Is it still accurate to refre to Peter Morgan as “ubiquitous” even though he went all of 2007 without a new film to his credit? After his busy 2006 with The Queen, The Last King of Scotland and Longford (which didn’t hit the U.S. until ’07), and the all the raves for the Broadway production of Frost/Nixon, it felt like Morgan was on his way to becoming the British Ron Bass (i.e. a funnily-accented repository of mediocrity). Okay, he’s a much better writer than Bass, but he’s not as wonderful as Hollywood thinks he is.
If you thought the failure of The Other Boleyn Girl might slow him down, you badly understimated a) Morgan’s moxie and b) the studios’ love affair with erudite-seeming scribes who’d rather make product than art. Given Morgan’s solid work ethic and unflagging conventionality, there’s no reason this guy can’t go on cashing million-dollar paychecks in Hollywood for another thirty years. The first in that long line of whopping paydays is Hereafter, which Kathleen Kennedy just snapped up for low seven figures against more seven figures if the script gets produced. The premise? It’s a thriller “in the vein of The Sixth Sense“. Thanks, Variety.
In other Morgan news, the film rendition of Frost/Nixon is set for release on June 30, 2008, which is kinda strange for a prestige picture. Not to worry. Ron Howard knows what he’s doing. After all, Cinderella Man opened in June, and it racked up tons of nominations!