‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ Has a Screenwriter Shortlist

Yes, the folks at Paramount and Focus are still making a 'Fifty Shades of Grey' movie. No, they didn't just purchase the rights to do us all a favor and make sure a film never gets made (if only). And now we have a list of the four writers producers Michael De Luca and Dana Brunetti are considering for the job.

THR reports that producers De Luca and Brunetti have a shortlist for the 'Fifty Shades of Grey' adaptation: Karen Croner, Dan Fogelman, Veena Sud, and Karen Marcel. Not that this "novel" should be terribly difficult to adapt or anything.

We imagine the job requirements are something like:

• Basic knowledge of sex toys, including but not limited to: whips, handcuffs, Ben Wa balls, breakfast foods.
• Proficiency with Wikipedia.
• Must own Thesaurus or be able to Google one.
• Must have subscription to Cinemax and be familiar with their late night programming, but only because you saw some sex stuff on there when you were flipping channels that one time, and you were just trying to get back to 'He's Just Not That Into You' -- no, really!
• Must love gratingly redundant exclamations like, "Oh jeez!"
• Must be a 'Twilight' fan.
• Comfortable writing hundreds of pages of a whiny girl trying to make a man love her by doing stuff she doesn't even like. So really, the perfect writer will have a subscription to Cosmo.

Karen Croner wrote the screenplay for 'Admission,' the upcoming film starring Tina Fey and Paul Rudd, which is based on the Jean Hanff Korelitz novel of the same name. Croner also adapted Anna Quindlen's 'One True Thing,' which starred Meryl Streep and Renee Zellweger.

Veena Sud is best known for her showrunner work on 'Cold Case' and the recently-cancelled 'The Killing' -- the AMC show based on the Danish series 'Forbrydelsen.' Her version would undoubtedly frustrate everyone by making the story into a murder mystery where sex toys are red herrings and we discover the killer in the last twenty minutes of the third film -- and it was cancer all along!

Dan Fogelman wrote the scripts for 'Cars 2' and 'Bolt,' so we're thinking an animated, family-friendly version of 'Fifty Shades of Grey' starring the voices of Taylor Swift and Alec Baldwin would be super cute, and maybe we could make main characters Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey into mountain goats or something.

The last name on the list is Kelly Marcel, a British writer (like 'Shades' scribe E.L. James) who has written for the Fox series 'Terra Nova' and wrote the script for 'Saving Mr. Banks,' the new Tom Hanks and Emma Thomspon film heading into production next month. Why not just take Tom Hanks and Emma Thompson and put them in this film instead? Add dinosaurs and voila, movie magic.

And if you're still not up-to-date on the whole 'Fifty Shades' phenomenon, you can read our explanation here.