— Our beloved Rashida Jones has signed on to the already-filming “The Social Network,” David Fincher’s movie about the founding of Facebook. Variety doesn’t confirm who she’s playing, but we’re almost certain that she’ll be Gretchen, the attorney of Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) – she’s almost a decade older than the rest of the cast, which also includes Andrew Garfield, Justin Timberlake, Rooney Mara, Armie Hammer and Max Minghella.
— Sam Mendes is still circling a handful of projects — Christopher Hampton is adapting “Netherland,” and John August is writing the comic-book movie “Preacher” for the director, and now Mendes has found another writer for a potential project. Joe Penhall, a British playwright who adapted “Enduring Love” and “The Road” for the screen, has signed to write the screenplay for “Butcher’s Crossing,” based on John Williams’ 1960 novel, set in the 1870s, about a Harvard drop-out who joins the search for a great buffalo herd in Kansas. We couldn’t be bigger fans of Penhall’s stage plays, but we’ve yet to be convinced by his film work – both “Enduring Love” and “The Road” felt like rather uninspired, adapt-by-numbers translations of their source material, for the most part, but fingers crossed he delivers here.
— Elizabeth Eulberg, a so-called ‘tastemaker’ in children’s publishing, and the PR mastermind behind the success of the “Twilight” books, has sold the rights to her upcoming young adult novel “The Lonely Heart’s Club” to Mandalay Pictures. The book follows a heartbroken teenage girl who, along with her friends, swears off dating until graduation. So, a gender-switched “Love’s Labour’s Lost,” then? We thought we were over the high school Shakespeare sub-genre when Amanda Bynes did “Twelfth Night”…
— We reported this before the trades, just so you know. Steven Soderbergh, who has written, shot and edited another movie in the time it’s taken you to read this sentence, will premiere his Spalding Gray documentary “And Everything Is Going Fine” at the Slamdance Film Festival in Park City on January 23rd (the title is definitely new). Slamdance founder Peter Baxter says “Steven Soderbergh represents the spirit of Slamdance. This year, he’s fully immersed himself within our community in support of the indie filmmaker by debuting an independently made film about a renowned independent artist.”