Daniel Craig’s may non-007 dance card may expand again

Daniel Craig in Skyfall

UPDATE (9:15 p.m. ET): Deadline altered the wording of its original post. It now describes Craig as being “in talks to star” in Kings instead of “is set to star.” The headline of this post was altered to reflect that.

ORIGINAL POST: Daniel Craig added another non-007 project and will star with Halle Berry in a drama set against riots in 1992 in Los Angeles, Deadline: Hollywood reported.

Here’s an excerpt:

 

EXCLUSIVE– Daniel Craig is set to star opposite Halle Berry in Mustang director Deniz Gamze Erguven’s eagerly-anticipated English language debut pic Kings. The project is set against a backdrop of rising tensions in L.A with the Rodney King trial in 1992. Craig will play Ollie, a loner who lives in South Central- one of its only white residents- who befriends and falls in love with Berry’s character, a tough, protective mother who looks after a group of kids. When the riots explode in the city, Craig’s character helps Berry try and track down the kids from the worst of the violence. Kings will have the same mix of lightness and tough emotion that made Mustang such a standout.

Besides King, Craig’s upcoming non-007 projects consist of:

—Logan Lucky, a heist film directed by Steven Soderbergh. Filming to start this fall.

—Othello, off-Broadway play, part of the 2016-2017 season at the New York Theatre Workshop.

—Purity, a limited series to be televised on the Showtime premium channel. Production is to start sometime in 2017. The 20 episodes will be telecast in 2017 and 2018. Craig also is an executive producer of the project.

 

1991: Donald Hamilton discusses Matt Helm films

Donald Hamilton

Over on The Spy Command’s Facebook page, reader Bill Groves shared a 1991 letter he received from Matt Helm creator Donald Hamilton.

In the letter, Hamilton commented about the four 1960s Matt Helm movies starring Dean Martin.

The films took Hamilton’s very serious novels and made them into comedies that incorporated bits from Dino’s variety show. The hero supposedly drank heavily (like Dean on his show) and was frequently surrounded by beautiful women. The Ambushers (1967) even had a joke referencing Martin’s birthplace of Stubenville, Ohio.

Poster for The Silencers

As it turns out, Hamilton wasn’t upset about the changes. Groves gave us permission to do a post about the letter. What follows is a portion of the text. The word is boldface was underlined by Hamilton in the original.

 

Dear Mr. Groves:

With respect to the Helm movies, my philosophy is that I write to entertain and once I’ve done a book or story to my satisfaction, anybody who can use my material entertainingly, and is willing to pay me for the privilege, is welcome, even if he doesn’t stick very closely to my original vision (if I may use a fancy word for it).

From this standpoint, I found the movie of THE SILENCERS enjoyable even though the playboy character played by Dean Martin was pretty far from the grimmer character I’d visualized. So it wasn’t my SILENCERS; it was still a fun movie, and I had no objections. (Of course a writer would always prefer to see his work brought to the screen the way he wrote it, but that happens so seldom, it’s only a dream.) The other Helm movies, unfortunately, were pretty mechanical and I didn’t like them much, not because they treated my ‘vision’ disrespectfully, but simply because they were not very enjoyable as movies.

(snip)

PS: For a much more satisfactory job, from the writer’s standpoint, try to catch a rerun of the movie made by William Wyler from my book THE BIG COUNTRY.

The Silencers, released in 1966, was the first film in the Helm series. It actually took material was from both 1960s’s Death of a Citizen, the first Helm novel, and 1962’s The Silencers, the fourth.

The four movies used varying amounts of Hamilton content from the books. For more details, read this 2000 article, which includes updates from 2006 and 2015.

Meanwhile, for those unfamiliar with it, The Big Country was an epic 1958 film with Gregory Peck, Charlton Heston, Burl Ives and Chuck Connors. Ives won an Oscar as best supporting actor.