VAN SANT gets his MILK early

Coming Soon have the press release from Focus Features which state that Sean Penn will star as the openly gay 70€™s politician Harvey Milk who was gunned down by Dan White, a fellow electoral supervisor in Van Sant's movie MILK... which will begin production in January. This beats out Singer who is still on post-production on VALKYRIE and because of the writer's strike, he is likely to be no-where near ready for his MILK biopic to roll next year. A shame because I would much prefer to see Singer's version of this tale, especially with him being so desperate for so very long to make it. It does look however as if there is some bad news for Van Sant. Matt Damon has had to pull out of the picture, like we all expected he would as his pre-strike movie at this time is an adaptation of the war drama IMPERIAL LIFE IN THE EMERALD CITY which he will be shooting early next year with his BOURNE director Paul Greengrass.

So where does this leave Bryan Singer then? He can't now do SUPERMAN as his next film as he chose to do VALKYRIE instead. He can't do his MILK biopic for the same reason (although he can, but history suggests that the latter movie about the same subject NEVER succeeds, no matter how good it is). He can't write or change any script that has not been turned in. Instead he probably has to sit and wait until the damn strike is over, or get tapped up to direct a script a studio needs a director for? Let's hope VALKYRIE is as awesome as it looks to be, because Singer is in need of some good news lately.