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Reese Witherspoon and Ryan Reynolds will star in Big Eyes, the film that Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski wrote and will direct this spring.

Witherspoon and Reynolds will play Margaret and Walter Keane, whose paintings of large eyed children became one of the first mass marketed art sensations in the 50s and 60s, with prints sold in gas stations and every five and dime store. While Walter was the marketing genius, he also took the bows for doing the brush work, and was a regular on the TV talk show circuit, his shy wife was the actual artist in the family. When they split and she tried to get her due, they ended up in court, where a judge finally provided them with two easels and ordered them to prove it. Walter’s art reputation went down on the canvas.

Alexander and Karaszewski have been trying to make this film for years; the leads are such rich parts that numerous stars have been attached. Their Ed Wood director, Tim Burton, will produce along with Lynette Howell and Jamie Patricof. The latter duo resurrected the project with their new company, Electric City Entertainment.

“We are ecstatic to have this dream cast for our dream project. Walter is a larger-than-life antihero — charming, funny, dangerous, and a little crazy, said Alexander and Karaszewski in a statement. “Ryan will knock it out of the park. As for Reese, she will be perfect as Margaret — soulful, decent, transforming from vulnerability to learning to fight for herself.”

Principal photography is scheduled for the Spring. Witherspoon opens in the Fox comedy This Means War, while Reynolds stars with Denzel Washington in the Universal drama Safe House.

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１月12日（ブルームバーグ）：米ニューヨーク近代美術館 （ＭｏＭＡ）の入館者数が昨シーズンに11％減少し約280万人となった。東欧出身のアーティスト、マリーナ・アブラモビッチによる長時間にわたって体を動かさないパフォーマンスや映画監督のティム・バートンのデザイン画などの展覧会で盛況だった前の年とは明暗を分けた。

　　一方、メトロポリタン美術館の入館者数は過去最高の約560万人に増加。デザイナーの故アレキサンダー・マックイーンがデザインした風変わりな衣服やアクセサリーが注目を集めた。両美術館は2010年７月－11年６月の年次報告書と財務報告書を発表した。

　　サザビーズの幹部でニューヨークのソロモン・Ｒ・グッゲンハイム美術館の元館長、リサ・デニソン氏は「大ヒットが期待できる時代に戻りつつあるのかもしれない」と指摘する。

　　ニューヨークのこれら２つの主要美術館の入館者数の増減は、大衆向けの展覧会がいかに入館者数を押し上げるかを浮き彫りにしている。メトロポリタン美術館では、同館初の大ヒット展覧会として挙げられる1978年開催のツタンカーメン展の入館者数が最も多く約130万人。マックイーンの作品が展示された展覧会「アレキサンダー・マックイーン：凶暴な美しさ」は約66万人を動員し、141年の同館の歴史で８番目の人気を博した。

　　米映画「シザーハンズ」などで知られるバートン監督の展覧会は09年11月から10年４月まで開催され、スケッチや絵画、彫刻が展示された。ＭｏＭＡでは史上３位の81万511人が訪れた。

　　この展覧会が盛況だったことなどから、ＭｏＭＡの09－10年の入館者数は過去最高の約310万人に達した。

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No matter! Burton has an epic cinematic year in the works, from his Johnny Depp-starring adaptation of “Dark Shadows” and his long-gestating animated project “Frankenweenie” to his work as a producer on the supernatural/action/historical/drama mash-up “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.” That’s why we’ve named Burton One to Watch in 2012. The director recently hopped on the phone with MTV News to discuss everything he has coming up over the next year and explain why thinking about it all leaves him in a state of panic.

MTV: Hi, Tim, we wanted to check in with you because it looks like it’s going to be a busy 2012.

Tim Burton: Don’t remind me. [Laughs.]

MTV: I’m sorry.

Burton: That’s OK. I have to face it sooner or later. I didn’t really plan it. I probably should have. I wish you could control film schedules a bit better. But it’s OK. It’s all things that I love, so that’s good.

MTV: How are you dividing your time between the various projects?

Burton: With “Frankenweenie,” it’s a little bit easier to do it, because you only have a couple shots coming through each day. It’s like a slow-motion process. When you’re dealing with something like “Dark Shadows,” that’s immediate and intense. And then with “Lincoln,” [director] Timur [Bekmambetov] is great. I’m there just to support it. It’s a project I really liked and just wanted to see.

MTV: I got a chance to visit the set, and I was impressed. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say I was on the set of a historical biopic.

Burton: You were! It is! That’s what’s great about it. It just seemed like a natural thing for Timur. It being an American history story, it seemed right for it to be directed by a Russian. [Laughs.]

MTV: What stage are you in for “Dark Shadows” right now?

Burton: Panicking. That stage. We’re editing and doing effects. It’s not an effects-heavy picture, but it’s still got stuff in there. There’s a strange tone to the movie. That’s always what’s fun about movies. You never know exactly what they are. It makes it both exciting and scary and why you like doing it. I have to keep remembering that.

MTV : With over 1,200 episodes of the original series to draw upon, what was important to you to retain?

