Jack Black is teaming with director Michael Winterbottom for the comedy Bailout, reports Variety. The Ealing Metro International project is based on Jess Walter’s novel “The Financial Lives of the Poets,” which is described as follows:
What happens when small-time reporter Matthew Prior quits his job to gamble everything on a quixotic notion: a Web site devoted to financial journalism in the form of blank verse? Before long, he wakes up to find himself jobless, hobbled with debt, spying on his wife’s online flirtation, and six days away from losing his home. . . . Until, one night on a desperate two a.m. run to 7-Eleven, he falls in with some local stoners, and they end up hatching the biggestand most misbegottenplan yet.
Walter adapted his own story for the big screen. The $20 million film is scheduled to go into production in the U.S. this August.
