Farragut North was written for the stage by Beau Willimon, who drew inspiration for the political drama from his experiences working on Howard Dean’s presidential campaign back in 2004. Clooney has been working with Willimon to adapt the play to the big screen for nearly three years now.

Pine would star in the role of spinmeister/wunderkind Stephen Myers, a shrewd political campaigner who is working to get his candidate nominated during the Iowa Democratic caucuses. The young man’s attempts are complicated by the efforts of an investigative journalist and a teenage intern – the latter of which Myers has an affair with. Marisa Tomei and Evan Rachel Wood are in talks to play the respective roles.

Leonardo DiCaprio was at one point attached to play the role of Myers, but that is no longer the case. Pine was widely praised for his portrayal of the character in an L.A. production of Farragut North last year (see below) and has seen his star meter in Hollywood rise significantly since – needless to say, he seems all but a perfect choice to play Myers in Clooney’s adaptation as well.

Chris Pine Farragut North movie George Clooney

Clooney already has two credible indie actors onboard to star in Farragut North as well: Philip Seymour Hoffman, who will play Myers’ boss, and Paul Giamatti, in the role of a rival candidate’s campaign manager. The politician Myers works for is never seen in the original play, but will have a short appearance in the film version and may be brought to life by Clooney himself.

Sony is currently holding negotiations with Clooney to distribute the pic, which will most likely be an independent production. The combination of a high-caliber cast and Clooney at the helm should be sufficient to attract the attention of financiers to fund the project.

We will keep you updated on the development of Farragut North as more news comes in.

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Gallery Link: On Stage – Play Photos > Farragut North ( 2009 )

“Farragut North,” Beau Willimon’s engaging drama about the dirty tricks and brutal backstabbing of those conducting the spin war for aspiring presidents, attempts to reignite our tapped-out passion for political one-upmanship. The play, which is having its West Coast premiere at the Geffen Playhouse, may not be able to compete with the loony stranger-than-fiction cast of recent election battles or offer us any stop-the-presses scoops about our Swift Boat campaign culture, but it does capture the frenzied scheming and counter-scheming of would-be Washington kingmakers.

Better yet, the production has a rising superstar on board who could give Barack Obama a run for his charismatic money. Chris Pine, the paparazzi’s current object of affection after his breakout role as Capt. James T. Kirk in the new “Star Trek” film, stars as Stephen Bellamy, a 25-year-old press secretary for a Democratic presidential candidate who remains an invisible presence throughout. Imagine Karl Rove as a fit, chicly dressed media strategist for the other side and you have some idea of the nature of this latest boy genius.

A morality tale about an attractively malign central character, “Farragut North” is as much about what drives Stephen’s merciless pursuit of victory as it is about the way political machinations have eclipsed what’s really at stake in our elections. As a character study of a “crackberry” generation mover-and-shaker, who lives a life of wall-to-wall work (with scheduled barroom binges and hotel room dalliances), the play has a fresh accuracy that suggests the playwright, who worked for both Sen. Charles E. Schumer of New York and Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont, was taking juicy notes on the campaign trail.

But the drama doesn’t concentrate its energies as satisfyingly as it might. Willimon tries (and mostly succeeds) in staying one step ahead of the audience with his foxy plot. Yet this hectic legerdemain distracts from character development, and the result is that even such crucial figures as Paul Zara, Stephen’s battle-hardened boss, who’s played by Chris Noth (a.k.a. Mr. Big from “Sex and the City”), and Molly, the 19-year-old sexually assertive campaign intern, who’s played by the entrancing Olivia Thirlby (“Juno”), can seem like functions of Stephen’s story more than fleshed-out figures in their own right.

Set in Des Moines, Iowa, weeks before the state’s caucuses will officially commence, the play begins — where else? — in a booth at a bar. Stephen is holding court with Paul, Ida Horowicz (Mia Barron), a New York Times journalist who’s as professionally manipulative as she is easily manipulated, and Ben (Dan Bittner), an earnest deputy press secretary whose idealism hasn’t yet been contaminated by the ugly reality around him.

This opening scene sets up expectations that these ruthless talkers, who are cackling over the way Stephen once pinned the anti-Semitic label on a rival candidate, are operating in a David Mamet universe. But the production, directed by Doug Hughes (who also staged the attractive new revival of “Oleanna” at the Mark Taper Forum), treats the play more like a topical David Hare drama in which the compromises of private conscience and the debasement of public values are seen as inextricably linked to each other.

Willimon subtly introduces a snowballing complication into the plot when Stephen meets Tom Duffy (Isiah Whitlock Jr.), the campaign manager for a rival candidate, at a dingily discreet restaurant. A furtive job offer sets off a squall of intrigue in which all parties are implicated in a contest of professional sabotage.