Burton: It’s got such a strange vibe. And it’s not something that a lot of people necessarily know. You’re trying to do a weird soap opera. I felt really lucky, because the cast is really good. People like Michelle [Pfeiffer] grew up watching it. Some of the cast knew about it. Some didn’t, but they were all game for it — getting into the weird spirit of what “Dark Shadows” was. It has a weird sense of heightened melodrama. There was a generation of us who would run home from school to watch it. That’s probably why we were such bad students. We should have been doing homework; we were watching “Dark Shadows” instead. It was hard to put into words the tone it was. It had a weird seriousness, but it was funny in a way that wasn’t really funny. We just had to feel our way through it to find the tone. We didn’t do any real rehearsals, because the cast all came in at different times. But there was an old photo of the [original] cast which I always remembered, so a couple days before shooting, we got the whole cast together to take a similar shot so everyone could see each other and get that vibe from doing a group photo. That helped set the tone more than anything.

MTV: Some of it takes place in the 1700s, but most of it takes place in 1972, is that right?

Burton: Yeah it goes back, but it’s mainly in 1972, which to the era of “Dark Shadows” is the modern era. To me, it was a scary time.

MTV: Does the film leave that house much?

Burton: A little bit, but the thing about “Dark Shadows” was it was a very hermetically sealed world. It’s mainly the internal family melodrama. You get a little bit of the sense of the world, but it’s like “Grey Gardens,” where these people are in their own sort of world.

MTV: Do you utilize time travel in the movie?

Burton: Not too much. A tiny bit. For me, that’s when the show kind of made me want to do homework. I was like, wait a minute! That came near the end of the trail of the series.

MTV: You decided not to do 3-D this time around?

Burton: No. It’s the ’70s, man. Only “Frankenstein’s Bloody Terror” was in 3-D. That’s the only one I remember from that time.

MTV: Is it true that you’re considering doing another “Beetlejuice” film?

Burton: Yes. I love that character, and Michael [Keaton] is so great in it. I always think about how great and fun that character was, so I just said to [“Vampire Hunter” writer] Seth [Grahame-Smith], “If you have some idea about it, go for it, and then I’ll look at it freshly.” In the past, I tried some things, but that was way back when. He seemed really excited about it.

MTV: Has he run any of his ideas by you yet?

Burton: No. I told him to try some stuff, but he hasn’t come back to me yet. Michael was so great in it. I’m sure he’d strangely tap right back into it.

MTV: It must be extremely exciting for you to return to “Frankenweenie,” considering the original short led to your demise at Disney.

Burton: Maybe it’ll cause my second or third demise. [Laughs.] I’m very excited about it. The opportunity to do it in black-and-white and 3-D really fits the story. For me, it’s the heart of the story that we’ve gotten to go back to and expand. It’s more of a “House of Frankenstein” kind of situation now, but also it stays with the same thing. It taps into the politics of other children that you remember from school. It’s still intimate, though. It’s still the basic story with a few more elements.

MTV: It actually shocks me there hasn’t been a Broadway musical version of “Nightmare Before Christmas.”

Burton: A couple of schools have done it. I think it could lend itself to something like [Broadway]. I’m just happy it’s taken on a life of its own. We’ve resisted any kind of sequelization thing. Some things are just best left on their own.

MTV: Did anyone try to dissuade you from doing “Frankenweenie” in black-and-white?

Burton: I’m very grateful, because I think they understood that that was part of the emotion of it. I was very happy about that, because it’s a big part of it. It’s a big deal for a studio to go along with something like that. And the 3-D really suits it. With a lot of 3-D, you lose some of the detail, but with stop-motion, you actually feel more of the detail. So all the work that people put into the puppets and the spaces on the set — you actually feel it.

MTV: Is IMAX interesting to you?

Burton: Yeah, definitely! We’re doing a test for “Frankenweenie.” “Frankenweenie” is such a tactile funky project. It would be interesting to see it in that, so we’re playing around with it.

MTV: Is “The Addams Family” the next thing on the stop-motion docket?

Burton: Oh, I don’t know. I got so many things to keep up with now …

MTV: You do seem to have a long list of things with your name attached.

Burton: That’s why I don’t go on the Internet, Josh. It freaks me out. I’ve got my immediate things to worry about. It’s like when they thought the Earth was flat and you hit the horizon and fell into a black hole.

MTV: So this laundry list of things that are stressing you out …

Burton: Just check them all off till later. Next year, we’ll take a look at them like Santa’s list. I’ll tell you yes or cross them off the list.

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"EXCLUSIVE: Disney has tapped Robert Stromberg to make his feature directorial debut on Maleficent, the Linda Woolverton-scripted revisionist take on the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale that is being constructed as a star vehicle for Angelina Jolie to play the villainess. While Stromberg is new to the director’s chair, he is no stranger to dealing with big-ticket spectacle films. He has been production designer on Avatar and Alice In Wonderland, and Disney’s upcoming Oz The Great And Powerful. He also worked on visual effects for such films as 2012, Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World’s End and Master And Commander. Joe Roth is producing."

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Tim Burton’s interest in tackling a live-action version of Pinocchio is heating up, The Hollywood Reporter has learned. And Burton’s choice to topline the movie is Robert Downey Jr. as Geppetto, the woodcarver who creates the puppet who dreams of becoming a real boy.

The Pinocchio story was first published in an Italian children’s book written by Carlo Collodi and has been adapted several times, including the 1940 animated Disney classic. 

In the version being developed at Warner Bros., Geppetto embarks on a quest to reunite with his missing marionette. The well-regarded script is by Pushing Daisies creator Bryan Fuller. Dan Jinks (American Beauty) is producing.

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