Tim Burton’s Stop-Motion version of The Addams Family to the Big Screen

By Mike Fleming – Deadline.com

Tim Burton has reunited with his Ed Wood screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski on a pair of projects. They will write The Addams Family, the stop-motion animated film that Burton and Chris Meledandri are producing for Illumination Entertainment and Universal Pictures. At the same time, Burton has come on to be a producer of Big Eyes, the fact-based drama which the duo wrote as a directing vehicle, based on artist Margaret Keane’s struggle to get credit for the line of paintings of big-eyed children that became wildly popular in the 60s. Burton will produce with Lynette Howell’s Silverwood Films banner.

The writers, whose scripts include 1408 and The People Vs. Larry Flynt,  actually made another move, to UTA. They were repped for two decades by Tom Strickler and became charter Endeavor clients when that dealmaker, Ari Emanuel and others left ICM to form the agency. They had been repped by WME since Strickler left before the merger. Alexander and Karaszewski board an Addams Family project that Deadline first revealed in March, when Meledandri bought the rights to the ghoulish, darkly humorous drawings that Charles Addams created for The New Yorker. Those drawings also formed the basis for the toned down TV show and subsequent feature film comedies and Broadway musical. Burton will direct a film that is one of the plum projects on Meledandri’s slate for Illumination, the Universal-based family film unit which launched this summer with Despicable Me.

“Both of these projects are based on artwork that Tim absolutely loves,” Karasewski told me. “The retrospective in New York of Tim’s own artwork showed how much of an influence Charles Addams was to him. We want the tone to be as darkly funny and subversive as the Addams drawings, and we’ve come up with an approach that nobody has ever done before.” Alexander said while they were discussing The Addams Family, they showed Burton their Big Eyes script.   Read the rest of Mike Flemings great article HERE

Filed under: New Releases

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