Lord of the Spin

In a distinct change of tack, Seven director David Fincher is growing his hair long, strapping on a couple of knee pads and getting some practice on those lip slides and heelflips for his next project, the skateboarding epic Lords of Dogtown. Based on 2001's fantastic documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys by skater, Stacey Peralta, Fincher is abandoning the gritty thrillers that have made his name for a coming of age story set amongst the Californian punk kids who took their surfing skills to empty swimming pools, named themselves the Zephyr Boys and re-invented themselves as skateboarding legends overnight. Originally developed for Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst (of all people) to direct, the project's talent quota has now thankfully leapt off the charts not only with Fincher's arrival, but with the welcome appearance of Pulp Fiction co-writer, Roger Avary, drafted in to rewrite Peralta's original script. Lords of Dogtown isn't the only project, however, designed to capture the hearts of every Vans-sporting slacker across the world. Cannily spotting a previously untapped demographic of huge proportions, studio execs at Warner Bros have conscripted popular skater Colin McKay to appear in The Grind which should be released later this year, while Disney are prepping a biopic of the one and only skateboarding icon Tony Hawk. But with Fincher's unrivalled trademark style combined with a characteristically cutting script from Avary and a cooler than cool subject matter, Empire Online certainly knows which film our money's on.