Cool guy actors and all-around macho men, Sean Penn and
Kurt Russell, have both announced separate movie projects today with Penn
in talks to star in GENIUS, a film based on the life of literary editor
Max Perkins, while Russell has signed on to play the lead high-school
football coach in TOUCHBACK.
The latter film is being directed by Don Hanfield and
stars Brian Presley, Melanie Lynsky and Christine Lahti. Presley
plays a down-on-his-luck farmer and volunteer fireman whose promising high
school football career was cut short when he was critically injured during
a playoff game. He gets the chance to decide if he wants the life he has,
or the life that could have been, when he’s unexpectedly thrust back to
that fateful instant that changed his life forever.
GENIUS would be directed by rookie helmer Bill Pohlad
(actually, he directed a film in 1990, so this would be his 2nd film), who
is best known for financing movies, including Penn’s own INTO THE WILD in
2007. The story would focus on the relationship
between Perkins and a young Thomas Wolfe, though the script is peopled
with literary characters. Perkins was a fedora-wearing eccentric
editor-in-chief at New York publishing house Scribner, where he oversaw
the release of works by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. The
script by John Logan is an adaptation of A. Scott Berg’s Award-winning
2008 biography, “Max
Perkins: Editor of Genius“.
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