Paramount Hires Scripter For Lance Armstrong Film

Paramount and JJ Abrams’s production shingle Bad Robot have found a screenwriter for their planned Lance Armstrong biopic – D.V. DeVincentis.

The High Fidelity scripter will be working from New York Times reporter Juliet Macur’s book Cycle Of Lies: The Fall Of Lance Armstrong. Macur followed Armstrong for over a deacde for the paper, reporting on the cycling star’s seven Tour de France wins and how they were subsequently stripped from him after he admitted to allegations that he used performance enhancing drugs.

DeVincentis is currently working on bringing the cult classic series Night Stalker to the big screen for Disney and director Edgar Wright, and has also recently completed work on Bengali Detective for Fox Searchlight.

This is just one of three projects about Armstrong that are currently in various stages. Although Paramount was the first to announce that they wanted to dramatize Armstrong’s story, director Stephen Frears has been able to get his adaptation of journalist David Walsh’s book Seven Deadly Sins: My Pursuit Of Lance Armstrong in front of cameras first. He is currently shooting with Ben Foster as Armstrong and Chris O’Dowd as Walsh. Meanwhile, Jay Roach and Warner Brothers have been trying to pull together Red Blooded American, which will tell the story of Armstrong and cycling teammate Tyler Hamilton, who would later go on 60 Minutes and accuse Armstrong of using performance enhancing drugs. Last August, Bradley Cooper was in talks to sign onto the project as a producer and possibly star as either Armstrong or Hamilton, but there has been no further word on the film since.

Needless to say, not all three of these films are going to get to the screen. If anything, I think that both Paramount and Warners will probably hold their breath until they get an idea of how Frears’s film will turn out before they give the go-ahead on actual production.

Via Deadline.