Universal Pictures is acquiring Sunny and 68, a spec script drama that Vince Vaughn will star in and Gavin O’Connor (Pride and Glory, upcoming Warrior) will direct, reports Variety.
O’Connor, who wrote the script with Anthony Tambakis, will produce with Vaughn’s Wild West Picture Show Productions. O’Connor and Tambakis penned the film, a drama with comedic overtones, with Vaughn in mind for the lead character.
Vaughn will play a superstar on the poker circuit whose alcoholism and recklessness cause him to flame out on national television. Wiped out and owing $500,000 to bookies, he heads home to upstate New York for the first time in 20 years, looking to take back cash he’d been sending his mother. Instead, he finds his mother dying of cancer and raising a 5-year-old girl who is actually his daughter. Mom has been positioning his former high school girlfriend to become the girl’s eventual caretaker.
“It’s a story of how three generations of women teach this character to become a man,” said O’Connor. The title comes from the character’s mother, who, despite the cold weather, insists that “it’s sunny and 68.”
Sunny and 68 will shoot in upstate New York in February 2010.