But this story line is just a useful device. The riveting interest is always Pine’s seductive double-talk, the way he maniacally stirs up trouble whenever he feels the heat from his incessantly moaning phone. There’s a reason his Stephen is so adroit at his job — a genially handsome exterior conceals a ruthlessly Machiavellian interior. He’s upfront about his moral shortcomings, but somehow that only adds to his lethal charm. Molly, who’s no old-fashioned purist, can’t help wishing that this sad, self-made dreamboat was made of better stuff. Pine coaxes us into falling into the same sinister trap.

This well-acted Atlantic Theater Company production includes several members from the original off-Broadway company, including Noth, who presents a flabby, middle-aged reflection of who Stephen will become if he doesn’t get out of this awful racket. It’s a well-knit ensemble that has little difficulty with the play’s rapid pulse.

The sets by David Korins aren’t particularly eye-catching, but then the locations aren’t supposed to be five-star. Joshua White and Bec Stupak’s video collages of TV news clips and election sights and sounds don’t add much to the visual palette, but they do keep the staging’s motor revved.

The strength of “Farragut North,” however, lies in the reflex duplicity that marks Stephen’s dealing with everyone in his orbit, particularly Molly. She may not be a fully formed character, but as portrayed by Thirlby with a tricky mix of guile and naivete, this jean-clad pixie is perhaps the only one with any chance to teach Stephen about the limits of work and the necessity of trust.

source: latimes.com

The cast of “Farragut North” poses for a group photo at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles Tuesday, June 23, 2009. From left, front row, are Isiah Whitlock Jr., Chris Noth, Olivia Thirlby and Chris Pine. Back, from left, are Justin Huen, director Doug Hughes, writer Beau Willimon, Mia Barron and Dan Bittner.

Gallery Link: Photo Sessions > Session #027

Pine, 28, costars with ” Sex and the City’s” Chris Noth as media massagers in the psychological drama inspired by Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign, which briefly claimed the energies of the playwright and recovering politico Beau Willimon. Pine plays Stephen, a wunderkind press secretary who prides himself on his ability to manipulate any situation.

At the moment, Stephen is trying to work his magic on an attractive young intern played by ” Juno’s” Olivia Thirlby, who was in the New York production’s original cast last fall. In a Geffen rehearsal room, under the watchful eye of director Doug Hughes (who also helmed the current Mark Taper Forum production of David Mamet’s “Oleanna”), Molly/Olivia has just entered to drop off an envelope for Stephen/Chris at a dingy restaurant in East Des Moines, Iowa, where he’s making calls. And now he’s trying to beguile her into sticking around for a drink.

The characters play a flirtatious game of verbal ping-pong, and then Pine suddenly mimes reeling in Thirlby as if she’s on the end of an invisible hook. Hughes is delighted. “Your silver-tongued eloquence claims another helpless victim,” he says.


Pine’s smile grows even broader. “It’s just another day, Doug,” he replies.

Pine may be self-mocking when he says that, but then that’s part of the charm that got him into this enviable position in the first place. Directors and writers who’ve worked with him quickly volunteer that he’s a great guy to have around, not an overgrown enfant terrible like so many other young lions of Hollywood who will go unnamed.

When “Star Trek” director J.J. Abrams cast him in the pivotal role of Capt. Kirk, the filmmaker was looking for “a relative unknown who had to behave as if he were an experienced movie star without any of the negatives of being a big movie star,” he said. “He had to treat the cast and crew in a way that would make the other actors feel safe and the crew feel appreciated. And he was impeccable.”

Add a wicked sense of humor and piercing blue eyes, and it’s easy to see how Pine has burst onto the scene as one of the action heroes of summer. What may be less obvious is why he took the dark and relatively low-profile stage role of Stephen, who personifies “Farragut North’s” catchphrase that it’s a play “about the lust for power and the costs one will endure to achieve it.” (Warner Bros. is developing the film version, with Leonardo DiCaprio attached to star and George Clooney to direct.)

“I was in a hotel room with my girlfriend at the time, and I had a bunch of scripts to read — film and theater — and I saved it for last because I’d heard it was really good, and I wanted to end my night on a good note, being excited,” Pine says of his early-spring decision to take the part during a lull in the “Star Trek” publicity grind. “I couldn’t put it down. The twist at the end completely threw me. I thought Beau’s sense of dialogue was so right on and so — I don’t want to say real, because that’s dumb — but real without being affected, and intelligent, but not so intelligent to make you feel like a dumbass. And I’m very interested in the world of politics, so it appealed to me on that end.”

