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The A24 folks are getting into the Sean Durkin business once again. After backing his third feature film in The Iron Claw, they’ve also set up shop once again with producers Ronald Bronstein, Eli Bush and Josh Safdie. Deadline is reporting that Saoirse Ronan and Austin Butler are set to star in the book-to-film adaptation of Deep Cuts – a first time novel by Holly Brickley which was actually just released this week. The project will span a full decade in the naughts – and will geographically move in the U.S. Here is the book description:

It’s a Friday night in a campus bar in Berkeley, fall of 2000, and Percy Marks is pontificating about music again.…...

After his brutally piercing trio of features thus far with Martha Marcy May Marlene, The Nest, and The Iron Claw, director Sean Durkin is looking to lighten the mood. He’s set to write and direct an adaptation of Holly Brickley’s debut novel Deep Cuts, which just arrived on bookshelves this week and tells a love story of two music-obsessed twenty-somethings in the 2000s.

Deadline reports Saoirse Ronan and Austin Butler will star in the feature, which is set up at A24 with Ronan also on board as a producer, alongside Ronald Bronstein, Eli Bush, and Josh Safdie. Ronan will next be seen in Jonatan Etzler’s Bad Apples while Butler is gearing up for a big summer with Ari Aster’s Eddington and Darren Aronofsky’s Caught Stealing.

Check out an interview with Holly Brickley below about her novel, as well as an official synopsis from Amazon and...

Frederica Sagor Maas, a Hollywood screenwriter in the 1920s, died January 5 at the Country Villa nursing facility in La Mesa, in the San Diego metropolitan area. She was 111. The daughter of Jewish Russian immigrants, she was born Frederica Alexandrina Sagor on July 6, 1900, in New York City. According to her autobiography, The Shocking Miss Pilgrim: A Writer in Early Hollywood, she studied journalism at Columbia University, but quit before graduation to work as an assistant story editor at Universal Pictures' New York office. While at Universal, she kept herself busy going to star-studded premieres and parties, and — as found in her book — having the studio buy the rights to Rex Beach's novel The Goose Woman, thus giving a solid boost to the careers of actresses Louise Dresser and Constance Bennett, and of future five-time Oscar-nominated director Clarence Brown. Sagor left Universal when film executive Al Lichtman and future...