Casting Notes: Jamie Foxx In Welcome To The Jungle; Rockwell, Johansson Signed To 'Lost' Kubrick Script; Jamie Kennedy In Scream 4?

So maybe those rumors of Jamie Foxx writing Laverne & Shirley were a little out there, but the guy is all over the place right now. For instance, in addition to working on a new sketch comedy show and having a role in Kane & Lynch, Foxx will produce, score and voice a character in the Fox Animation film Welcome to the Jungle, based on a pitch by Foxx and Malcolm Spellman.

The latter is writing the script, and while the studio isn't revealing much about the story (that won't last long) there is this quote dangled to suggest...well, something: "Life is a jungle and welcome to it." [Variety]

After the break, a fan favorite may return for Scream 4, and a 'lost' Kubrick treatment continues to slowly come back to life.

CHUD has word that Jamie Kennedy might be back for Scream 4. Kennedy played Randy in the first two films in the series — the guy who explains horror movie conventions to the other characters and ends up being the bridge to bring the audience into Scream's semi-meta take on the genre. He was killed in the second film. Devin says sources close to the production are talking to Kennedy about returning, but the story mechanism for bringing him back is not yet clear. Is he back from the grave, or will this be even more meta, with Kennedy playing himself?

Devin does note that this might not pan out, as Kevin Williamson is currently writing the film, but he cites the idea of bringing the original cast back together is still in play and that Kennedy is basically a lock for the film.

Finally, one of the treasures of the late Stanley Kubrick's estate is the treatment for Lunatic at Large, written for the director in the '50s by Jim Thompson. (Author of the book that spawned the recently controversial The Killer Inside Me.) This was discovered in 1999 and is now going into production, with Sam Rockwell and Scarlett Johansson currently attached.

The 80-page treatment stands more as a gem for serious Thompson fans (like me) than those of Kubrick. The director commissioned the treatment after working with Thompson on The Killing and Paths of Glory, but the film never made it into production at the time. The original idea was Kubrick's, but the work is really Thompson's. A few years ago Stephen R. Clarke turned the treatment into a screenplay, with Chris Palmer planned to direct. Production Weekly mentions the stars being attached, but not if there's a new director or further script drafts. Check the 2006 New York Times article on the film to see why it might be a wee bit like Shutter Island, and here's a basic synopsis:

Set in New York in 1956, it tells the story of Johnnie Sheppard, a former carnival worker with serious anger-management issues, and Joyce, a nervous, attractive barfly he picks up in a Hopperesque tavern scene. There's a newsboy who flashes a portentous headline, a car chase over a railroad crossing with a train bearing down, and a romantic interlude in a spooky, deserted mountain lodge. The great set piece is a nighttime carnival sequence in which Joyce, lost and afraid, wanders among the tents and encounters a sideshow's worth of familiar carnie types: the Alligator Man, the Mule-Faced Woman, the Midget Monkey Girl, the Human Blockhead, with the inevitable noggin full of nails.