Planning To Adapt Stage Play ‘All New People’ Into A Feature Film
For a moment there, the world seemed be his oyster for Zach Braff. The “Scrubs” star wrote and directed the mega indie hit “Garden State” which not only did gangbusters at the box office, but also spawned a best-selling soundtrack that suddenly had music supervisors everywhere looking at independent labels to find the music for their films. And then…Braff seemed to fade into the background a bit. He returned to his hit show and outside of “The Last Kiss” didn’t do too much film work and found his sophomore directorial effort tough to get off the ground. But it looks like this year, Braff is going to be coming back in a big way. He stars in “The High Cost Of Living” which is now available on VOD and he’s lining up a couple of more films, both of which are news to us.
In an interview with Movieline, Braff says he’ll be making a movie later this year with some pretty big stars. “…I’m supposed to act in a movie called ‘The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea,’ with Chloe Moretz and Jessica Biel, in the fall. That’s a really, really well-written script by a guy named Bill Purple,” he said.
A quick hit over to IMDB shows the project, but it seems to flown under everyone’s radar. The script is credited to Robbie Pickering — who hit SXSW last month with his directorial debut “Natural Selection” — so going by Braff’s it’s unclear if Purple, who will direct the movie, rewrote it or if he’s just mixed things up a bit. As for Purple, he’s most known as a Second Unit or Assistant Director, but he does have one short under his belt, “Hole In The Paper Sky,” which also starred Biel (you can check out the trailer below). As for the plot, here’s what IMDB has to say about the drama: “Unable to reconcile the grief from recently losing his wife, an introverted architect befriends a wisecracking young girl and agrees to help her build a raft to cross the Atlantic.”
Sounds like some tough material, but Braff seems to be headed in that direction these days. He’s also got a play he wrote, “All New People,” which will hit the 2econd Stage Theater this summer in New York City and it’s another grim story. Here’s the synopsis:
It’s the dead of winter and the summer vacation getaway of Long Beach Island, New Jersey is desolate and blanketed in snow. Charlie is 35, heartbroken and just wants some time away from the rest of the world. The island ghost town seems to be the perfect escape until his solitude is interrupted by a motley parade of misfits who show up and change his plans. A hired beauty, the townie fireman, and an eccentric British real estate agent desperately trying to stay in the country suddenly find themselves tangled together in a beach house where the mood is anything but sunny.
And he tells Movieline, he’s already got plans to turn it into film. “And I have an adaptation I’m doing of my play. One idea is to forgo the whole system — to kind of go the Tyler Perry route and make a really small-scale movie like,” he says about how he’ll get the project mounted. “And Gary Gilbert, who financed ‘Garden State’ has already said he’d finance it. So if the things that are on my burners that require more of a substantial budget don’t come together, I think what we’re going to do in maybe the fall or winter is that I’m going to direct and Gary’s going to produce a movie on this scale so we can just make something.”
Overall, it sounds like both projects aren’t quite 100% just yet, but are just waiting for the pieces to fall into place. But with “Scrubs” now finished, Braff is certainly not short of options of where to go to next.
