Steve Carell And James Gandolfini To Star In HBO’s Dinosaur Comedy ‘Jurassic Fart’

Clever girl, that HBO. The former home of The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, and some other shows probably, waited until today, when Jurassic Park 3D tricked us into paying $20 for a movie we’ve already seen at least a dozen times, to announce their dinosaur comedy. Bone Wars stars Steve Carell and James Gandolfini as two feuding paleontologists, truly the wackiest of the -ologists. Except for gastroenterologists. The headline’s for them.

The project, now in development, is based on the real-life Bone Wars (a.k.a. the Great Dinosaur Rush) between Edward Drinker Cope of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia and Othniel Charles Marsh of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale.

Set during the post-Civil War birth of American science, the film is a comedy about one of history’s most notorious feuds – the great dinosaur fossil race between paleontologists Marsh (Gandolfini) and Cope (Carell) — a decades-long competition which led to the discovery of over 160 dinosaurs and their mutual downward spiral. (Via)

Spoiler alert: Marsh won the war, mostly because his name was Othniel. Anyway, no writer has been attached to Bone Wars yet, but the WACKY comedy basically writes itself. We enter on a bunch of dinosaurs doing a bunch of dinosaur things, until a meteoroid strikes Earth and kills them all. The final prehistoric shot is of a bone flying into the air…and into the present, where it hits Tony Soprano in the nuts. He yells, “MY BONE—, catching the attention of Michael Scott, who confusingly cries out, “-ER?” Then Jeff Goldblum gives his “rape of the natural speech.”

Light the cigar, pop the bubbly, you’ve got yourself an Emmy winner.

(Via Deadline)

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