Great Moments In Development: Chasing The Balloon Boy

Yesterday, America held its collective breath and watched, via any number of basic cable and internet video feeds, as a balloon reportedly carrying six-year-old Falcon Heene hurtled through the air 7,000 feet over Colorado. As we all know by now, the unmanned balloon eventually landed in a field, and it turned out that young Falcon had been safely hiding in a box in his attic the entire time (yay!), even as millions of people spent four hours praying for his safety. Today, Hollywood is undoubtedly in hot pursuit of the rights to the Heene family's incredible -- and possibly entirely orchestrated for publicity (boo!) -- story. Movieline now takes you inside a high-level meeting at Balloon Boy's natural landing spot to see one studio's strategy for winning the Balloon Boy sweepstakes:

Disney Development Office. This morning.

"So. Balloon Boy."

"Motherf*cking Ballon Boy. I'm harder for this than a tree-f*cker at a knothole convention."

"That's what I love to hear. That crazy family's already on the plane here. Now what's the movie? We need a take to sell them, so they feel comfortable with us giving them a big f*cking bag of money."

"It's Flight of the Navigator meets Up meets Where The Wild Things Are meets The Diary of Anne Frank meets that girl in the well meets Hoax. Never heard of half of those, but they were all over the Twitter trends--"

"Slow down, slow down. These are simple people. They've been on Wife Swap, for Christ's sake. They didn't even have the sense to do Supernanny."

"Right."

"So catch me up real quick. Did the kid, um, make it?"

"Make the balloon?"

"No no no. You know, live?"

"He did."

"He did?"

"He did."

(Uncomfortable silence.)

"Didn't see that coming. That changes things."

"He lied about being in the balloon. Did you not get the coverage I had Mandi do of the CNN video feed?"

"I glanced at it, thought I knew where it was going. Why the hell do I have you if I have to read the whole thing myself?"

"Sorry."

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