth anniversary, leaving her husband as the main suspect
James Franco announced he will direct and star in a film adaptation of crime novelist James Ellroy's American Tabloid, which follows three law enforcement officers who are drawn together as the events of President Kennedy's assassination unfold. (Hat tip to Omnimystery News.)
Joaquin Phoenix is replacing Robert Downey Jr. in director Paul Thomas Anderson's adaptation of the novel Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon. Phoenix will star as a detective solving a case brought to him by his ex-girlfriend in 1969 Los Angeles.
Twilight's Peter Facinelli has been cast to star alongside Dylan McDermott in the thriller Freezer from director Mikael Salomon. The two actors play unwitting of shadowy Russian thugs who falsely accuse McDermott's character of stealing millions from them.
TV
Lara Pulver, who starred as Irene Adler in the "Scandal in Belgravia" episode of the BBC's Sherlock, has joined the cast for the upcoming Ian Fleming biopic. She'll play play Ann O'Neill, an elegant Baroness whose wartime meeting with James Bond creator Fleming alters the course of their lives.
Sean Patrick Flanery is joining Dexter for a recurring role in what may be the series' last season. He'll play Jacob Elroy, and ex-cop who runs a private investigation service in Miami.
Actor James Brolin has signed on to play Rick Castle's father in an episode of Castle debuting Monday, Feb. 25.
The BBC released a promo photo of Merlin star Colin Morgan in his new role on the three-part series Quirke, starring Gabriel Byrne as a Dublin pathologist who solves crimes in the 1950s. The series is based on characters from the crime thrillers of Booker Prize winner John Banville (a/k/a Benjamin Black).
All sorts of news pilots have just been given orders from the networks, including from CBS, Backstrom, based on a character created by Swedish crime novelist Leif G. W. Persson. Stockholm police inspector Evert Backstrom, and a version of Beverly Hills Cop; from ABC, a Revenge-like drama called Betrayal; and from Fox, a pilot for The List about members of the Federal Witness Security Program who start getting killed. (Hat to Omnimystery News.)
Other pilots that have orders in hopes of snaring a coveted spot on ABC's 2013-14 lineup include Doubt, from House creator David Shore, about a former cop who's now a street-smart and low-rent lawyer; Killer Women, which follows the only woman in the Texas Rangers; and an adaptation of the British series Spy.
Creator and showrunner of The Mentalist, Bruno Heller, has also sold a pilot to CBS titled The Advocates, about a female lawyer and a male ex-con team up as victim advocates.
The same team behind Fringe on Fox (J.J. Abrams and J.H. Wyman) are creating a new futuristic pilot for the network that's billed as an action-packed buddy cop show with all LAPD officers partnered with highly evolved human-like androids.
For an updated scorecard on all the various pilots currently in the network pipeline, Hollywood Reporter has a handy list.
Larry Manetti, 65, who played Magnum, P.I.'s sidekick Rick from 1980 to '88, has landed a recurring role in Hawaii Five-0 as a nightclub owner.
Omnimystery News provides a look at the teaser poster for the new ABC crime drama Red Widow, about the widow of a man murdered by Russia gangasters who is forced to work with them to repay his debt, while also serving as an inside mole for the FBI.
If you happen to be in New Zealand next month, check out the new crime drama, The Blue Rose when it debuts. It centers around a group of temp workers who band together to try to work out who killed a friend after her death in the Auckland harbour is officially called an accident.
PODCASTS/VIDEO
The latest Suspense Radio podcast features authors Kerry Copleand Smith and Dr. Barry Johnson.
Although this is originally from May of 2012, the Passive Voice blog posted a link the day from mystery author Hallie Ephron's AtGoogleTalks appearance (note that it's a relatively long clip, at about 50 minutes or so).
Bestselling novelist David Baldacci will guide a virtual field trip at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History via a free webcast will on March 5th at 1:00 p.m. ET / 10:00 a.m. PT.
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