Steve Carell to star with James Gandolfini in HBO movie about paleontologists, once more snubbing our Dan In Real Life sequel

By Sean O'Neal  |  April 5, 2013 | 10:55pm
Aux Features TV

Having already delved into the world of stage magic together with The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, Steve Carell and James Gandolfini are set to reunite in a movie about dinosaur fossils, the greatest illusion ever perpetrated by the devil. Carell and Gandolfini will play rival paleontologists in the HBO film Bone Wars, finally giving the network a use for its rejected title for Game Of Thrones, and bringing to life one of the science world’s most notorious feuds—the one between Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh during the science boon immediately following the Civil War. That race between Cope (Carell) and Marsh (Gandolfini) found the men shoving aside the boring bones of stupid soldiers and Native Americans to get to the good stuff, uncovering some 160 dinosaur species that would later go on to entertain us so greatly as the stars of Jurassic Park. The comedy is currently looking for a writer and director who can find something amusing about two men with old-timey facial hair trying to outdo each other by getting bigger bones.

Unfortunately, as with every Steve Carell project, this brings him only further and further away from signing on to Dan In Real Life 2: Back 2 The Life, even though it only gets more compelling and needlessly expensive with every outing.

INT. MARIE’S SLEEPING CHAMBER

Dan and Ruthie Foster softly creep toward Marie, who’s slumbering atop a bed whose shape is oddly reminiscent of a giant stack of pancakes, only slathered in a “butter” of glowing amniotic fluid that keeps her reptilian skin moist.  All around her are the books Dan helped her pick out what seems like a lifetime ago—The Life Of Gandhi, the works of Pablo Neruda, Anna Karenina—all with bloody human femurs shoved in them as grisly bookmarks.

DAN (whispering)
Looks like it’s time to collect my commission.
RUTHIE FOSTER
What?

DAN

I helped her pick all those books out. That’s how we met.  She mistook me for a salesman and I just walked around and collected stuff and—you know what? It’s not believable or all that interesting, even without the leg bones in them.

Dan finally stops talking about this and moves on with his life. Using his one good arm that has not been dissolved by alien stomach acid, Dan levels his shotgun at Marie’s sleeping face.

DAN (bitterly)
Here is your tea… Hot.

Marie’s eye-slits slide open, her yellow pupils narrowing. She sits up slowly, a wry smile stretching her lips as though she’s been expecting this, yet another “spontaneous” meeting with Dan at an obviously contrived time.

MARIE

Well, well… I suppose I once told you I was looking for something that could sneak up on you and surprise you. I just never thought it would be you, sneaking through my phalanx of guards to surprise me here, atop my sleep-pancakes… Dan, Dan, Dan. You’re telling me you’re one of those widowers with three daughters whose faces I devoured, who preys on unsuspecting lizard queens in their gestation chambers?


DAN
It seems that would be me… Wait… Did you say gestation chamber?

Suddenly, Marie lets out a terrifying shriek, as a stream of glowing eggs and sticky afterbirth begins spewing forth from her lizard vagina. Dan and Ruthie are knocked violently backward as Sondre Lerche’s “To Be Surprised” begins playing on the soundtrack.

 
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