Yahoo Lifestyle Bidders Circling Hot Radio Silence & Paul Giamatti Package About Paranormal DJ Art Bell – The Dish
EXCLUSIVE: We are hearing that Amazon and Warner Bros among others have put bids in for a pitch that’s been making rounds from the Radio Silence team with Paul Giamatti attached to star.
The pitch is a biopic about the late paranormal DJ Art Bell, who would broadcast his radio show from his home studio 65 miles west of Las Vegas, fielding unscreened telephone calls in a five-hour show on KNYE-FM called Coast to Coast.
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Guests would offer up eyewitness stories on Bell’s show about alien counters, past lives, time travel and more X-File-like situations. His 2018 New York Times obit noted that Bell claimed he and his wife spotted a “150-foot-long triangular craft” above their car one night before it disappeared.
In Coast to Coast‘s heyday in the 1990s, it would pull in around 10 million listeners.
Bell became an amateur radio operator at 13, served as an Air Force medic during the Vietnam War and was a DJ for an English-language station in Okinawa. He was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 2008.
Bell also co-wrote The Coming Global Superstorm with Whitney Striebler, which became the basis for the Roland Emmerich megahit The Day After the Tomorrow. He wrote several books including his autobiography The Art of Talk, which is included in the rights to this package.
Producing the film project is Sophie Cassidy, the head of 2.0 Entertainment, and Jeff Katz. Katz started his career in talk radio and began chasing rights to the Art Bell project with Cassidy while they worked on The Pope’s Exorcist. He eventually worked with the city government of Pahrump, NV, Bell’s hometown, to build a relationship with and earn the support of Bell’s business partner Karen Jackson, as well as Bell’s family.
Jackson started antagonistically and ended as best friends and business partners with Bell. She’ll be the catalyst of the film, making full use of Bell’s legendary role as ground zero for paranormal broadcasts, thriving discussions and reporting on weird, wonderful and unexplained phenomena.
Sam Chalsen and Nelson Greaves are writing the script.
Radio Silence is comprised of directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett and producers Justin Martinez and Chad Villella. They directed 2012’s V/H/S, but 2019’s Searchlight horror film Ready or Not took them to the next level, becoming a cult classic and earning close to $58 million at the global box office. They went on to helm the reboot of Scream and Scream VI, which combined delivered $304M worldwide for the Dimension/Spyglass horror series. Last year they had the horror vampire comedy Abigail, and they have a sequel to Ready or Not in the works reteaming with Samara Weaving.
Chalsen and Greaves previously penned an untitled Ted Kaczynski film for 2.0 Entertainment and made waves with the pilot script Potus Maximus for 20th and Howard Gordon. This led to several projects around town including Spyhunter for WB/Todd Phillips and Inspector Gadget for Disney. They also wrote Unfriended for Universal. Chalsen was also an EP on CW’s The Flash.
A biopic would rep new territory for Radio Silence, yet from the sounds of it, Bell feels right in their wheelhouse. We’ll let you know where this package lands.
Radio Silence is repped by CAA, Brillstein Entertainment Partners, Johnson Shapiro Slewett & Kole and Herrera-Reiss Strategies.
Giamatti is repped by UTA, Kipperman Management and Sloane, Offer, Weber & Dern. He received his second Oscar nomination last year for Focus Features’ The Holdovers. That was in the Best Actor category. He was previously nominated for Best Supporting Actor for Cinderella Man. Other feature credits include Sideways, 12 Years a Slave, Private Parts, the HBO series John Adams and Showtime’s Billions.
Chalsen is repped by WME and Kaplan/Perrone, while Greaves is repped by CAA and Kaplan/Perrone.
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