Most year-end best-of lists consist of things that have already been produced, released, and consumed. But the Black List stands apart in that it's all about the films that haven't come out yet. Created by Franklin Leonard and Dino Sijamic, the annual compilation shines a light on the "most liked" unproduced screenplays of each year, as…
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Remember The Night Chronicles? That's the planned three-film series funded by Media Rights Capital and produced by M. Night Shyamalan that would chronicle the intersection of the supernatural and the modern world. The first film in the loose series, Devil (yeah, the elevator movie) was released in fall 2010, and in June 2013 Shyamalan had announced 12…
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Chris Sparling wrote the 'man in a coffin' thriller Buried, and he followed that script up with another tightly confined thriller, ATM. Sparling's script was directed by first-timer David Brooks, and the resulting thriller finds three people (Brian Geraghty, Alice Eve and Josh Peck) trapped inside an ATM in the middle of a parking lot…
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Back in the late '90s, when Mandy Moore first appeared on the pop music scene, I would've never predicted she'd still be an active famous person in the early 2010s. Of course, I also dismissed Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Jessica Simpson, and everyone in 'NSYNC as one-hit wonders destined to fade into obscurity by about…
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I'll be honest: If you asked me to name the best original screenplays of 2010, Chris Sparling's script for Rodrigo Cortés' Buried would probably not be on the list. Some critics would probably agree with me, but that hasn't stopped Sparling from lobbying members of the Academy for the Best Original Screenplay Oscar nomination. After…
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Got to hand it to Collider: they're scouring the American Film Market scarfing up info on a ton of new films being represented there this week. The latest two are Abducted, which is the first post-Twilight film for Taylor Lautner, and ATM, which is based on a script hatched by Chris Sparling, aka the screenwriter…
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Briefly: M Night Shyamalan and Media Rights Capital are moving full speed ahead with the 'Night Chronicles' series, audience laughter at trailers for Devil be damned. (And, honestly, I half expect the people that see Devil to come away liking it. But we'll find out soon enough.) A while back, Buried screenwriter Chris Sparling was…
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Over a year ago M. Night Shyamalan put together a deal with Media Rights Captial to create a label called The Night Chronicles. The first of three films for the label, Devil, is in post-production now. So it's time to move forward on the second, to be called Twelve Strangers. We don't know much about…
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Screenwriter Chris Sparling made a name for himself with the one-man, one-location script Buried, which landed on the Black List, an industry insider list of the best unproduced screenplays of the year, and premiered at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. Huge buzz (read my review) resulted in a bidding war which ended with Lionsgate spending…
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Screenwriter Chris Sparling made a name for himself with the one-man, one-location script Buried, which landed on the Black List, an industry insider list of the best unproduced screenplays of the year, and premiered at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. Huge buzz (read my review) resulted in a bidding war which ended with Lionsgate spending…
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I first learned of Buried after the spec screenplay appeared on the Black List, a listing of the top unproduced screenplays of the year. Written by Chris Sparling, the film stars Ryan Reynolds as a U.S. contractor working in Iraq who wakes up to find that he has been buried alive inside a coffin. With…
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