One) Blowing My Cover: My Life As A CIA Spy And Two) Earthlings

I'm afraid that I don't have any time for Minesweeping tonight, but I simply can't NOT tell you about these two projects.

Firstly: Daniel Waters is adapting Lindsay Moran's Blowing My Cover: My Life as a CIA Spy. It's the memoir of her deepening alienation and isolation on becoming an operative for that there Central Intelligence Agency. I'm off to the library tomorrow to try and find this book, and failing that, Borders and... let's face facts, I'm probably going to have to resort to Amazon, aren't I? It doesn't appear to have been a bestseller, and for all I know, it wasn't even published in the UK. If Waters has agreed to adapt it, I'm keen to see what it's all about.

Secondly: Daniel Waters has another project cooking up. That's two at once - which suggests, frankly, The Clowns are about to burst through the computer screen any second and eat my brain because I must be asleep right now. Earthlings is to be a 90 minute pilot for the Sci-Fi channel, and hopefully a series afterwards. Unsurprisingly, the premise has been called a 'darker and subversive' take on Mork and Mindy or 3rd Rock... and features some key alien characters getting derailed, irritated and sideswiped by humans and their pesky irrationality.

Know how they feel? I bet Waters does.

Official Poster For Sex And Death 101

Directed by Daniel Waters and, even more excitingly, written by Daniel Waters. Here's the first official poster for Sex and Death 101.

Click upon it to hugify it.

Can You Unlock The Sex And Death 101 Trailer?

A trailer for Daniel Waters' Sex and Death 101 is available on the Arclight website... if you have a password. And passwords are only being issued to film buyers.

Are you a film buyer? Do you know one? Can you convincingly pretend to be one? Or are you just a good hacker? I want to see this trailer bad and, budding Jims of the world, I'll love you forever if you can fix it for me.

One Poll Ends, Another Begins

As the new film ick poll begins (look to the column on your right), here are the results of the last.

Anchor Bay To Release Sex And Death 101 Theatrically

Daniel Waters' Sex and Death 101 is making bigger steps towards the cinema. The latest news is that Anchor Bay will be releasing the film both theatrically and then on DVD in the US. You should be happy about this - I'm very, very confident about this film.

There also appears to be screening scheduled for Fantastic Fest but the page is a little confusing, not giving any screening date or time. Can anybody shed any light on this for me?

Movie Minesweeper - The Mr. Sheen Edition

- Christian Tramitz is to play FBI Agent Jerry Cotton, fictional hero of German pulp fiction in a new film series.

- Daniel Waters has won a best director award. That's very encouraging. The gong was for his film Sex and Death 101 which played at the Seattle Film Festival. If I could blow glass I'd make him a nice bauble too - for his Heathers screenplay which is, I'd say, the best script. Ever. How do I get to see Sex and Death 101?

- The IESB have a heap of License to Wed clips and a behind the scenes featurette too.

- No link for this one, I'm afraid, but John Travolta has been speaking to the UK tabloids and he's revealed that the Dallas movie isn't dead after all. He's meeting a new director soon and is very keen to get the wheels moving again, with a possible shoot start in January.

- Matthew Vaughn's MARV films, in which he is a partner with Kris Thykier, have signed a three-year first-look deal with Sony. The projects currently in development? A World War I drama, a Spaghetti Western and two comedies. The MARV men see themselves as a reply to Working Title, and I think they've every chance of similar success.

- A 21 disc set of John Ford films is coming in December. Yes - 21 discs. Suddenly the Blade Runner special edition has competition for pole position on my Christmas list.

- Richard Linklater has earned himself a ten-year supply of wine.

Oswalt On Sex And Death

Sci Fi Wire were listening to Patton Oswalt chat about Ratatouille when he slipped in a few morsels regarding Sex and Death 101, the dust-gathering latest from Daniel Waters. Waters was the screenwriter of the greatest script ever written.

Yep. He wrote Heathers.

Oswalt said of Waters "I guess he's going to take it to some film festivals and show it to distributors. I hope it comes out. It was really good. I mean, it's not like anything, so why not put it out there?"

He described his character, Fred, as "a supreme being controller of the universe" - though that's probably going to give you the wrong idea, if I know Waters.

I've discussed Sex and Death 101 before, but if you can't bother using that wee search box uptop, here's the basic premise: Simon Baker plays Roderick Blank, a nearly-married man who, one week before his big day, receives an e-mail list of all the women he has ever slept with. As if this wasn't curious enough, the list goes on, apparently naming all of the women he will go on to sleep with in the rest of his life. This includes a formerly-lesbian astronaut and a younger girl from a private school.

Winona Ryder's character, Gillian 'Death' Nell, is on the list too, which is a serious problem for Blank because, somehow, everybody who ever lies down with her goes into a coma...

Frankly, I find it criminal that a film with this kind of line-up is having to go looking for distributors, that they aren't bowing and scraping at Waters door and begging to come in.