Drug Story: Jake Gyllenhaal and Anne Hathaway are in talks for Love and Other Drugs, the Ed Zwick–directed adaptation of former drug rep Jamie Reidy’s memoir Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman, which reveals the practices of the pharmaceutical industry in the late nineties. The movie will feature Gyllenhaal as the salesman and Hathaway as his love interest, a woman with Parkinson’s he meets on a sales call. The role of the drugs will be played by drugs. [HR]
Eat, Pray, Love, Felipe: Javier Bardem is in talks for Eat, Pray, Love, the adaptation of the best-selling Elizabeth Gilbert memoir starring Julia Roberts as the author on a quest for self-discovery. Bardem plays Felipe, the dude Gilbert conveniently falls in love with during the last part of the trip. Bardem as a sexy, swarthy foreign love interest? You know, that could work. [Variety]
NPH: Tony host Neil Patrick Harris will star in the indie comedy The Best and the Brightest, as one-half of an Upper East Side couple embroiled in the high-stakes game of private-kindergarten admissions. Bonnie Somerville will play the status-obsessed wife, and the rest of the cast includes Amy Sedaris, John Hodgman, and Christopher McDonald. Harris is also starring in Beastly, a modern retelling of Beauty and the Beast, as a blind tutor who helps a teen who’s been transformed into a monster. [HR]
Commando Colbert: Starting today and running through Thursday, Stephen Colbert will be broadcasting four shows from Baghdad for “Operation Iraqi Stephen: Going Commando.” Colbert arrived at Camp Victory on Friday, along with a stripped-down production crew of 30 people; he’ll be taping in front of 450 troops, where he’s scheduled to interview the likes of General Raymond Odierno and Barham Saleh, the deputy prime minister of Iraq. The stated motivation of the trip is to draw attention back to the war, and the troops, in Iraq, but seeing as Colbert underwent a very abbreviated basic training, a side effect will obviously be the sudden and complete end of all insurgency activity. [Variety]
Games We Play: Based on a pitch from Heroes’ Masi Oka, The Defenders — about a group of teenagers involved in a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (or an MMORPG, for those in the know) who are forced to come together as inadvertent heroes in real life — has been picked up by Dreamworks. That loud popping noise you just heard was the Internet’s brain exploding. [HR]
Summer Songs: Matisyahu’s third studio album, The Light, will be released August 25. The album was apparently finished a year ago, but Epic Records chief Amanda Ghost wasn’t hearing a hit, so Matisyahu went back to the studio and recorded “For You” and the album’s now-a-single “One Day.” Anyway, JCC meet-and-greet barbecues across the nation this season: You now have your summer soundtrack. [Billboard]
