Seinfeld co-creating god Larry David is usually happy to toddle around in a universe of his own making, playing a grumpy, endlessly frustrated but always amusing version of himself in Curb Your Enthusiasm. He rarely surfaces on the big screen, and when he does, it’s even less likely that he’ll be a leading man (except for Whatever Works – few are likely to turn down Woody Allen’s call). But David has decided to take the starring role in a new, untitled comedy for Fox Searchlight.
Greg Mottola, last seen behind the camera for Paul, is set to direct the film, about which very little is known. But the Hollywood Reporter did dig up that Seinfeld and Curb veterans Alec Berg, Jeff Schaffer and David Mandel are behind the script, which will apparently serve as a jumping-off point for largely improvised scenes, much like David’s show. We’ll push the boat out here into the guess lake and say that David won’t be playing a happy-go-lucky sort who skips through life with rainbows and singing unicorns everywhere.
Mottola has a few promising projects on his plate at the moment – he directed the pilot for Aaron Sorkin’s new HBO show The Newsroom and has just signed on to write an adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel The Marriage Plot, which he may direct for Scott Rudin and Sony if everything works out. Since the untitled comedy has a star ready to work and a script in hand, we figure it’ll go first.
David will also hit our screens in a smaller capacity later this year, as he has a small role in The Three Stooges, which arrives on August 22. Quite why he’d pick that still seems a mystery, though we do know the Farrelly brothers wrote the part for him and it means he gets to play a child-loathing nun named Sister Mary-Mengele…