James L. Brooks' Philly-shot movie has a title, release date

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James L. Brooks' Philly-shot movie has a title, release date

POSTED: Tuesday, March 23, 2010, 3:18 PM

Filed Under: Movies

quangly.com

Director James L. Brooks

The New York Times has a piece today about how James L. Brooks' locally-shot movie — starring Paul Rudd, Reese Witherspoon, Owen Wilson and Jack Nicholson — is bucking current Hollywood trends of sequels and tentpoles, with an original story and a star-filled cast. The film, titled How Do You Know (sans question mark in the Times piece), centers around a love triangle between a white collar suit (Rudd), a baseball player (Wilson) and their sports-loving, former softball-playing paramour (Witherspoon). (Nicholson appears as Rudd's father, a role initially meant for Bill Murray, who dropped out last minute.) The Times is quick to point out this isn't a baseball movie. Rather, "the sport only occasionally figures in a film that is actually about people trying to figure out exactly what, for each of them, matters most." The film has a December 17 release date, smack dab in the heart of awards season. The piece doesn't say much that the local press hasn't sorted out already and even if this movie makes buckets of money, studios will still be hesitant to green light expensive movies that don't involve the blowing up of shit. But it's this line in the piece that will get the Greater Philadelphia Film Office, and its head Sharon Pinkenson, all hot and bothered:

With "How Do You Know," incentives from Pennsylvania and the District of Columbia helped pay for a relatively expensive enterprise — Columbia executives declined to provide a budget figure — whose release on Dec. 17 will test the audience appetite for story-driven, star-heavy films.

See, backwoods PA State Reps!: If you take away our film tax credit, Hollywood will fall apart

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