In it’s dying days, Variety is resorting to running slightly different pieces than was once the trade’s bread and butter. Hence their current feature on Tom Cruise’s slate of possible films and the creative teams assigned to write and re-write (for up to $250k per week!) some of them.
The most interesting note in there is that David Cronenberg has handed in his draft of The Matarese Circle and that, in true big-ticket movie fashion, Cruise has sent it back out for a rewrite by Paul Attanasio. He wrote The Good German, Donnie Brasco and did loads of work on Homicide.
A Tom Cruise movie is going to fall victim to one rewrite after another; it’s not like this is a surprise. But how often has Cronenberg had to deal with the process, and will this change his approach to the film? He’s usually got a fairly personal take on his movies, and earlier comments suggested that he had specific ideas about Matarese. I’ve got nothing to base this on but intuition, but if Cronenberg ends up moving on to another project I wouldn’t be surprised at all.