“‘C’mon, I have to BELIEVE you want to eat plants. Now once more, with feeling.”

Despite Roger Corman’s inroads with Dinocroc, the Carnosaur trilogy, and now Dinoshark, Steven Spielberg remains Hollywood’s leading authority on ass-kicking dinosaur epics. So there’s understandably some excitement about the possibility that Spielberg will sign on as a producer for “Terra Nova,” a dinosaur series that Fox is presently considering.

Spielberg and Peter Chernin are in negotiations to board the drama project “Terra Nova,” which is described as following a family from 100 years in the future who travel back in time 150 million years to the strange and inhospitable environs of prehistoric Earth.

The 20th Century Fox TV project, which is said to have drawn special attention from Fox Entertainment chairman Peter Rice, would involve such elaborate sets and vfx that there’s been talk of greenlighting it directly to series production rather than a pilot because it would be too expensive to shut down and start up again during the downtime between pilot and episodic production. [Variety]

Tough call here. On the one hand, it sounds pretty unoriginal. On the other, DINOSAURS!!!! Sounds like it’s gonna get greenlit to me. If I know anything about Hollywood, all-caps and exclamation points trump “unoriginal” every time. It’s called the Michael Bay Principle.

The Marine Corps’s ass-kicking birthday continues at Warming Glow with this video about HBO’s “The Pacific” — an epic miniseries that, as I’ve said before (more than once), will be the greatest thing ever televised. No, YOUR expectations are too high!

Anyway, this is just Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg giving us no information that we haven’t already gotten before, but it’s set to moving music, and they talk about Marines, and there’s an old M4 Sherman tank, and God damn it’s days like this that I miss shooting my .50 cal. What an amazing weapon. The way it’s mounted on an M1A1 tank, you can put steel on steel from defilade 1800 meters away. One of the rarest pleasures in life is sending hot steel at unsuspecting enemies of America. It’s one of the few things in life I enjoy more than cats in wigs.

[The Live Feed]

Today’s weather: Warm and sunny, with a 100% chance of explosions

Following the success of Band of Brothers, Steven Spielberg and HBO have teamed up to create a 10-part, $150 million miniseries about Marines in World War II’s Pacific Theater of Operations called, simply, The Pacific.  From /film:

[The Pacific] tells the intertwined stories of three Marines, Robert Leckie (played by James Badge Dale), Eugene Sledge (Joe Mazzello) and John Basilone (Jon Seda), during America’s battle with the Japanese in the Pacific during World War II.

Since most of you ignorant heathens don’t know Tarawa from Pelelieu, Robert Leckie was a noted military historian whose memoir Helmet for my Pillow — about his time as a scout for the 1st Marine Division — is part of the basis for the series.  E.B. Sledge’s With the Old Breed, about Pelelieu and Okinawa, is one of the finest war memoirs ever written.  And who was John Basilone?  Oh, he just won a Medal of Honor on Guadalcanal for single-handedly annihilating about 3000 Japanese while manning and repairing a machine gun through the night until his hands were blistered from the heat.  No biggie.

The Pacific (early promo trailer below) is expected to air late this year or in early 2010.  Watch it or I hate you.

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