Media Murder for Monday

AWARDS

Congratulations to all the film and television winners of the Screen Actors Guild Awards handed out last night in Los Angeles. For the complete list, check out the SAG awards website.

MOVIES

The complete version of a rare narrative film from 1919 starring fabled escape artist Harry Houdini has been rescued and restored and will soon see the light of day on Turner Classic Movies. Titled The Grim Game, Houdini plays a young man who is framed for murder, escapes from the police and goes after the gang of men who framed him.

Starz Digital Media has acquired all North American rights to Jay Martin’s crime thriller 7 Minutes, to be released this summer. Starring Luke Mitchell, Jason Ritter, Leven Rambin (The Hunger Games), Kris Kristofferson and Zane Holtz, the film follows three men forced by circumstance to commit a brazen robbery. But as each minute of the event unfolds, their simple plan goes awry and becomes a dangerous game of life and death.

The distributor Kino Lorber has acquired North American rights to the South Korean thriller A Hard Day. According to Deadline, the film centers on homicide detective Geon-soo Go who receives a divorce notice from his wife, his mother passes away, and he becomes the focus of a police investigation over alleged embezzlement, all within 24 hours. On his way to his mother’s funeral, he commits a fatal hit and run and then tries to cover it up by hiding the man’s corpse in his deceased mother’s coffin. But when he gets a mysterious call from a person claiming to be the sole witness of the crime, he realizes someone has been watching him all along.

A trailer was released for Michael Almereyda's film Anarchy, described as a a modern-day adaptation of William Shakespeare's Cymbeline. The film is set in contemporary Americand and stars Milla Jovovich, Ed Harris, Dakota Johnson, Penn Badgley, Anton Yelchin, Ethan Hawke, John Leguizamo and Bill Pullman in a battle between dirty cops and a drug dealing biker gang.

TELEVISION

PBS announced a couple of additional new offerings for 2015, including Arthur & George, which stars Martin Clunes (Doc Martin) as world-famous author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The three-part adaptation of Julian Barnes’ acclaimed novel will follows the separate but intersecting lives of two very different men: a half-Indian son of a vicar who is framed for a crime he may or may not have committed, and Doyle, who investigates the case.

Fans of Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch series, who've been (not so patiently) waiting for Amazon Prime's television adaptation, don't have to wait much longer. The series starring Titus Welliver as Bosch will premiere February 13 on Amazon Prime Instant Video in the USA, the UK, and Germany. (Hat tip to Crimespree.)

Harlan Coben is set to write his first original TV script, The Five, which follows a circle of friends and their shared experience of a tragic accident. It's slated to air on the British network Sky Living in late 2015.

Fox has hired Richard Shepard to direct Rosewood, a procedural written/executive produced by Todd Harthan (Psych). The show follows brilliant Dr. Beaumont Rosewood, Jr., the top private pathologist in Miami who owns one of most sophisticated, state-of-the-art independent labs in the country and finds secrets in bodies others usually miss.

Emmy Award-winning writer/showrunner René Balcer (Law & Order: Criminal Intent) is spearheading a new project titled The Council. The one-hour international thriller for the CBC woven around a murder in a remote Canadian Arctic town that turns into an international conspiracy to control the vast natural resources of the Arctic.

Showtime is developing a crime drama titled Lonely Hearts Killers, based on the true story of a 1940s sexy, violent grifter and a quiet, love starved Dairy Plant employee on a cross-country crime spree, seducing and murdering as many as 20 women.

NBC gave the go-ahead to the pilot Game Of Silence, from Carol Mendelsohn (CSI). Based on the Turkish drama Suskunlar, it's about a rising attorney on the brink of success who could lose his perfectly crafted life when long-lost childhood friends threaten to expose a dark secret from their violent past.

In more pilot news from the Peacock Network, NBC handed out a pilot order to the drama Endgame, described as a high-octane thriller set in the high stakes world of Las Vegas where a former sniper turned security expert gets drawn into a mysterious conspiracy; and also Blindspot, centering on a beautiful woman with amnesia found naked in Times Square, her body fully covered in intricate tattoos, which leads the FBI to use the road map on her body to reveal a larger criminal conspiracy.

Meanwhile, ABC's new pilot orders include Quantico, described as "Grey's Anatomy meets Homeland"; Runner, which centers on the traditionally masculine world of arms dealing through the unexpected lens of a woman; and L.A. Crime, a true-crime procedural "that explores sex, politics and popular culture across various noteworthy eras in L.A. history."

Fox greenlighted a pilot for an American remake of the popular BBC procedural Luther, which originally starred Idris Elba, who will executive-produce the pilot.  

If it worked once, do it again - following November's three-way crossover episode between Chicago Fire, Chicago P.D. and Law & Order: SVU, the three NBC dramas will be joining forces again later this season. Chicago Fire/P.D. showrunner Matt Olmstead teased a few details: "There's a Ted Bundy-esque character who hunted in New York and hunted in Chicago, and it's the pursuit of a character like that."

Showtime Networks bought the rights to Dreamcatcher, the Sundance premiere documentary about former Chicago prostitute-turned-advocate Brenda Myers-Powell and her efforts to fight the sexual exploitation of at-risk youth.  

A trailer was released for the third season of Hannibal, with Will (Hugh Dancy) desperately tracking the whereabouts of Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen).

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO

NPR reporter Martin Scholz talked with internationally best-selling author Henning Mankell (of the Wallander series) about his writing and the "catastrophe of cancer" in his battle with the disease.

Open Road Media posted a video of Rand Lee, son of Manfred Lee, talking about his famous father who was one half of the creative team behind Ellery Queen.