Done Deals

These are pitches that have been OPTIONED by Hollywood, from a website that used to be free and now isn't anymore, those fuckers. Via warrenellis.com, who used to post them because it depressed him to see what was making other people money. And it IS pretty depressing.

Title: Untitled Maddock-Wilson Picture
Log Line: Centers on the Navy Marine Mammal Program and the animals being trained for military rescue operations.Buyer: Walt Disney PicturesMore: This will be based on two pitches that were merged into “Navy SEALs” in February 2005. Patrick Aiello, Mark Ciardi, Jessie Nelson, Nina Laden and Mayhem Pictures’ Gordon Gray will produce. The film is set to be live action, but could be a CGI animation project.

Title: Boob Job
Log Line: A guy’s dreams come true when his wife gets a boob job, but his dream doesn’t turn out to be everything he hoped for.

Title: Live 2 Tell
Log Line: A black teen from the projects becomes a drug kingpin and then turns his life around.Writer: Tupac Shakur
(The FUCK?)

Title: Twist
Log Line: A wimpy computer programmer switches bodies with a studly secret agent. The two become entangled in a complex web of espionage as they fight to survive and bring down their enemies.

Title: Parents on Strike
Log Line: Parents, who are fed up with their children’s behavior, decide to go on strike.

Title: Hall Pass
Log Line: A married couple find themselves going through the motions. The wife gives her husband a “hall pass,” which means permission to engage in extracurriculars. Complications ensue.

Title: DopeLog
Line: An undercover DEA agent intent on busting a rural Indiana pot growing ring, jeopardizes her mission by falling in love.

Title: Double Dutch
Log Line: Set in the world of competitive jump
More: Pitch. Raven Symone is set to star.

Title: Notorious D.A.D
Log Line: A superstar rapper loses everything and is forced to take a job as a nanny for his accountant’s kids while trying to resurrect his music career.

Title: The Grays
Log Line: An alien race function as the “United States of the cosmos” and they run things on Earth as well as on other worlds. Operating in secrecy, the aliens are unwilling to reveal themselves for fear of altering mankind’s development.
More: 75 page treatment, which was based on Whitley Strieber’s unpublished novel.

Title: The Proposal
Log Line: A book editor is forced to marry her male assistant in order to stay in the country. When they travel to Alaska to meet his family, the new couple has to fake their way through a surprise wedding thrown by his parents.

Title: Mr. Nice Guy
Log Line: A guy attempts a seemingly mundane task, but mishaps snowball and turn his life upside down.

Title: Prey
Log Line: A beautiful homicide detective investigates a series of rapes and murders in New Orleans.

Title: Untitled Yakuza Project
Log Line: A white American kid who’s orphaned in Japan is raised by yakuza gang members. He becomes one of their fiercest leaders during an all-out gang war.
(”It’s THE LAST SAMURAI, only with guns and cars! And no Crying Tom Cruise!”)

Title: Genbot
Log Line: A young woman discovers that she is part of a secret government operation that turns her into a cyborg.Genre: Action-Comedy

Title: A Thousand Clowns
Log Line: An out-of-work TV writer, constantly fighting the system, must find a conventional job if he is to remain the guardian of his 12-year old nephew entrusted to his care.

Title: Max Payne
Log Line: A New York cop’s wife and baby are killed by thugs high on a designer drug called Valkyr. Devastated, the cop joins the Drug Enforcement Agency and goes undercover with the mob to find the source of the drug. Framed for the murder of his partner and hunted down by both the mob and the police, he is forced to wage a one-man war against crime.

Title: Big Man on Campus
Log Line: In a high school, beauty and brains duke it out and the perception of popular changes, which makes the power structure crumble.

Title: Absolute Angels
Log Line: A high school outsider is invited to join the cheerleading squad only to find out the girls are a pack of vampires.

Title: Valiant
Log Line: A 17-year-old runaway befriends a group of teens living in the New York subways and discovers that some of Gotham’s inhabitants are a magical species trying to exist in the modern world.

Title: Untitled Bisch Project
Log Line: Described as a cross between “Cheaper by the Dozen” and “The Pacifier” and centers on a male protagonist in his mid-20s to late-30s.

Title: Easier, Softer Way
Log Line: Two unlucky pot heads become involved in a scheme to rip off a mysterious character called Mr. Big after the duo sours on rehab.

Title: Randy and the Mob
Log Line: A good ol’ boy lands in hot water with some low-life mobsters, and then must seek help from his estranged, identical twin brother who is gay.

Title: I’d Tell You I Love You but Then I’d Have to Kill You
Log Line: At an isolated girls school outside Washington, D.C., all the students are daughters of spies and are secretly being trained to become agents themselves. Trouble begins when one of the girls has a romance with a local boy.

Title: The Dogs of Babel
Log Line: A grieving linguistics professor tries to communicate with his Rhodesian Ridgeback because the dog was the only witness to the death of the man’s wife, who fell from a tree in their backyard.
(YOU HAVE TO BE FUCKING KIDDING ME WHATWHATWHAT?!!!!?!?!!!)

Title: Quiet Type
Log Line: A mute from a small town moves to New York to pursue his dreams of conducting an orchestra.

Title: Darksiders
Log Line: A band of vampires become special operatives for the FBI.

Title: Billy Grimm
Log Line: The first Grimm Reaper with a heart is born.

Title: The Impossible Adventures of Phineas Roone
Log Line: A 13-year-old Brooklyn boy sets out to find the anonymous author of a popular fantasy-adventure book series when the publisher offers a million-dollar prize to whomever can find the mysterious scribe. The boy then discovers that the fantastical tales in the books are real.
(In the pitch meeting: “What if Willy Wonka fucked Harry Potter?”)

