If all goes to plan, Bradley Cooper, Robert De Niro and director Jonathan Demme could be packing their bags for the darkly-tinged blend of comedy and pathos that is Honeymoon With Harry, according to Deadline.
Honeymoon is the sad, strange story of a former womanizer and party animal (the role Cooper has been eyeing) who decides to sober up when he meets a woman and falls in love. His father-in-law to be (De Niro) sizes him up from the off and, in true Jack Byrnes style, decides to break them up.
But the pair goes ahead and gets engaged, only for the woman to die tragically just before the wedding (enter the pathos). The groom decides to go on the honeymoon anyway, planning to drink himself into a stupor and, since he doesn’t care about living, an early grave. Until, that is, he runs into De Niro’s character, who has come to spread his daughter’s ashes on her favourite beach.
The story behind the script’s long, troubled trip to the screen could fuel a movie in itself, but we’ll try to break it down for you. Back in 2004, New Line and a producer named Mike Katz nabbed the rights to what was then an unpublished book by Bart Baker, and hired Paul Haggis, in his pre-Crash/** Million Dollar Baby** days, to adapt it. Haggis managed to secure a deal to direct, and lined up Vince Vaughn and Jack Nicholson for the roles, but hit a snag when the studio couldn’t agree on a budget or tone for the pic.
Cue a montage as the script gathered dust on a shelf through New Line falling apart and the writers’ strike. Cooper came to its rescue when, hot off working with De Niro on the upcoming Dark Fields, he decided they should make something else together and decided to try to set it up. One script reading later and the pair are attached, and have now got Demme interested.
It’s nowhere near a done deal, though, as there are no actual contracts or any funding in place yet. And as for Baker’s novel? It still hasn’t hit bookshelves. Bet he’s hoping the movie goes ahead…