As Pine discusses the play during a break in rehearsal at the Geffen, his mind and body seem to be in constant motion. He alternately scratches his side and reaches for the coffee table as he mulls over certain questions, waiting for the right answer to finish percolating. He’s casually dressed in a blue button-down shirt, black jeans and high-top sneakers and a new beard. The facial fuzz was inspired by Willimon’s hirsute college buddy and political mentor, Jay Carson, who worked for Hillary and Bill and, at only 26, served as Dean’s national spokesman in 2004.

Pine is trying on the beard to see if it helps him penetrate Stephen’s miserable je ne sais quoi. He acknowledges that he’s not quite there yet.

“I’m having a hard time not judging him,” he says. “But there’s a primal drive in him to win at all costs that I’m coming to understand. That need comes from all the damage that all of us carry in one form or another. It’s just his ability to screw other people over, it’s that Machiavellian politician in him. . . . Once I can pinpoint that, I’ll be able to take it, hopefully, to a different level. But it sure is a lot of fun.”

Not just guy candy

In fact, the dark Stephen is just as much a typical Chris Pine role as the stellar Kirk is. His brief career has already swept the spectrum of characters, from heroes to antiheroes.

And for the most part, the dividing line is the one that separates film and theater.

Pine’s first big-screen role was as an arm charm for Anne Hathaway in 2004′s “Princess Diaries 2,” a service he also provided Lindsay Lohan’s character in 2006 in “Just My Luck.” He quickly moved on to the young hero role in the 2008 film ” Bottle Shock,” in which, as with “Star Trek,” he played a hapless young man who tries to live up to his father’s legacy (a scion of the family business much like Pine himself, the son of “CHiPs” veteran Robert Pine and TV actress Gwynne Gilford, and a third-generation thespian from what he calls “a working-class Hollywood” family, presumably because they literally worked).

Yet one of Pine’s favorite film roles was not a lead but rather the “redneck neo-Nazi hit man” of 2006′s “Smokin’ Aces.” And while he was becoming better known for his good-guy film parts, he was earning critics’ notice in much darker roles onstage, such as the vicious Carter in Neil LaBute’s “Fat Pig” at the Geffen in 2007 and the amoral journalist of Ronan Noone’s 2006 one-man drama “The Atheist” in New York.

Of Pine’s work in “Fat Pig,” LaBute says: “He had what I felt would have worked for either of the male characters in that piece — the good guy or the bad guy. He had a watchability. I think he isn’t looking at [his career situation] as, ‘I have this chance of being a star.’ He knows a good role is a good role, and if it’s a bad guy, they often get the best lines. It’s great to see him going off to do a piece of theater. He’s approaching it as, ‘What is the best material I have at the moment?’ “

Willimon thinks the pattern of Pine’s acting credits reflects the opportunities available to a young guy with leading-man looks, and “it doesn’t have as much to do with Chris Pine as it does with the chasm between theater and film,” he says. “In general, film — particularly Hollywood films — tend to lean more toward the good hero who overcomes obstacles and comes out on top. Theater, largely because it doesn’t bear the same commercial burden that film does, has the luxury and the bravery to take on risks and support the other sort of heroes — call it the antihero. Sometimes obstacles do not result in a happy ending — or a more complex ending than triumph.”

In August, Pine moves on to his own happy ending when he starts filming 20th Century Fox’s “Unstoppable” with Denzel Washington. In the thriller directed by Tony Scott, he and Washington will play conductors trying to stop a runaway train carrying toxic chemicals. It’s probably reasonable to assume that there are a couple of hero roles in there somewhere.

Pine seems gobsmacked about the opportunity to work with the two-time Oscar winner, an experience he anticipates will be tantamount to earning an acting PhD. “I don’t ever want to be so precious to eschew those kinds of roles because I’m on some mission to be the artiste in Hollywood,” says Pine, who credits his family with keeping his feet on the ground. “But I think there’s a closeted Peter Lorre inside me that loves to play the fun, darker, weirder roles that hopefully I’ll get the chance to play as I move ahead in my career.”

source: latimes.com

At that point in the interview, Chris Pine walked into the room. The 28-year-old actor, who plays Stephen and appeared two years ago at the Geffen in a production of Neil Labute’s “Fat Pig,” is a lot more in demand these days as a result of his much-praised portrayal of the young James T. Kirk in the just-released big-screen blockbuster “Star Trek.”

“This guy is tremendous,” Noth said of Pine. “He’s really good at it; brings all kinds of dimensions to the role. He was born to be onstage.”

You can read the entire article & interview with Chris Noth here @OC Register.com

Gallery Link: On Stage – Play Photos > Farragut North ( 2009 )