Weinsteins Love (Fan) Boys

Hey guys, it's Donnie...The Weinstein Co has just acquired the rights to Fan Boys, a script that has been drifting through development hell for quite a while now. Variety broke this story two days ago, but I had to do some fact checking because, shockingly enough, Variety totally botched the story. Their plot synopsis was not only factually incorrect, but it made the movie sound like "very special episode" of Charles In Charge. And they got the name of the director wrong. Hooray for the fourth estate...

Here's the real deal: The film is centered on four friends. Four absolute total hardcore awesome geek friends, all Star Wars nuts ever since they saw the originals in theaters a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...Except we cut to the late 1990s. Now they're all growed up, some married, some with kids, all with regular old boring jobs. And then suddenly, they get word that there's going to be a new Star Wars film. Episode I. Lucas has come out of hiding and they're all going to get to revisit that perfection of their youth...all except one. One of the friends has a terminal illness, and he probably won't make it to one of those crazy opening night shows. Tragedy. And so the friends band together, pack up the car, and head out towards the Skywalker Ranch to convince The Bearded One to let them watch the film at the ranch before their buddy bites the big one.

On the surface, there's certainly potential for this to be a corny pile of garbage, except those who have read the script have sworn up and down that it's not. The characters are apparently very strong and very awesome. And it's also supposedly freakin hilarious. A road trip film with a bit of poignant purpose and full of wonderful, three dimensional characters. I really hope this works out the way I hear that it should, because this will paint Star Wars fans, and indeed fan boys of most any nature, in a new light. Sci-Fi fans have been marginalized to the point of caricatures, and I'd like to see a flick that treats them with a little empathy and perhaps shows us that we're all fan boys of some sort.