Hollywood Reader

With all the ill will surrounding the introduction of Daniel Craig as the newest 007, perhaps it's up to several teenage super-spies to restore audiences' faith in the espionage flick. Anthony Horowitz's 14-year-old MI6 agent Alex Rider is already parachuting onto the big screen in next month's Stormbreaker, starring Alex Pettyfer and Ewan McGregor. Now producer Trudie Styler—better known as the wife of singer Sting—has acquired the rights to British author Joshua Doder's Grk trilogy, consisting of A Dog Called Grk, Grk and the Pelotti Gang and Grk and the Hot Dog Trail, for her Xingu Production Company (Delacorte Books for Young Readers will publish the first title in the U.S. in February). The action-adventure series, which seems a perfect fit for Spy Kids'Robert Rodriguez, follows the country-hopping adventures of schoolboy Tim Malt and a stray dog he takes in, which happens to be the beloved pet of the former ambassador to Stanislavia. Doder is repped for lit by Greene & Heaton's Linda Davis.

Snoot Entertainment has selected Robert J. Sawyer's novella Identity Theft (coming from Red Deer Press in early 2007)—a dark dames and detectives noir set on Mars—to kick-start their live-action feature division; the newbie production company recently optioned the sci-fi title through Created By's Eli Kirschner, who reps Sawyer for film.... Director Chris Columbus (Harry Potter 1&2; Rent) and his 1492 Productions have just optioned the rights to Christopher Moore's A Dirty Job (Morrow) for a high six figures. The dark comedy concerns the exploits of nice guy widower-turned-Death's apprentice Charlie Asker.... Anna Paquin (X-Men: Evolution) has joined the cast of HBO's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, an adaptation of Dee Brown's 1970 examination of white society's steamrolling of the American Indian in the late 19th century. The Oscar winner will play a writer/educator who opened a school for the Sioux in 1885, only to watch their decimation five years later. Production begins in Calgary this month.

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