A forthcoming HBO movie directed by Greg Mottola and starring Larry David certainly raised interest when it was announced, as it would have been easy to initially assume that it would be a Curb Your Enthusiasm feature - particularly as the movie is set to shoot in a similar way to the excellent TV series. However, this was rubbished some time ago, and it additionally emerged that Mottola's movie would take priority over a future series of Curb - although appearances of Curb cast members haven't been ruled out.
Details of the project, until now, have been kept hush hush, but The Los Angeles Times have published an outline of its story, which certainly sounds interesting:
The plot concerns a marketing executive named Lenny (David) who is helping to market a new electric car. Because he objects to the name (it’s “the Howard,” after The Fountainhead’s Howard Roark), Lenny gets into a fight with the creator, a colleague named Haney, and in a fit of Davidian pique, gives Haney back his stake in the project.
This being a David story line, the car of course goes on to become a huge success, making Haney absurdly wealthy and leaving Larry out of the money (shades of George in Curb’s faux-Seinfeld reunion, forfeiting all the cash he had made on a public-toilet app to a Bernard Madoff scheme).
Having lost his wife, house and everything else, including his hair (it wouldn’t be a Larry David project without a baldness joke), Lenny moves to Martha’s Vineyard. Years later we find him as a lowly paid assistant to an elderly woman, living incognito with a different look under the assumed name Rolly.
But his life is soon shaken up when Haney, fabulously successful and not recognizing his former co-worker, shows up, prompting Lenny/Rolly to hatch a plan to exact revenge.
Jon Hamm is heavily linked to the project, and he's presumably pencilled in for the Haney role. Hamm, despite being known mainly as Don Draper, is a lover of comedy and has certainly impressed in the comedic roles he has had to date. Seeing Hamm and David play off against each other as described above could be truly brilliant.
More on the project when we get it.
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