Screenwriter Michael Gilio Scripting Carter Beats The Devil For WB And The Interventionalist For Alexander Payne
By Russ Fischer/June 21, 2010 11:02 am EST
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Meanwhile, what is The Interventionalist, which Deadline offhandedly mentions that Gilio has scripted for Alexander Payne? This is the first that I’ve heard of that script, and consequently of Payne’s involvement.
…opens with real-life magician Charles Carter executing a particularly grisly trick, using President Warren G. Harding as a volunteer. Shortly afterwards, Harding dies mysteriously in his San Francisco hotel room, and Carter is forced to flee the country. Or does he? It’s only the first of many misdirections in a magical performance by Gold. In the course of subsequent pages, Carter finds himself pursued by the most hapless of FBI agents; falls in love with a beautiful, outspoken blind woman; and confronts an old nemesis bent on destroying him.
Payne is producing the series Hung, the film Cedar Rapids, and is finishing up The Descendants (see a tiny bit of fan-filmed on-set footage here) and possibly still planning to direct Downsizing, which he’d been set to make prior his current film. (Though I wouldn’t be surprised at all to hear that Downsizing is actually dead. Just hoping it isn’t.) The Descendants is the first movie Payne has directed that he didn’t write; would this be his second, or is this only a producing gig as well?
So: The Interventionalist. There are a few possibilities here. Spelled as Deadline has it, that’s primarily a medical term, while the alternate spelling, ‘interventionist,’ leads to a couple things like this book, which “classifies various syndromes that prevent a church from making the changes that are needed for new life” and this one, which describes Banksy-like artists who “who trespass into the everyday world to raise our awareness of injustice and other social problems.” Hm, OK. Given Payne’s tendencies towards the weighty, I’d expect the Deadline spelling to be correct, with all associated medical implications. But we don’t know.
If you’ve got any info on this one, please drop me a line. I’m quite curious.
