Summit Picking Up Sci-Fi Project 'Revoc' (Exclusive)

In what is likely one of the last deals of the year, Lionsgate division Summit Entertainment has picked up a sci-fi action pitch titled Revoc from Olaf de Fleur.

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David Hoberman and Todd Lieberman of Mandeville are attached to produce.

Plot details are being kept under wraps, but the story has been described as being in the vein of District 9 and Moon and is a post-alien invasion thriller.

Mandeville is prepping a winter shoot in London for the sequel to The Muppets, which will star Ricky Gervais and Ty Burrell. It also has the zombie love story Warm Bodies awaiting a Feb. 1 release.

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De Fleur is an Icelandic filmmaker who co-write and directed the crime movie City State; New Regency is remaking the film with James Mangold attached to direct. He is repped by WME and Thruline.

Overseeing for the company are Lionsgate Motion Picture Group president of production Erik Feig, Summit Entertainment president of production Geoff Shaevitz and Lionsgate vp production Matthew Janzen.

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'Jack Reacher' Co-Star Signs With WME (Exclusive)

David Oyelowo, who will be seen opposite Tom Cruise in Jack Reacher, has signed with WME.

He remains with management firm Inphenate and U.K. agency Hamilton-Hodell.

Oyelowo is an Indie Spirit Award and NAACP-nominated actor (for his work in Middle of Nowhere) who can currently be seen in The Paperboy as well as Lincoln. Other recent appearances include Red Tails, The Help and Rise of the Planet of the Apes. 

He recently wrapped work opposite Oprah Winfrey and Forest Whitaker in Lee Daniels' The Butler and opposite Zoe Saldana in Nina Simone.

Oyelowo is now meeting directors on the Sugar Ray Robinson biopic Sweet Thunder,  in which he is attached to star and will executive produce.

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Black List Writer Tapped to Work on 'Line of Sight' for Warners (Exclusive)

Warner Bros. has hired Black List writer Brooks McLaren to rewrite Line of Sight.

Mouse McCoy of The Bandito Bros. is directing the action movie project that Joel Silver and Andrew Rona of Silver Pictures are producing.

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Sight revolves around an elite commando squad who, in the midst of an attack on the United States, must transport a high value target along the eastern seaboard to insure the security of the government.

The goal of the producers is to make an action thriller grounded in the real world as much as possible, with Zero Dark Thirty and Act of Valor as the watchwords. (McCoy directed Valor with heavy Navy SEAL co-operation and is expected to bring a higher level of authenticity than the norm to the table.)

Scott Frasier wrote the initial draft of Sight, which also ended up on the Black List and had Ben Affleck attached to direct at one point.

Silver Pictures' Alex Heineman is exec producing the internally-developed Sight along with the Bandito Bros. 

McLaren wrote the disaster script How It Ends, which was on the 2011 Black List. The project is currently set up at Sierra Affinity with Breck Eisner attached to direct. He is working on an action movie titled God's Gulch with McCoy, which paved the path to Sight.

He is repped by Verve and Apostle and Bloom Hergott.

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Warner Bros. Adaptation of Children's Book 'Genius Files' Finds Writer (Exclusive)

Robert Rugan, a rising star in the commercial directing world, has been hired to pen the script for Warner Bros.’ adaptation of The Genius Files.

Gulfstream Pictures’ Mike Karz (New Year's Eve) is producing the project, which is based on the book series by Dan Gutman.

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The first tome, published in January 2011, revolves around 12-year-old twins who are recruited to be part of a secret government experiment that uses young geniuses to solve complex national problems. The pair must fight for their lives while on a road trip with their family.

The book was “discovered” when Warner Bros. Pictures president Greg Silverman was shown a copy by his son Cooper and his friend, Jed Siegel, both fourth graders at Oakwood School.

Rugan has done commercial spots for companies ranging from HBO and IFC to Visa and Nikon; his envelope-pushing comedic spot for Durex won two CLIO Awards and the CyberLion at Cannes.

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But even though he’s receiving attention for his reel, Rugan isn’t directing Genius Files, he’s writing it. And he got the gig based on his original spec Beauregard Thibodeaux and the Curse of the Rougarou, to which he is attached as director.

He is repped by Verve, Kaplan/Perrone and attorney David Matloff.

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Jon Voight in Negotiations to Play KGB Agent in Ronald Reagan Biopic (Exclusive)

Oscar-winning actor Jon Voight is negotiating to play a pivotal role in Reagan, an upcoming movie about President Ronald Reagan, people associated with the project said Tuesday.

Voight, perhaps the most prominent and outspoken conservative in Hollywood, would play a Soviet KGB agent whose job it was to track Reagan, the 40th U.S. president who is largely considered a hero of the Republican party.

The movie is based on The Crusader and God & Ronald Reagan, two books by Paul Kengor. The story unfolds as a young Russian leader visits a retired agent named Viktor – the character Voight is negotiating to play – so that he may learn of the demise of the Soviet Union. 

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“Viktor is actually a character based on a number of KGB agents and Soviet analysts who we now know were tasked with keeping tabs on Ronald Reagan for many years,” Kengor said. “This is a feature film and not a documentary and I thought it was a smart way for the producers to keep the integrity of the story and yet make it entertaining.”

