Casting 'Mockingbird', 'Snow Crash', 'The Alchemyst'

Bryan Fuller is bringing one of regular actors to Mockingbird Lane. Veteran character actor Beth Grant, who played nosy neighbor Marianne Marie Beattle on Fuller’s Wonderfalls and then brought the character over to his Pushing Daises series, will have a recurring role on The Munster’s reboot as the wheelchair bound neighborhood busybody, Maryanne. Apparently, this Maryanne is very suspicious of her creepy new neighbors. 

Director Joe Cornish, who wowed critics with his low budget alien invasion film Attack the Block, has scored a major follow-up prize -the long in development version of Neal Stephenson’s 1992 classic novel Snow Crash. The long-time Steven Spielberg producer Kathleen Kennedy (who has been tapped to take over the CEO reigns of Lucasfilm now that George is retiring) has drafted Cornish to write and direct the film for problem-plagued Paramount Pictures.  Snow Crash follows Hiro Protagonist as he investigates the effects of a mysterious virus called "Snow Crash" through both real and virtual worlds in a near future dominated by corporations and organized crime. The novel's development history goes all the way back to its publication, when Kennedy first picked it up for Paramount. The studio eventually dropped the project, and Kennedy took it to Disney, where it went stagnant. 

 

 

The popular young-adult fantasy novel series by Michael Scott, The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel, will be heading to the big screen as Lawless Entertainment will partner with the Australian based AMPCO Films to adapt the first novel in the six-book series, The Alchemyst. Scott will adapt his own book, though no director has been announced. Production, however, is scheduled to begin in February in Australia and New Zealand. No distributor has picked it up, either.

 Deadline is reporting that Gaumont International Television and producer Martha De Laurentiis are looking to adapt the 1968 cult film Barbarella into a TV series. Martha, and her husband, Dino De Laurentiis -who produced the original film- acquired the property back in 2007 and was working on a remake before his death in 2010. Gaumont International Television is a French based company that launched a small office in Los Angeles back in the fall of last year, who are also behind Bryan Fuller’s 2013 midseason drama for NBC, Hannibal. 

 

 Veteran character actor Richard Lynch, who for more than 40 years played villains in many horror and science fiction films, along with many TV series appearances, died June 19 in Palm Springs. The actor was 76, though no word was released on what he died of. During the late 70’s and 1980’s he played many bad guys, mostly in science fiction shows like Battlestar Galactica (Gun on Ice Planet Zero), Galactica 1980 (Galactica Discovers Earth), Buck Rogers in the 25^th Century (Vegas in Space) and Star Trek: The Next Generation (Gambit). Other appearances on TV included Blue Thunder, Charlie’s Angels, Airwolf, Highlander. His movie roles included the films The Sword and the Sorcerer, Alligator II: The Mutation, The Seven-Ups, Vampire, Trancers II, Puppet Master III, the remake of Halloween (2007) and this year’s Rob Zombie film The Lords of Salem.