the industry

At Last, Ellen Page, Maeby Fünke, and Har Mar Superstar to Write a TV Show

Turn the Page: Ellen Page, Alia “Maeby Fünke†Shawkat, and Sean “Har Mar Superstar†Tillmann will co-write a single-camera comedy, Stitch N’ Bitch, for HBO. The show will revolve around two hipster girls as they move from Williamsburg to L.A.’s Silver Lake neighborhood and attempt to become artists. The three will executive-produce, with Page and Shawkat possibly starring as well. We totally expect this project from the trio, which worked on Whip It! together, to be better than this one. [HR]

Phantom Loves the Cyclone: Love Never Dies, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s sequel to Phantom of the Opera, will premiere March 9 in London and next November 11 on Broadway. This time out, it’s ten years in the future, and the Phantom has moved from the Paris Opera House to (is this real? Oh, please say this is real) the fairgrounds of New York’s Coney Island. [Variety]

Whoa-Oh, It’s the Big Show: Melora “Jan†Hardin, Mark Feuerstein and WWE’s Paul “Big Show†Wight will star in Knucklehead, a comedy from WWE Studios. Feuerstein plays a fight promoter in heavy debt who discovers Wight, a church handyman who’s spent his whole life in an orphanage, and convinces Big Show to fight on behalf of the orphans (?). Then the two of them go on a road trip (??) with Hardin, who runs the orphanage. If that’s not enough to convince you this will be awesome, be aware that fast-talking Bobb’e J. Thompson is in this, too. [HR]

TV’s Don: Rebecca Mader, a.k.a. Charlotte from Lost, has landed roles in both Ceremony, the Uma Thurman disaster-wedding movie, and The Big Bang, the Antonio Banderas private-eye flick. She’ll play a married member of the wedding party and a meth addict who works at a medical center where she acts out different diseases for interns to react to, respectively. It sounds like at least one of those roles will require nose-bleeding, which is good because Mader is totally great at it. [HR]

One Deadly Venom: Gary Ross, who is writing Spider-Man 4 for Columbia, will also write and potentially direct Spider-Man spinoff Venom for the studio. Columbia had no comment on whether Topher Grace, who played Venom in Spider-Man 3, will be involved, probably because they, like everyone else, get bored talking about Topher Grace. [HR]

Em 2X: Eminem’s Relapse 2, at least partially made up of material recorded during the sessions for the first album, is now totally done, and is, amazingly, still coming out this year, as was originally announced. According to Em, “On the last record I was concentrated more on just spitting … the overall basis of the [sequel] is going to be more emotionally driven.†Considering that the first one was, by anyone else’s standards, cringe-inducingly emotionally driven, this is a terrifying concept. [Billboard]

At Last, Ellen Page, Maeby Fünke, and Har Mar Superstar to Write a TV Show