Sleeper Cell creators Cyrus Voris and Ethan Reiff have closed a deal to write Starz’s live-action adaptation of the 2001 Japanese anime series Noir. This marks Starz’s third stab at getting a script for the project, initially greenlighted to series last June with Sam Raimi, Rob Tapert, Joshua Donen and Bill Hamm executive producing. Original writer Steven Lightfoot was replaced by Sean Jablonski last October. The project was then put on hold but I hear it is a priority for the pay cable network, which has already incurred some production costs, including building sets. Noir follows two female assassins who team up to fight against a secret society. After discovering they’re mysteriously linked, the two, under the Noir moniker, have to work together until they get answers about why and how they are connected — or until one of them kills the other. Voris and Reiff are with UTA.
In an interview, Starz CEO Chris Albrecht discussed Noir briefly.
When will viewers get to see some of your new shows, such as Da Vinci’s Demons, Black Sails, Marco Polo and Noir?
ALBRECHT: Da Vinci’s Demons will be on most likely the second quarter 2013, but nothing is announced yet or set in stone. Black Sails will hopefully be on in very early 2014, potentially in the Spartacus slot, but nothing is set. The scripts for Marco Polo are absolutely, positively fantastic. The challenge of making that show in China has proved to be as formidable as we feared. It’s not like making a movie in China where, once you load up and you leave, you’re gone. We have to be able to come back and capture something that’s going to feel like a major feature film, on a television budget, and do it, hopefully season after season, so we are taking more time than the producers thought. I don’t have any news on when that will air because we are still very much in the planning stage, although we spent plenty of money and invested a lot of time in making all of those plans. We ran into some creative challenges on the script side of Noir, but it is absolutely in our zone. Rob Tapert, Josh Donen and Sam Raimi are terrific executive producers and partners for Starz. We want to do as many things as we can with them. We have a couple of things with them, but Noir is certainly the thing that we all see as a must-figure-out. So, we are still getting the scripts together, but I’m very confident that Noir will be on. I just can’t tell you when.
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No. Fuck you Sam Raimi. Fuck you Starz. Fuck you Chris. Fuck yo couch. Do not let this project go forward. This sexist bullshit about two women, one of which suddenly gets a husband from out of fucking nowhere exclusively for this live-action show. This homophobic bullshit, removing the lesbian overtones...I cannot rn.
