Who Is Legend? Lawrence, That's Who!

Hey guys, it's Donnie...Holy crap today is a slow news day. There's a new entry in The Poseidon Journals posted over at Freeze Dried Movies, and other than the following little nugget of news, there's nothing else of note. Granted, most folks are wrapped up in the Toronto Film Fest right now, where most things are performing as expected except for Atom Egoyan's Where The Truth Lies, which, according to one reviewer, started out well but ended up sucking balls, and apparantly the rest of the theater seemed to share his opinion.

Anyway, forget about that, because here's the good news: I Am Legend seems to have been resurrected from the dead so to speak. Warners has handed control of the long gestating graphic novel adaptation to Constantine director Francis Lawrence and I couldn't be happier about this news. I thought that, while Constantine suffered some script problems, Lawrence's direction was excellent throughout. His vision of hell blew me away. It was simple, and yet it connected with me. As soon as I saw it, I just thought to myself, "Oh, of course that's what hell looks like." I think that this project has the perfect tone for Lawrence and having tested the waters with Constantine, he'll really be able to spread his wings and sink his teeth into this project. Wow, could I have used any more metaphors in that last sentence?

For those who don't know, I Am Legend is a graphic novel about the last man on earth, the sole survivor of a global plague who is left to fight nocturnal, blood sucking mutant survivors. At one point, Ridley Scott was going to direct Schwarzenegger, and then Michael Bay and Will Smith were going to take up the fight, but it all seemed to fall apart. Warner's seems determined to get it done this time and they've fast tracked the project for a 2006 start. Mark Protosevich wrote the script seemingly forever ago, but we can expect some futzing about with it before production starts, which is too bad because I'm told it's close to perfect. I haven't read the graphic novel, but I have read the first half of the script (check it out here) and what I read I liked quite a bit. Here's hoping.