Mel Rodriguez to Star in YouTube Premium’s Dark Comedy “On Becoming a God in Central Florida”

Mel Rodriguez has landed a God-sized project…

The 45-year-old Latino actor has been cast in On Becoming a God in Central FloridaYouTube Premium’s a one-hour dark comedy series set in the 1990s.

Mel Rodriguez

Rodriguez will star opposite Ted LevineKirsten Dunst and Beth Ditto, the lead singer of Gossip, who’ll be series regulars, as well as Usman Ally, who has a recurring role.

The web series hails from George Clooney and Grant Heslov’s Smokehouse Pictures and Sony’s TriStar Television.

On Becoming A God In Central Florida, one of the passion projects for the late TriStar television head Suzanne Patmore Gibbs, was written by Robert Funke and Matt Lutsky based on a spec script they wrote.

Set near Orlando in the early 1990s, it centers on Krystal Gill (Dunst), a minimum-wage-earning water park employee who will eventually scheme her way up the ranks of the Founders American Merchandise, the cultish, flag waving, multi-billion dollar pyramid scheme that drove her family to ruin.

Rodriguez will play the manager of the low-rent waterpark where Krystal works.

Rodriguez’s previous credits include Getting On, The New Normal, Hot in Cleveland and The Middle.

Daniel Espinosa to Direct the Film Adaptation of Clinton Romesha’s “Red Platoon: A True Story of American Valor”

Daniel Espinosa is seeing Red

Sony Pictures has selected the 40-year-old Chilean filmmaker to direct an adaptation of Clinton Romesha’s book Red Platoon: A True Story of American Valor.

Daniel Espinosa

George Clooney and Grant Heslov’s Smokehouse Pictures will produce the film. Sony optioned the book last year., with Suicide Squad 2‘s Adam Cozad penning the script.

Medal of Honor winner Romesha was part of Red Platoon and the Black Knight Troop , which in 2009 prepared to shut down Command Outpost Keating. The outpost was the most remote and inaccessible in a string of bases built by the U.S. military in Nuristan and Kunar to keep Taliban insurgents from commuting between Afghanistan and Pakistan. It took three years for military to understand what was instantly clear to the men guarding it: The outpost was too isolated and dangerous to defend. After a series of smaller attacks, the Taliban came with everything it had, on October 3, 2009. While Romesha and his compatriots beat back the assault after 14 hours, they lost eight men in the balance. Romesha spearheaded both the defense of the outpost and the counterattack that drove the Taliban back.

The deal puts Espinosa back in business with Sony Pictures, which released the sci-fi thriller LifeRed Platoon potentially falls right into the filmmaker’s wheelhouse, and could follow in the footsteps of great war films like Black Hawk Down and We Were Soldiers.

Espinosa’s credits include Safe House, Child 44 and Easy Money.

George Clooney’s Smokehouse Pictures Acquires Film Rights to Navarro’s “Three Minutes to Doomsday”

It’s a special three minutes for Joe Navarro

George Clooney and Grant Heslov’s Smokehouse Pictures has acquired the film rights to the Cuban author, public speaker and former Federal Bureau of Investigation agent’s book Three Minutes to Doomsday.

Joe Navarro

The deal was brokered by Abrams Artists Agency, after Scribner bought the book’s North American rights.

Written by Navarro and Howard Means, Three Minutes to Doomsday recounts efforts by Navarro, during his career the FBI’s leading body-language expert, to track down Clyde Lee Conrad, an Army officer who sold secrets to Hungary during the Cold War. The book focuses on Navarro’s relationship and interviews with Rod Ramsey, who knew of Conrad’s crime.

Co-author Means has collaborated on multiple bestsellers, including the Robert Baer books See No Evil and Sleeping with the Devil that led to Clooney’s movie Syriana, for which he received an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. Baer these days is a frequent national-security commentator on CNN and elsewhere.

Smokehouse Pictures’ next film is Our Brand Is Crisis, a comedy set during the 2002 Bolivian presidential election and based on the true story of Democratic political consultants Greenberg Carville Shrum as they bring U.S. campaign techniques to South America. It’s directed by David Gordon Green and set for release in 2016.

Navarro is represented through Abrams Artists Agency by Steve Ross and Paul Weitzman.