'Hell' freeze is over with Tristar sale
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"Hell and High Water," sources confirmed Friday, is tentatively scheduled to go into production in August, almost two decades after the late screenwriter Franklin Cohen wrote it under the title "Running the Wild Big Red."
TriStar has hired John Patrick Shanley ("Moonstruck") to polish characters and dialogue on the project. Cast has not been set.
Slated to produce are the "Short Circuit" team of Lawrence Turman and David Foster, as well as longtime Harlin collaborator Mario Kassar. TriStar president of production Stacey Lassally and veepee of production Kevin Misher shepherd the Western for the studio.
Trek down the Colorado
"High Water" is the fictional tale of the first white men to travel down the Colorado River. Over the last two decades, producer Foster has pitched the post-Civil War drama as "the Western on the water."
The screenplay was first optioned in 1974 by David Brower and Foster, who sold the project to a young Columbia Pictures production exec named Peter Guber. Screenwriters Walter Newman ("The Great Escape,""The Magnificent Seven") and Paul F. Edwards took cracks at the movie to no avail.
While the screenplay festered in development hell, Guber has risen to chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment, which oversees TriStar operations. Guber referred inquiries on "High Water" to TriStar chairman Mike Medavoy, who has also played a major role in the movie's development. Over the 18-year development, the only constant was Foster. "When I first started to work on the project, I was a young, hip guy with long hair," Foster said. "Now I'm attractively bald."
"Hell and High Water" landed at TriStar under chairman Jeff Sagansky and executive veepee Steve Randall in 1989. Medavoy put "Total Recall" screenwriter Ronald Shusett and George Lee Marshall on the Western, to no avail, before the movie emerged from the deep freeze with Harlin at the helm.
