He has had cameo roles in several films and television shows, and even wrote a previous screenplay, called "Ground Beneath my Feet," though the film was never made.
Latter Days was written and directed by C. Jay Cox after the success of his previous screenplay, Sweet Home Alabama, gave him the financial resources and critical credit to write a more personal love story.
A second film has been talked about since at least 2001, but neither Williams nor Columbus warmed to previous screenplays.
The fact that this apparent overnight sensation had completed 30 previous screenplays, all of them rejected, was hushed up once Rocky was sold and the United Artists publicity department got to work.
A visitor to the HBO Web site, for example, could run a streaming video of "The Sopranos," conduct an interactive search of characters, look up old screenplays, watch previous episodes (complete with ads), purchase Sopranos-related products, even participate in promotional events with sponsors.
Mr. Robinov said David Yates, who directed "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" (2007), and is in production on "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," both starring Daniel Radcliffe, above, will direct "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," adapted by Steve Kloves, who has written previous Potter screenplays.
A previous version of the screenplay by Green himself was spiked in 2010 but the project now looks to be moving ahead following the huge success of this year's big-screen take on The Fault in Our Stars.
But once Mr. Rudin joined the project as a producer and Daniel Pyne -- whose previous projects include the screenplay for the 2002 Tom Clancy thriller "The Sum of All Fears" -- was hired to rewrite the script yet again, they shifted the story line.
Payne is writing the script with regular collaborator Jim Taylor (who had a hand in the screenplays for previous Payne projects Sideways, About Schmidt and Election, as well as Jurassic Park III); the pair are also producing, with another Payne regular, Jim Burke.
"Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium" was written and directed by Zach Helm, whose previous major credit was the screenplay for the Will Ferrell comedy "Stranger Than Fiction," which envisions a sophisticated adult version of the same kind of magic.
The film is no radical departure for the brothers, adept at tough crime thrillers in a harsh climate, as in their debut Blood Simple (also set in Texas) and their previous Oscar-winner, for its screenplay, Fargo, from the other end of the country.
