From Dirty Book to Dirty Movie: Fifty Shades Gets a Female Screenwriter

The soon-to-be major motion picture event Fifty Shades of Grey just got a screenwriter and her name, according to an announcement from Universal Pictures and its subsidiary Focus Features, is Kelly Marcel.

Marcel, as you may or may not know depending on how much slack you are willing to give bloated, uninteresting TV shows, served as co-creator and executive producer of Fox’s money-on-fire series Terra Nova. However, she also wrote the spec script for what sounds like a super-interesting movie, Saving Mr. Banks, which chronicles Walt Disney’s two-decade, dogged pursuit of the rights to author P.L. Travers’ novel Mary Poppins and will star Tom Hanks as Walt Disney’s severed, cryogenically preserved head.

Perhaps of more interest to Fifty Shades fans is that Marcel has had a working relationship with the pouty-lipped Tom Hardy (the pair recently formed a theater company together) ever since doing an emergency rewrite for Hardy’s film Bronson. Are your eyebrows raising? Could this be the latest Fifty Shades casting rumor run amuck? The Los Angeles Times, at least, does not speculate.