The Lost City of Z has lost its star: Brad Pitt will no longer be starring in Paramount Pictures’ planned adaptation of the non-fiction book by New Yorker staff writer David Grann about the quest to find the infamous El Dorado. Pitt was to have played Col. Percy Fawcett, who led a 1925 expedition into the wilds of Brazil, only to vanish as inexplicably as the golden Amazonian city he was seeking. Insiders tell Vulture the issue was an impasse with Paramount over compensation for Lost City’s director James Gray (The Yards, We Own the Night). Late yesterday, Deadline’s Mike Fleming broke the news that Pitt had started negotiating to star in and produce Cogan’s Trade, a mobster comedy – a mobedy? a mob-com? – that will reteam Pitt with Andrew Dominik, who directed Pitt in 2007’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford; now we know why.