You Kill Me is currently enjoying a 75% “fresh” rating over at RottenTomatoes.com. Visit to read some of the great reviews!

Did you hear the one about the Polish hit man (Sir Ben Kingsley) who gets sent from Buffalo to San Francisco to sober up? That’s the nutshell plot of John Dahl’s You Kill Me, a return to the off-kilter crime tales of his earlier independents The Last Seduction and Red Rock West. Tea Leoni doesn’t just play the flinty-yet-flirty San Francisco saleswoman who falls for Kingsley; she also came on board the film as a producer. Dahl and Leoni spoke with Cinematical in San Francisco about low-budget film making, scene-stealing and other petty larcenies.

Cinematical: Your previous film, The Great Raid was a effects-heavy period piece set during World War II; was part of the appeal of doing You Kill Me being able to do something more modern-day and not smaller in scope but less arduous on a production level?

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Couple to play founders of Reader’s Digest

Tea Leoni and David Duchovny will give the bigscreen treatment to the story of Reader’s Digest founders DeWitt Wallace and Lila Acheson Wallace.

Through their And Then Prods. shingle, Leoni and Duchovny have optioned “American Dreamers,” a book by former Digest editor Peter Canning.

While Leoni and Duchovny will produce, they likely won’t appear in the film.

“This is what happened to their American dream, when it got filtered through the right wing,” Leoni told Daily Variety. Canning, a 25-year vet of the mag who rose to managing editor, writes that the magazine’s idealistic goals got compromised as it grew into a juggernaut after WWII. It became a pulpit for a conservative agenda, and the founders allowed it to be used as a tool by the CIA and the FBI. The founders also lost themselves when they became rich and passive as people pawed for money and control of their empire. “They were manipulated by a system that was so much bigger than they were. The wealthier they got, the more vulnerable they became,” Leoni said.

The author will be a consultant on the project.

He had difficulty getting his book published, and by the time it was released, hundreds of volatile pages were excised. They will be exploited in film. Leoni said a writer will be hired shortly.

As producers, Leoni and Duchovny recently set up the Universal comedy “Miss Captivity”; the Beacon Communications comedy “Mount Pleasant”; the Showtime pilot formerly known as “Californication,” starring Duchovny, written by Tom Kapinos and directed by Stephen Hopkins; and “Yogaman,” a comedy series written for Showtime by Duchovny, Scott Burns and Bart Freundlich.

Source: Variety

The Hollywood Reporter
Tribeca Film Fest unveils lineup
By Gregg Goldstein - March 13, 2007

NEW YORK — The Tribeca Film Festival on Monday unveiled its World Narrative and World Documentary Feature Film Competition lineups and Spotlight section slate.

Filmmakers including Leonardo DiCaprio, Michael Apted, John Dahl, Ed Burns and Shane Meadows and stars such as America Ferrera, Ray Romano, Tea Leoni and Debra Messing will be featured.

The announced films from the sixth annual fest come from 25 countries and include 10 world premieres. “The festival, while young, continues to attract films expressing compelling views from filmmakers from around the globe and around the corner,” said fest co-founder Jane Rosenthal.

One of the highest-profile entries among the 18 World Narrative competition films is “Entourage” star Kevin Connolly’s black comedy “Gardener of Eden” starring Giovanni Ribisi and Erika Christensen from producer DiCaprio. Other highlights include Pascale Ferran’s French-language D.H. Lawrence adaptation “Lady Chatterly” (billed as “sensual yet never vulgar”), Paolo Virzi’s biopic “Napoleon and Me” (Lo e Napoleone) starring Daniel Auteuil as the famed emperor and Jose Antonio Negret’s Colombian kidnapping thriller “Towards Darkness” (Hacia la Oscuridad)” starring Ferrera.

The 16 World Documentary films in competition include John Reiss’ graffitti docu “Bomb It” and the Afghani murder mystery “Taxi to the Dark Side” from director Alex Gibney (”Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room”). Esther Robinson examines her uncle, Andy Warhol’s onetime lover, in “A Walk into the Sea: Danny Williams and The Warhol Factory,” and Paul Taylor looks at a South African AIDS orphanage in “We Are Together (Thina Simunye),” featuriung a performance by Alicia Keys and Paul Simon.

Among the 17 Spotlight films: Writer/director/star Julie Delpy’s romantic comedy “2 Days in Paris” (Deux Jours a Paris), Burns’ romance “Purple Violets” starring Messing and Patrick Wilson, and Zak Penn’s casino mockumentary “The Grand” starring Romano and Woody Harrelson.

Other high-profile Spotlight films are Jim Brown’s folk music docu “Pete Seeger: The Power of Song” featuring Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, Meadows’ ’80s punk coming-of-age take “This is England,” Apted’s soccer docu “The Power of The Game” and Dahl’s hitman comedy-drama “You Kill Me” starring Leoni and Ben Kingsley.

The fest is set to run April 25-May 6 in its namesake lower Manhattan neighborhood. The rest of its 159-feature lineup will be unveiled over the next few weeks.

Actor-writer-director David Duchovny recently acquired the life rights of Linda Brewer, who provided for her family by hosting passion parties and selling sex toys out of her car throughout the Bible Belt. Duchovny’s wife, T?a Leoni, is attached to star as the Arkansas woman. Duchovny will produce the film for Touchstone Pictures and Beacon Pictures.

Courtesy of the Hollywood Reporter