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Quoted

Patrick Dempsey signs on for heist comedy

Penned by 'The Hangover's' Jon Lucas, Scott Moore
By Gregg Kilday

Nov 3, 2009, 07:09 PM ET



Patrick Dempsey will find himself in the middle of a couple of stick-ups in an untitled bank-heist comedy written by "The Hangover" team of Jon Lucas and Scott Moore and to be directed by Paul McGuigan ("Lucky Number Slevin").

Peter Safran and Foresight Unlimited's Mark Damon are producing with Dempsey, with Joannie Burstein serving as an executive producer.

Foresight will fully finance the film and is handling worldwide sales at AFM.

Dempsey ("Grey's Anatomy"), who last appeared onscreen in 2008's "Maid of Honor," will play a man caught in the middle of two different robberies at the same bank who tries to protect a bank teller with whom he's secretly in love.

Production will begin in April.

Dempsey, repped by UTA and manager Burstein, next appears on the big screen in Warner Bros.' ensemble comedy "Valentine's Day," directed by Garry Marshall, to be released in February.

Quoted

When scruffily handsome TRIPP KENNEDY (Patrick Dempsey), finds himself in the middle of two gangs trying to rob the same bank, one gang slickly pro and the other bumbling buffoons, he must outsmart them, solve a series of mysterious murders, save all the bank customers before they are next--and in the process falls in love with the smart, pretty bank teller who helps him.

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The script for the Baton Rouge-shot bank-heist romp “Flypaper” is violent, intense, darkly comic — what you’d end up with, one of its producers says, “if ‘Dog Day Afternoon’ and ‘The Hangover’ had an illegitimate child.”

In other words, it’s not exactly the kind of movie in which you’d expect to see Patrick Dempsey, the “Gray’s Anatomy” actor whose big-screen résumé has to this point trended toward fluffier fare such as “Enchanted” and “Sweet Home Alabama.”

But then, neither is it the sort of movie you’d normally associate with Rob Minkoff, the family-friendly director of Disney’s “The Lion King” and “The Haunted Mansion.” Or with “Hangover” scribes Scott Moore and Jon Lucas, who — before that lost-weekend comedy caught fire at the box office last year — had built their careers around such lighter-side films as “Four Christmases” and “Ghosts of Girlfriends Past.”

But there they all were this month — along with co-stars Ashley Judd, Tim Blake Nelson and Jeffrey Tambor — on the film’s Baton Rouge set. They all brought vastly different résumés, but most shared a common goal: to show they’re more than the sum of their individual IMDB.com pages.

For Dempsey, the desire to prove he can play more than the dreamy-eyed lead in romantic comedies was so strong that he signed on to produce “Flypaper” — his first major foray behind the scenes — to make sure he got the gig.

“It’s a nice character for me to play, to get away from how I’ve been pigeonholed and get a chance to show something else,” Dempsey said during a break in shooting at the once-grand Bellemont hotel, which had been taken over by the production and turned into a makeshift stoundstage. “I wouldn’t be hired for a role like this unless I found the material, mainly because I haven’t shown it — and until you show it, people don’t quite believe you can pull it off.”

Minkoff said a major draw for him was the off-center intensity of the script, which Moore and Lucas wrote 12 years ago at the dawn of their writing partnership. But he said, he shares Dempsey’s interest in stretching his artistic wings, and Hollywood’s expectations.

“I think all of the people that are involved in this are getting an opportunity to do something that they wouldn’t get to do under other circumstances,” Minkoff said. “This isn’t a typical studio movie, so we’re all given a little more freedom to have fun and challenge ourselves.”

In the film, Dempsey plays Tripp, a vaguely Woody Allen type who is neurotic, fussy, quirky — and who just started taking meds to help get his head in order. He also happens to be secretly in love with a beautiful teller (Judd) at a local bank branch — which complicates things when, during one of his visits to the bank, a pair of bank robbers stage a holdup.

Just when it looks like things couldn’t get any worse, a competing gang of robbers show up for their own bank heist. One gang exhibits the hallmarks of professionals. The others? Total boobs by the name of Peanut Butter and Jelly.

“Basically, we get to stand around the movie and look stupid,” said Peanut Butter actor Tim Blake Nelson (“O Brother Where Art Thou?”), sporting faux tattoos on each arm and a tattered shirt suggesting that his character finds himself on the wrong end of an explosion or two.

Soon, the whole thing morphs into what Nelson describes as “a drawing-room-style murder mystery” as characters begin turning up dead and the realization sets in — for Tripp and for the bank robbers — that maybe the dual robberies weren’t a coincidence.

“It’s got like four or five genres going on at one time,” Dempsey said. “It’s a comedy, a dark comedy, it’s a thriller, a whodunit, an action movie, a bank heist and a love story, all wrapped into one.”

It’s also got a legion of, as Nelson put it, “really weird characters in quite extreme situations. “I think the best comedies have really, really high stakes and characters who aren’t going to respond well in high-stakes situations — and if this movie is anything, you can categorize it as that.”

Minkoff said he’s a fan of Coen brothers films, and he sees a similar sensibility in “Flypaper.”

“It’s funny but it’s also in some ways very dangerous and intense,” he said. “People get shot, killed; there’s murder and mayhem. But it has a sense of humor.”

After a rushed 30-day shoot — all of it shot on sets built inside the cavernous Bellemont, save for two days of exteriors picked up on the streets of Baton Rouge — the movie wrapped earlier this month. Producers hope to have it ready for the 2011 film-festival season and, assuming a distribution deal follows, an eye toward a release in early fall 2011.