Worthington heads to a Mann's 'Fields' (DH, VAR)

By R. Kinsey Lowe

Sam Worthington's next project will be "The Fields," based on the true story of a pair of detectives investigating a series of murders in the estuaries near oil refineries in coastal Texas, according to reports posted minutes apart Sunday afternoon on Deadline Hollywood and Variety.

The movie will mark the major-feature directing debut of Ami Canaan Mann, daughter of Michael Mann - who is producing with Michael Jaffe in partnership with Bill Brock's QED and Mann's Forward Pass.

Slated to start shooting April 5 in Louisiana, "The Fields" was scripted by Don Ferrarone, a retired DEA operations agent Mann met while exec producing the 1990 miniseries "Drug Wars: The Camarena Story." Ferrarone told Mann about the agents investigating the Texas crimes and Mann hired him to tell the story, according to Mike Fleming's report for Deadline Hollywood.

Fleming's report has considerably more detail than Variety's, which uses a slightly different title, "The Texas Killing Fields." That's how it was referred to when rumors about the movie surfaced last year and Danny Boyle was believed to have been under consideration as director. Bradley Cooper was also rumored as a possible star, and IMDB Pro's listing includes his name as well as Worthington's.

Fleming's more comprehensive report was time-stamped 13 minutes after Variety's quick-and-dirty version, which would imply that someone in one of the camps involved in the project tipped off Variety after they found out Fleming was onto the story but hadn't quite posted it. Now that Fleming has jump from his longtime home at Variety to Deadline Hollywood (he's based in New York) you'll see more and more of this kind of thing because Variety and the Hollywood Reporter (which banged out its own short item hours later) don't want to be seen as missing anything that breaks on Deadline Hollywood.

Michael Mann described Ferrarone's script as "filled with things you cannot make up in Hollywood, things you would have had to find the dead bodies in a heroin operation to understand. That�s why it�s such a haunting piece. This is such a spooky zone in Texas where cell phones don�t work, where the homes sit on trailer stilts, and where there�s a hand-painted sign on the bridge that reads, `You Are Now Entering the Cruel World.� "

In any case, Brock's QED will be at the Berlin Film Festival this week brokering international rights; QED, which also financed "District 9" and Oliver Stone's "W," and CAA will be partnering on domestic rights.

Children following in their famous parents' footsteps is hardly new in Hollywood, and Fleming's story points out a couple of family ties on other projects.

On "The Fields," additionally, Ami's sister Aran will handle production design.