Blind item.

We here at The Whine Colored Sea are super well-connected with all the high-powered industry types. Or something. I've We've been sworn to secrecy about a potential project for one of our favorite filmmakers, so, uh, we'll have some fun keeping this one vague. Try to spot this one:

Which punch-drunk auteur got Focus Features to snap up the rights to David Grann's sprawling New Yorker piece "The Lost City of Z"*?

And in a completely unrelated note, I stumbled across an online version of an Esquire piece I never thought I'd see again. In December of 1999, the magazine asked various critics (and Martin Scorsese) "Which young filmmaker is The Next Scorsese?" The answers run from the obvious (Todd McCarthy picks, ahem, Paul Thomas Anderson) to the sad (Andrew Sarris opts for Kevin Smith). For the record, Martin Scorsese says The Next Martin Scorsese is Wes Anderson.

* I can't find an online link to the piece, but it appeared in the Sept. 19, 2005 edition of The New Yorker. Trust me when I say it's an unbelievable feat of writing/journalism. Grann synopsizes it thusly: "For centuries, adventurers have searched for evidence of a lost civilization in the Mato Grasso region of Brazil. Many of them have been swallowed up by the 'green hell' of the Amazonian rain forest--which has been described as 'the last great blank space in the world.'"