Bill Murray may be infamously hard to contact these days if you're trying to get him to work on movies, but it can be done. Barry Levinson has pulled off the trick for his latest, scoring Murray as the lead in **Rock The Kasbah.
Boasting a script by Mitch Glazer (who has Murray links after writing Scrooged and producing Lost In Translation), Kasbah will see Wes Anderson’s lucky charm play a burned-out music manager who heads to Afghanistan on a USO tour with his one remaining client.
Through a series of unfortunate events, he ends up abandoned, cash-strapped and without his passport, but then stumbles upon a young girl with an amazing voice who he figures could make it big. So he somehow manages to smuggle her back to Kabul so she can compete in The Afghan Star, AKA that country’s version of X Factor.
There’s no indication when this one might start shooting, but the producers will be touting the international distribution rights at the Toronto International Film Festival, scheduled to kick off on Thursday. Murray will next be seen in George Clooney’s The Monuments Men (out here January 9) followed by Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, which will follow at some point in 2014.