If your brain has rotted as much as ours have, you will know, off by heart, the full story of Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan’s flip-flopping tumultuous friendship in the mid-noughties, with Britney Spears — arguably the most famous of the trio — at its centre. The pair, once inseparable, spent weeks in 2006 purportedly going back and forth between being besties and hating each other. (“Paris is a c*nt” lives in our head rent free.) Now, that iconic, very public feud — which apparently lives on to this day — has been transformed into a movie script. All it needs is a willing financier to put money behind this legendary story and bring it to the screen.
Debut screenwriter Ariel Sayegh is behind Frenemy, a script that’s managed to earn seven mentions on 2020’s Black List – an annual rundown of the most-liked, unproduced scripts in Hollywood which has helped launch projects like Diablo Cody’s Juno.
The blurb attached to the film’s entry calls it “a chronicle of the infamous Lindsay Lohan/Paris Hilton feud of 2004-2006 over who would be Britney Spears’ best friend”, which is a one-line pitch that has us scrambling in our pockets for cash to make this happen. If the stars don’t play themselves, who would you like to assume the roles of Lindsay, Paris and Britney?
But that famous noughties trio are not the only Hollywood legends to have their life transformed into what’s 100% bound to be an unequivocal on-screen masterpiece. The late, great Anna Nicole Smith also gets the biopic treatment on this year’s Black List.
Director and screenwriter Abigail Briley Bean has written Gusher, a script that follows the model and actress’ life and controversial positioning as a young woman married to a man pushing 90. “Based on the story of Anna Nicole Smith,” the summary reads, “a shrewd young mother rises out of a small Texas town to become a famous Playboy centerfold, but when she falls in love with an eighty-nine-year-old billionaire, his son and the entire world believe she’s nothing but a gold digger.” It got 12 mentions on the Black List while Frenemy racked up seven. Either way, both are in strong positions to get commissioned, so long as the respective parties agree to it.
So what else has made the list? The most popular, with 29 mentions, is a script by Sophie Dawson called Headhunter, about a high-functioning cannibal whose victims are selected based on how many people follow them on Instagram. Not far behind it is Chang Can Dunk, about an Asian-American basketball-obsessed teen navigating his final high school years that Disney+ have already picked up the rights to produce.
There are also some queer titles making appearances here too. A meta-fiction Richard Simmons biopic about a boy who’s inspired to lose weight and help others do the same after he’s visited by an apparition of Barbra Streisand, called St. Simmonds. There’s the story of two trans women holding a sit-in in a Nordstrom bathroom after a manager refuses to let them use it, called Occupied. And then there’s What If?, a high school movie being financed by MGM and directed by Billie Porter about a 17-year-old boy asking out his transgender classmate.
We’ll have to wait a little longer to see if anyone bites on the Lindsay and Paris feud script, but you can view the Black List rundown in full here, and get a sneak peek at the movies that might be coming your way in the years to come