Getting your script picked up in Hollywood can be both a blessing and a curse. You can see your vision realized as it should be on the big screen or you can see it ripped apart, rewritten, retooled, dumped, re-acquired and re-imagined until it barely resembles the thing you first wrote. For Black List approved Jonathan Herman, he’s seeing his work get a makeover.
His script, “Conviction,” was first acquired a couple of years ago by Warner Bros and Silver Pictures, and it was described as a heist picture in the vein of “Heat,” that centered on a mastermind robber jailed after a job goes bad who is forced by the FBI to entrap his protege who is also planning a big score. Well, that’s gonna be changing into something else. Deadline reports that Steve Carell is now attached to star and produce the movie that is being revamped to be something more in the style of “48 Hours” or “Ocean’s Eleven.” Which is fine, but it makes you wonder why anyone would take a script that was heralded for what it was and then turn it into something it’s not. But whatever, that’s Hollywood.
Carell has been busily stacking up his post-“The Office” workload filming “Seeking a Friend for the End of the World” with Keira Knightley earlier this year, currently shooting “Great Hope Springs” with Meryl Streep and has “Burt Wonderstone” with Jim Carrey and Bennett Miller‘s “Foxcatcher” with Channing Tatum booked for the first part of 2012. The heat is on him, so why not make the most of it. No one has been hired yet to rewrite “Conviction,” but Joel Silver is co-producing, so you know, keep expectations at a minimum.