Posted: Mon., Feb. 20, 2006, 9:00pm PT

Col's good 'Yuma' man

Mangold and wife team for '3:10'

By Michael Fleming

Mangold

Konrad

"Walk the Line" director James Mangold and his wife, producer Cathy Konrad, have set the Columbia Pictures remake "3:10 to Yuma" as the next film he'll direct.

Pic will shoot in the summer.

Mangold and Konrad boarded "Yuma" after getting a new draft from "Collateral" scribe Stuart Beattie, who rewrote scripts from Michael Brandt and Derek Haas.

The original 1957 Western, starring Glenn Ford and Van Heflin, is about a sheriff determined to bring a captured desperado to justice. Elmore Leonard wrote the short story on which it was based.

"There are a lot of good-bad themes that were only touched on in the original," Mangold said. "A lot of Westerns are meditative, but this is a total struggle culminating in a showdown, which has the potential to be one of the great movie gunfights."

Mangold and Konrad have also cast Anne Heche to star in the Jenny Bicks-created pilot "Men in Trees" for Warner Bros. and ABC. Mangold and Konrad are co-exec producing with Bicks ("Sex and the City").

Hourlong pilot came from an idea Konrad found about a Gotham-based relationship guru who suffers a bad breakup and finds herself in Alaska.

"It was a story I had banging around in my head for over 10 years," Konrad said. "The tone is 'Northern Exposure' with a 'Sex and the City' perspective."

Mangold and Konrad have also found new homes for three feature projects:

• They are working with Spyglass partners Roger Birnbaum and Gary Barber to move a remake of the 1995 British thriller "Mute Witness" to Universal after getting it out of turnaround from Sony;

• They are also back in business with Fox 2000 president Elizabeth Gabler, who has picked up "The Rich Part of Life," an adaptation of the Jim Kokoris novel about what happens to the family of a widowed Chicago professor when he cashes in a lottery ticket worth $190 million;

• Paramount co-prexy Brad Weston has picked up "Follow Me," a drama based on a short story about a woman who hires a photographer to covertly take snapshots of her. Konrad first set up that thriller at Dimension, then moved it to Disney.