20 Movies Not Coming Soon to a Theater Near You
A Confederacy of Dunces
Potential Cast: Will Ferrell, Mos Def, Drew Barrymore, and Lily Tomlin
The 2003 Nantucket Film Festival seemed like the end of a long journey for producer Scott Kramer. Back in the early '80s as an executive a Fox, Kramer had set up an adaptation of John Kennedy Toole's Pulitzer Prize-winning, New Orleans-set character study of the portly underachiever Ignatius J. Reilly, starring John Belushi and Richard Pryor and set to be directed by Harold Ramis. Now Will Ferrell, Mos Def, and All the Real Girls' David Gordon Green picked up where they had left off by participating in a public table-read of the Confederacy adaptation, co-written by Kramer and Steven Soderbergh and set to start filming by the end of the year. But as is wont to happen on films with the eccentricity of Confederacy, Paramount shuffled their feet, even with Ferrell and Drew Barrymore onboard, and Dunces was done in by studio ambivalence and issues concerning ownership of the book rights.
Project Status: Green told Roger Ebert in April 2006 that "the project is in development once again." However, Green is currently directing the Judd Apatow-produced stoner comedy The Pineapple Express.
NEXT: Dino, a retro cool bio of Dean Martin

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Will Ferrell slayed audiences in Anchorman, but his dramatic A Confederacy of Dunces has been weighted down in development.
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