· Happy Monday, here's your juicy development/casting rumor to carry you over the rest of the week: Mike Nichols reportedly wants to adapt the recent book Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and the Marriage of the Century as a biopic of the star-crossed Hollywood power couple. Catherine Zeta-Jones and Angelina Jolie are the actresses whose names have arisen first in the slow boil of casting gossip; Clive Owen and Russell Crowe are two of the possibilities to play Burton. For all anyone knows this is just a bored trade writer's daydream, but if so, I dunno how Brad Pitt wouldn't come up for Burton. Play the meta card with Jolie, and that could be a barnburner. Or... not. Bored trade writer here. [Telegraph]
· Assuming Mission Impossible 4 is actually greenlit, Simon Pegg will likely return as comic-relief lab dork Benji Dunn. The actor has taken meetings with director Brad Bird and apparently done the whole locked-in-a-room-with-the-super-top-secret-earth-shattering-action-script thing at Paramount. [THR]
· Panic, everyone -- it's apparently time for another Hollywood work stoppage. This time it's the transportation workers of Teamsters Local 399, who argue that the 2 percent raise offered by the studios should be more like 3 percent. They have two weeks to reach a deal before armageddon occurs and your grip truck doesn't show up. Developing... [THR]
· Nia Vardalos has written and will co-star in Happy Mother's Day, about a quartet of suburban moms who take a road trip. Like Wild Hogs meets Sex and the City 2, right? Kind of? Family-friendly production monolith Walden Media is handling this one, reportedly fast-tracking it for production by the end of the year. Which implies a May 2011 release. [Variety]