Title: The Richest Man in the World
Log Line: The poorest man in the world gets the chance to walk in the shoes of the richest man in the world.

Title: Red-Tails in Love
Log Line: Romances occur between a group of bird watchers in Central Park when they become captivated by Pale Male and its mate when they set up a nest at the co-op, an exceptional occurrence. The group chronicles the activities of the birds and gets involved when residents of the co-op serve an eviction notice.

Title: Hotel for Dogs
Log Line: A teenager secretly fills a vacant house with stray dogs after she moves in with her aunt and has to leave her “best friend” behind.

Title: Stay at Home Tom
Log Line: A father has to learn to take care of his two young children when his wife goes back to work.
(starring Michael Keaton maybe?)

Title: Camp Couture
Log Line: A spoiled, trendy teen is forced by her parents to go to a “regular” camp filled with misfits and not the famed elite fashion camp known as Camp Couture that she would like to attend.

Title: Untitled Holden PitchLog Line: A romance develops between a blue state city boy who is always on his Blackberry and a red state country girl who has grown up on a peach farm

WOW!

Listzombie Old-Timey

I'm going to start making lists while I'm at work, for various reasons, in various ways, and it's all for me. So if you've reached this page in hopes you'd find something edifying or perhaps just entertaining, look elsewhere.

In no particular order:

1. Ella Fitzgerald

2. Frank Sinatra

3. Louis Armstrong?

4. Irving Berlin-but who sings his songs?

5. Billie Holiday

6. Nina Simone

7. Count Basie

8. Sarah Vaughn

9. Peggy Lee

10. Anita O'Day

11. Maxine Sullivan

12. Mildred Bailey

This list makes sense to me for my purposes.

Yellowjackets Are Carnivorous

And they're going to eat Alabama.

MOBILE -- To the bafflement of insect experts, gigantic yellow jacket nests have started turning up in old barns, unoccupied houses, cars and underground cavities across the southern two-thirds of Alabama.
Specialists say it could be the result of a mild winter and drought conditions, or multiple queens forcing worker yellow jackets to enlarge their quarters so the queens will be in separate areas. But experts haven't determined exactly what's behind the surprisingly large nests.
Auburn University entomologists, who say they've never seen the nests so large, have been fielding calls about the huge nests from property owners from Dothan up to Sylacauga and over into west-central Alabama's Black Belt.
At one site in Barbour County, the nest was as large as a Volkswagen Beetle, said Andy McLean, an Orkin pesticide service manager in Dothan who helped remove it from an abandoned barn about a month ago.
"It was one of the largest ones we've seen," McLean said.
Attached to two walls and under the slab, the nest had to be removed in sections, McLean said.
Entomologist Dr. Charles Ray at the Alabama Cooperative Extension System in Auburn said he's aware of about 16 of what he described as "super-sized" nests in south Alabama.
Ray said he's seen 10 of them and cautioned people about going near them because of the yellow jacket's painful sting.
The largest nest Ray has inspected this year filled the interior of a weathered 1955 Chevrolet parked in a rural Elmore County barn. That nest was about the size of a tire in the rear floor seven weeks ago, but quickly spread to fill the entire vehicle, the property owner, Harry Coker, said. Four satellite nests around it have gotten into the eaves of the barn, about 300 yards from his home.
"I'm kind of afraid for the grandkids. I had to sneak down there at dark and get my tractor out of the barn," Coker said. "It's been a disruption."
Coker said he may wait until a winter freeze to try to remove the nest.
In previous years, a yellow jacket nest was no larger than a basketball, Ray said. It would contain about 3,000 workers and one queen. These gigantic nests may have as many as 100,000 workers and multiple queens.
Without a cold winter to kill them this year, the yellow jackets continued feeding in January and February -- and layering their nests made of paper, not wax. They typically are built in shallow underground cavities.
Yellow jackets, often confused with bees, may visit flowers for sugar, but unlike bees, yellow jackets are carnivorous, eating insects, carrion and picnic food, according to scientists."They were able to find food to colony through the winter," Ray said in a telephone interview.
He investigated a nest near Pineapple, measuring about 5 feet by 4 feet, that was coming out of the ground on a roadside. A southwest Pike County house in Goshen had a giant nest spreading into its roof.
Goshen Mayor G. Malon Johnson said he consulted Ray in removing it because he was concerned that children playing nearby could be attacked.
A colony has a maximum size in early July and August. The hot, dry conditions could force the yellow jackets out of ground nests.
"Normally it starts declining in the fall," Ray said.
He said the "super colonies" appear to have many queens.
"We're not really sure how this multiple queen thing works," Ray said. "It could be that the daughters of the original queen don't leave the nest or that the queens have developed some way to cooperate."
Ray examined a collected nest from Macon County to count the queens in it.
"We found 12 queens so far, so that's definitely a factor," Ray said Thursday.
Dr. Michael D. Goodisman, a biologist at Georgia Tech who has studied large nests in Australia, said he's heard of some large ones in Georgia and Florida, but not as big as those in Alabama.A 6-foot by 3-foot nest on a pond stump in Bulloch County, Ga., was featured July 12 on CNN.
"I'm not sure people know what triggers it," he said.
U.S. Department of Agriculture entomologist James H. Cane said he's familiar with a nest in Florida 10 or 15 years ago that engulfed a big easy chair. Cane said the monster nests reported in Alabama are intriguing and agreed with Ray that they could be the product of multiple queens in a single nest.
The nest usually dies out each year. "All that overwinters is the future queen," he said.
Given a queen's egg-laying rate, he said, there's no way a nest with a single queen could get that big in a growing season.
But in a multiple-queen colony, Cane said, there must be space where queens can't get at each other.