Ballet is clearly the next big Hollywood trend. Okay, so two films about it don’t really count as a trend, but with Black Swan getting ready to take first position in cinemas, a very different sort of hoofing pic is hoping for a second chance, with Kristen Bell signing on to indie comedy **Dance of the Mirlitons.
Dance focuses on a slightly overweight but ambitious and plucky young ballerina who must find her way through a highly competitive school for dancers where bitchiness is at a premium and looks are everything. She’s not helped by her obsessive and overly driven mother (Bell - playing a mother already? What is she, about 23?*).
The script has had an rollercoaster of a journey so far: birthed from writer (and now director) Evan Greenberg’s NYU short film script, it became a hot property when it landed on the 2005 “Blacklist” of the best unproduced scripts, alongside such famous titles as Juno and Lars and the Real Girl. But while Warner Independent snapped it up, it sank into the mire once that company fell apart.
Now Greenberg has struggled for years to grab the rights back, hooked up with a couple of producers and is kicking off a search for an unknown actress to play the central girl. "I hope that one day people will talk about how it was one of those movie that came together, fell apart, came together again,” he tells The Hollywood Reporter. “The best projects are the ones that take the most elbow grease to get made." Hope he has his fingers crossed…
*OK, she's 30, but it's only about five minutes ago she was playing teens.