The Playlist perhaps puts it best in the opening line of their own post regarding this news: “How the mighty have fallen…” Remember how Mary Harron directed American Psycho? Do you think she does? After her work there, Harron could have done just about anything she wanted – which made it all the more confounding when she began her slow descent into half-cocked features that barely even left a mark (The Notorious Bettie Page, The Moth Diaries) and one-shot directing gigs on various television series. What next?
Obviously a Lifetime movie about Anna Nicole Smith, creatively titled The Anna Nicole Story. Pardon?
Deadline Hollywood reports that Harron will helm the television movie from a screenplay by John Rice and Joe Batteer, a biopic that is said to trace the transformation of Smith, from small town girl Vickie Lynn Hogan to Hollywood bombshell, all the way to the tragic end. Agnes Bruckner is set to play Smith. Former soap star Bruckner is also known for her work on television series like 24 and Private Practice, though she’s recently started turning her attention to small features, like Jamie Babbit’s Breaking the Girl and Quentin Dupieux’s Wrong Cops.
Additionally, Harron isn’t the only person who has actual talent to get mixed up with, again, a Lifetime movie about Anna Nicole Smith, as the outlet also reports that Martin Landau is set to play J. Howard Marshall (the elderly oil tycoon who Smith married at age 26, only to see him die a year later, a passing that triggered the massive legal battle for his estate that took up so much of her final years). Virgina Madsen is also in to co-star as Smith’s mom, Virgie. Good luck to all of you.
