Gold Circle Films has picked up a spec script called Oh Brother, about a woman so desperate to have a showpiece wedding that she hires actors to play her family.
The script was written by newcomer Cathy McCarthy, and Gold Circle are clearly hoping that it will give them a boost similar to the one they got from their last wedding-related pic: My Big Fat Greek Wedding.
Oh Brother appears to be more of a screwball comedy, though. It revolves around a self-made woman who is set to get hitched at a high-society wedding. However, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, she’s too ashamed to tell her fiancé that she grew up an orphan. So, rather than come clean (which, of course, would be the sensible, movie-ending thing to do), she hires actors to play her relatives. We can’t see that going wrong in any way, shape or form.
Oh, of course it’s implausible, but then, so was While You Were Sleeping, in which Sandra Bullock pretended to be engaged to a guy in a coma just so she could feel part of a family, and if Oh Brother can mine that same seam of sweetness and sunny optimism, then it could be an unexpected pleasure.
Peter Safran and Gold Circle head honcho Paul Brooks will produce McCarthy’s script, which was brought to them after catching the eye of manager, Tom Drumm. However, if McCarthy is jumping for joy about selling her first script, she’s already been introduced to the hard-edged Hollywood machine: a new writer is being brought in to work on a new draft.
Oh brother, indeed…