What an exciting day. For many, many moons now, there’s been this curious IMDb entry for “Untitled James L. Brooks Comedy.” There’s quite a bit known about it, actually. The movie stars Reese Witherspoon, a professional softball player and two-time Olympian, who is caught in a love triangle between a white collar corporate executive (Paul Rudd) and a professional baseball pitcher (Owen Wilson). Jack Nicholson is also in there, as the father of Rudd’s character.
Witherspoon told MTV in early November that the movie had just wrapped, though it still didn’t have a title. Now it does, along with a release date and a few new details.
The New York Times reports (via The Playlist) that the Brooks-directed comedy/drama, now called “How Do You Know,” will hit theaters on December 17. I have to say, the secrecy surrounding this project is pretty remarkable; Brooks, known best as executive producer of “The Simpsons,” has a ton of street cred on his own. Add the star-studded cast into the mix, and you’d think this is something Columbia would be shouting to the heavens about.
All of the info that the NY Times dug up comes from an anonymous source, since Brooks and his fellow producers are still wary about discussing specifics about the movie. The idea was apparently born roughly five years ago, when Brooks decided he wanted to tell a story about a female athlete.
Witherspoon plays Lisa Jorgenson, a 27-year-old woman who is “just past her sporting prime.” Rudd’s and Nicholson’s characters were born out of Brooks’ interest in the world of corporate executives while Wilson’s character is there “to complicate Lisa’s love life.” While it had been previously believed that baseball would be a heavy focus for the story, it seems that it will factor in mostly as background. The story grows out of “an encounter between two people who meet on the worst night of their respective lives” and is about “people trying to figure out exactly what, for each of them, matters most.”
So there you have it. We’ve gone from knowing virtually nothing to having a title, a release date and a rough synopsis. Call me crazy, but “Untitled James L. Brooks Comedy” is starting to look an awful lot like a real movie!
From MTV