It’s that time of year again: no, not Christmas, but the time when the year’s most promising unproduced scripts are slapped together on the Black List and we all get to take a look at what Hollywood agents, studio executives and the like have been going gaga about during the last 12 months. While several of the titles are already in active development (more on that in a moment), one has just scored a big talent injection, with Drew Barrymore signing on to direct When The Street Lights Go On.
Written by Eddie O’Keefe and Chris Hutton, the ‘80s set coming-of-age drama takes a leaf out of the **Stand By Me **playbook, following a teenage boy stumbling across the bodies of a 17-year-old beauty and the English teacher she was having an affair with. The story is related by our hero, Charlie, who fancies himself as a young filmmaker (shades of Super 8 here, too), and as the suspect list grows, he tries to figure out who might have committed the double murder.
Right now, the script will simply get added to Barrymore’s growing pile of possibilities. She’s also attached to Heist Society from Whip It’s Shauna Cross and New Line’s rom com How To Be Single, which is based on Liz Tuccillo’s novel.
The rest of this year’s Black List makes for interesting reading: for all those already bubbling away in development saucepans (such as Matthew Aldrich’s Father Daughter Time: A Tale Of Armed Robbery And Eskimo Kisses), there are the intriguing newcomers including Evan Susser and Van Robichaux’s Chewie, which recounts the behind-the-scenes drama of Star Wars through the eyes of Peter Mayhew and **In The Event Of A Moon Disaster **by Mike Jones, offering an alt-history take on the Apollo 11 moon mission where the astronauts crash land. You can take a peek at the whole list right here.