The $35 million independent movie is being written by Jonas McCord (The Young Riders, The Body) and Howie Klausner (Space Cowboys). It is produced by Ralph Winter, who was behind the 2000-06 X-Men films, along with Mark Joseph, who produced the indie film Doonby in 2010 and was a marketing executive on such films as The Passion of the Christ, Holes and Ray.

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The former U.S. president is a fairly hot commodity in Hollywood nowadays, with multiple projects in the works that will feature Reagan. The Butler, for example, has already generated controversy for casting liberal activist Jane Fonda as Nancy Reagan while Alan Rickman plays Ronald Reagan. The Weinstein Co. film is expected to open in 2013.

Reykjavic from Participant Media will feature Michael Douglas, also a liberal activist, as Reagan. Participant has backed several politically-charged movies, including Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln and former Vice President Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.

Perhaps the best-known treatment of Reagan was in 2003 when James Brolin portrayed him in the Showtime miniseries, The Reagans, largely perceived to be a negative take on his presidency.

Email: Paul.Bond@thr.com

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Emma Thompson Wins 'Effie' Lawsuit, Can Release 19th Century Love Triangle Movie (Exclusive)

Screenwriter and Academy Award-winning actress Emma Thompson has prevailed in a lawsuit against another writer who penned a script about a love triangle involving art critic John Ruskin, his teenage wife Effie Gray and pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais.

Thanks to a ruling Tuesday, Thompson can release her film, Effie, without fear of infringing two other screenplays about a sex scandal that rocked 19th century England. The film is set to come out next year and stars Dakota Fanning, Robbie Coltrane and Thompson.

In the lawsuit, Thompson battled Eve Pomerance, who had authored and copyrighted two screenplays, The King of the Golden River and The Secret Trials of Effie Gray, both concerning the same subject matter as the one that Thompson wrote.

New York District Court Judge J. Paul Oetken has issued a 61-page opinion clearly that is intended to be more than just a summary judgment ruling. The judge, seemingly inspired by the topic at hand, has delivered an opinion that functions as a quasi-legal journal scholarly thesis. He discusses the nature of creativity in pulling together historical facts and critiques how courts view original authorship on works of imagination that are built on the foundation of underlying facts.

The tale of Effie is the story of art, sex and public intrigue. It's a highbrow version of TMZ before the tabloid era, so it shouldn't be a surprise that Victorian England's most notorious sexual drama has served as a rich source of inspiration for historians, artists, dramatists and scholars.

As a result, the judge must wrestle with the idea of authors staking originality in a well-trodden topic.

The backdrop of Oetken decision is a legal antecedent -- Hoehling v. Universal City Studios, Inc., a 2nd Circuit ruling in 1980 that went against an author of a nonfiction book who contended that George C. Scott's action thriller The Hindenburg stole his book’s premise that the airship was sabotaged by people out to embarrass Adolf Hitler. The appellate circuit noted then how "virtually impossible" it was to write about a particular historical era without resorting to standard literary devices, such as scene a faire involving indispensable incidents, characters or settings.

In other words, if an author writing about Nazi Germany wishes to write a scene about soldiers making a "Heil Hitler" salute, one can hardly expect to claim originality and thus, copyright protection for this, right?

Then again …

"Some commentators and scholars have argued that Hoehling was wrongly decided because it misunderstood the nature of the historical enterprise," the judge wrote. "They contend that, whereas Hoehling assumes historical facts and interpretations exist out in the world as objective and discoverable truths, history actually involves a deeply subjective, contested and imaginative process that requires the creation of value-laden narratives purporting to represent a lost world."

As much as the decision functions to give Thompson and her attorney Andrew Deutch at DLA Piper a win, it also serves to rebut those critics who believe that the process of gathering facts and presenting them to audiences deserves more respect and therefore more copyright protection.

"Hoehling is not an opinion about historians' lack of creativity," the judge continued. "But as its opening paragraph states, Hoehling is concerned primarily with the unique importance of maintaining a free flow of accessible historical information."

The ruling then spends some time considering whether strong or weak copyright protection results in the production of historical knowledge and understanding. In short, it's the perpetual debate over the essential being of intellectual property under the U.S. Constitution.

Throwing his robes around those who believe that less is more, Oetken eventually went from his scholarly digression to address his task at hand in the Effie dispute. He notes the difficulty of determining infringement in the historical fiction realm where copyright doesn't protect facts -- only imagination. Unfortunately it's not easy to separate one from another, he wrote, and cautioned about the "particular care" that must be taken in analyzing substantial similarity between one historical fiction work and the next. His idea of doing this -- with nods to Francis Fukuyama and G.W.F. Hegel -- is "a careful parsing of protectable fictionalizations from unprotectable interpretations, since both involve the elaboration of meaning in a past that lacks an internal narrative structure or self-determined meaning."

For more on what the judge had in mind and how it was applied to things like the dual fictional portrayals of how Ruskin discovers the Effie-Millais affair, here's the full decision:

E-mail: eriq.gardner@thr.com; Twitter: @eriqgardner

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