Ripe for plucking
Mount, Sony talk distrib rights on 'Cherry'
NEW YORK -- The Thom Mount Co. is negotiating with Sony Pictures to distribute "Cherry Poppers," a proposed theatrical movie to be directed by Roland Joffe and to star Leelee Sobieski and Jared Leto.
That's the word from Rodman Gregg, Mount's partner, who said the movie, an original screenplay by Darren Lemke, is about "three wannabe hoodlums in their early 20s. But it won't be a genre gangster picture so much as a character-driven drama."
Gregg said Mount ("Bull Durham," "Tequila Sunrise") has put together the equity funding for "Cherry Poppers," which should cost between $15 million and $20 million. Another partner on the picture is Angry Films, which is owned by Don Murphy ("Natural Born Killers," "Apt Pupil").
Mount and Gregg brokered the deal reported last week in which Talisman Films of the U.K. and Montreal's Ice Storm Studios sold the U.S. rights to a 22-episode series called "The Adventures of Jules Verne" to the Sci Fi Channel for between $2.5 million and $3 million.
"Iron Man," another Mount project, which is in script development, focuses on the world of high-school wrestling, says Gregg. Terrence O'Hara, the director of episodes of "The X-Files" and "JAG," will direct "Iron Man" on a budget of about $10 million. The writer and star is Nate Adams, a former high-school wrestler, and the consultant is Dan Gable, an Olympic wrestler.
Also in the works is a movie shot on digital tape based on the play "Additional Particulars," written by Ed Simpson. The director is Brad Battersby.
Under the Mount/Gregg banner is "The Unknowns," a "Chariots of Fire"-type screenplay by Killian Kerwin about the 1924 American Olympic rugby team that won the gold medal despite the fact that rugby is a European sport that's played by very few athletes in the U.S. Gregg said that the American victory over the French team was so embarrassing that rugby was abolished as an Olympic sport. Gregg said he's in talks with Miramax to distribute "The Unknowns."
On the drawing boards is a proposed anthology TV series about "true crime among the rich and famous," with the society author Dominic Dunne as host. Gregg envisions it as a cable-network project, in the form either of a weekly hour series or of a batch of two-hour movies.
And Showtime has commissioned the script for a biopic of Fiorello LaGuardia, the colorful mayor of New York during the 1930s and early 1940s.
