Rueben's Ramblings

Hey All,

Here are the news items for today:

TELEVISION

Actor Gil Bellows (Ally McBeal) will guest star in the new fall drama Vegas, playing mayoral candidate George Grady, who is campaigning against incumbent Ted Bennett and is intrigued with and inspired by Vincent Savino (Michael Chiklis). Vegas will debut on CBS on September 25. (Lynette Rice at Entertainment Weekly)

Actor John Shea (Gossip Girl and Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman) will appear on The Good Wife as Cary’s (Matt Czuchry) dad. This will potentially be a recurring role. The series returns to CBS on September 30. (TV Line and TV Guide)

Actress Alfre Woodard will play Sam’s (Taye Diggs) mom on Private Practice. The series will return to ABC on September 25. (Entertainment Weekly and TV Guide)

DEVELOPMENT NEWS

Angela Bassett will star and executive produce the potential new drama at NBC for which the network just closed a deal. The project is called Vanishing Point and comes from writer Ben Ripley (the box office film Source Code). The project is being described as a character-driven legal franchise revolving around two women. One, to be played by Bassett, is a brilliant yet unsympathetic rainmaker at a powerful New York law firm whose world is suddenly and permanently upended by a health issue. Facing this crisis, she makes her condition public and vows to continue her practice with the help of a young brilliant attorney she chooses to be her right hand. (Nellie Andreeva at Deadline)

Shonda Rhimes and Grey’s Anatomy writer Peter Nowalk will be working together on a potential new drama for NBC called Under the Gun. The project revolves around Erin Kain, a woman who goes to work for the FBI as she struggles to make sense of a terrible event in her past that ruined her life and tore her family apart. While her young and fragile appearance doesn’t typically suggest that she’s best suited to work as a field agent, her dark past helps her get inside the head of criminals who were normal one day and cracked the next. (Lesley Goldberg at The Hollywood Reporter)

Jason Katims, the creative mind behind Friday Night Lights and Parenthood, will be working with feature writer Simon Kinberg on the potential new pilot called Anonymous for which FOX. The project follows a rebellious, hot-shot wunderkind who is plucked as the CIA’s latest recruit and teamed with a seasoned handler with whom he forms an unlikely father-son relationship. (Nellie Andreeva at Deadline)

A potential hour-long drama from producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron (the men behind Smash) has been selected by NBC. The tentatively titled White House Confidential is being described as an upstairs-downstairs type soap set in the White House, told from the point of view of a young female doctor who has a secret from her past. (Nellie Andreeva at Deadline)

BOX OFFICE NEWS

Here are the top 10 box office movies for this past weekend courtesy of Deadline:

1. The Possession – 9.3 million
2. Lawless – 5.9 million
3. The Expendables 2 – 4.9 million
4. The Words – 4.7 million
5. ParaNorman – 4.2 million
6. The Bourne Legacy – 4 million
7. The Odd Life of Timothy Green – 3.6 million
8. The Campaign – 3.3 million
8. 2016 Obama’s America – 3.3 million
10. The Dark Knight Rises – 3.2 million

Actor Sean Bean (Lord of the Rights) is set to star in the post-apocalyptic action thriller called Scorched Earth that is set after an environmental collapse causes billions to die where mankind has finally re-established a rudimentary society with a new set of laws for the ravaged wastelands. Bean will play a bounty hunter named Atticus Gage who is very similar to the criminals he hunts. He is soon presented with the bounty of a lifetime, and goes off in search of the most wanted criminal in these badlands. (Deadline and Dark Horizons)

Actor David Thewlis (Harry Potter and War Horse) is expected to have a supporting role in the sequel film RED 2. The original film was about a group of retired special agents (Bruce Willis, Helen Mirren and John Malkovich). Thewlis will play a character called The Frog, an information dealer who got his name by poisoning the water supply at the Kremlin using a poisonous Amazonian frog. (Heat Vision and First Showing)

That’s it. Enjoy!