A few weeks back, I bemoaned the lack of Crazy Heart writer and director Scott Cooper in recent cinema. Despite being attached to a number of projects, nothing had yet panned out, so the news that he was signing on for an equally-as-languishing project, the adaptation of Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children was music to my ears. Such news must have given Cooper and his team a kick in the pants, as the helmer is now set for another new project. Fox Searchlight has signed Cooper to helm (and possibly adapt from the source material) a film based on Mark Seal’s book The Man in the Rockefeller Suit. Seal’s book chronicles the bizarre and criminal life of Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, a German man who moved to the United States as a teen, and then slowly began to pass himself off as a part of the Rockefeller family. For whatever reason, Gerhartsreiter’s insane ruse worked, and he spent a number of years as “Clark Rockefeller.” As a Fake-efeller, Gerhartsreiter got work on Wall Street, palled around in chi-chi social circles, got married to an apparently smart businesswoman, and had a kid. He also apparently killed two people in California in his younger years. Oh, and he also went totally nuts when his wife finally caught on to his lies and sought a divorce, kidnapping their young daughter for a period that was less than a week, but that still involved his dragging a social work by SUV and also a weird [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

The film adaptation of Claire Messud’s gorgeous novel The Emperor’s Children has faced an unfairly bumpy trip to the screen. Back in 2009, Ron Howard was slated to direct the film from a script by Noah Baumbach. Then the project seemingly fell dead, with no news until March of 2010, when Howard left the project entirely, leaving both writing and directing duties to Baumbach. At that time, a list of attached cast members was announced (including Keira Knightley, Eric Bana, and Richard Gere, with buzz about some other names like Michelle Williams). Production was supposed to start last summer, but of course, it didn’t, and know Baumbach appears to be back out of the director’s chair, with Crazy Heart helmer Scott Cooper stepping in to direct from Baumbach’s script (according to an insider report from Twitch). Cooper burst on to the scene with his Jeff Bridges-starring Crazy Heart back in 2009, a directorial debut so lovely and assured that it earned its star his first Oscar (after being nominated no less than six times). Since then, Cooper has had his own fair share of project whiplash, with rumors that he was on the shortlist for Gangster Squad, news that he was developing his own take on The Hatfields and the McCoys, and attachments to the Carancho remake, Empire of the Summer, and Black Listed The Low Dweller. Which is all a nice way of saying that, just like The Emperor’s Children, there’s been a lot of talk about Cooper, but no [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

We’ve yet to see a follow-up film from Scott Cooper since his much lauded Jeff Bridges as an alcoholic country singer film Crazy Heart made its rounds on the awards circuit, but that appears ready to change. Relativity Media bought a spec script back in 2008 called The Low Dweller. It’s the story of an 80s era Indiana convict who gets out of jail and tries to set about putting together a normal life, but instead gets sucked into a revenge scheme after his brother is murdered. A fairly anonymous Pennsylvania man named Brad Ingelsby wrote the original script, and when it was bought it was Relativity’s intentions that Leonardo DiCaprio would star and Ridley Scott would direct. Those plans have changed considerably, but DiCaprio is still on the project in a producer’s role. Now the film has been re-titled Out of the Furnace, and Cooper has been hired not only to direct the film, but also give the script a rewrite. It was reported back in November that Cooper was also involved in a remake of the Argentinean film Carancho, so it remains to be seen where this film ends up falling on his to-do list. Either way, the news of a movie studio hiring a director to bring to life a spec script that isn’t attached to any sort of pre-existing property or centered on a product or corporate logo should be reason enough to celebrate. Right? Source: Deadline Birdseye

‘Crazy Heart,’ better known as the movie that Fox Searchlight thinks will get Jeff Bridges an Oscar, is an admirably low-key venture that never packs much of a punch.

A month ago, there was very little known about the Jeff Bridges led drama Crazy Heart, from first time director Scott Cooper. But ever since Fox Searchlight set a release date, we’ve been hit with a flood of new info that has piqued our interest.