EXCLUSIVE: Maude Apatow and Mike Faist are set to star in The Maid of Orleans, Sarah Elizabeth Mintz’s follow-up to Good Girl Jane. Mintz penned the script that she will also direct. Astute Films is financing the pic.

The film follows a young woman who navigates her new job by assisting a famously talented and complicated director on a French production of Joan of Arc. Shooting begins this week.

Mintz will produce along with Shuli Harel and Jeff David.

Up next, Apatow will make her feature directorial debut with Poetic License, starring Cooper Hoffman, Andrew Barth Feldman, and Leslie Mann. The film, also produced by Apatow under her Jewelbox Pictures banner, first premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival to rave reviews, followed by a well-received screening at South by Southwest. It was recently acquired by Sony Pictures Classics and will release next spring. Apatow is perhaps best known for her performance as Lexi Howard on HBO’s acclaimed Emmy and BAFTA-nominated series Euphoria, which recently concluded its three-season run. Apatow is represented by WME, Mosaic, Ziffren Brittenham.

Faist is coming off rave reviews in the limited series East of Eden, which bowed last week on Netflix. The series also stars Florence Pugh and Christopher Abbott. He is repped by WME and Brillstein Entertainment Partners.

EXCLUSIVE: The new Warner Bros’ Christian Parkes-led contemporary film label, Clockwork, which we first told you about last December, will be making the segue to the new Paramount Warner Bros merger aka Skydance.

Clockwork was on an internal list of Warner Bros labels shown in-house at Paramount. In addition, we’ve heard from reliable sources that all Warner Bros’ label heads (i.e. James Gunn and Peter Safran at DC, Richard Brener at New Line, etc) will stay in charge of their domains at the new conglomerate. As previously reported, all film label heads roll up and report to Paramount Pictures Co-Chairs, Dana Goldberg and Josh Greenstein.

Clockwork’s first theatrical release is on Oct. 16, the unearthed spicy Catholic taboo 1971 Ken Russell directed The Devils which will be screened in a 4K restoration. The whole idea why former Warner Bros Motion Picture Bosses Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy launched the label with former NEON Chief Marketing Officer Parkes was to give the studio some A24-like mojo a shot in the arm. Clockwork is an entry point for edgy filmmakers with moderate sized budgeted pics. The label’s original output was for two-to-three films annually.

Clockwork, we understand, will co-exist with Paramount’s current global acquisition division and Republic Pictures, led by Wicker producer Lia Buman. That Melrose lot department made a big purchase out of Cannes with Canal’s Midnight Library for $36M (which includes domestic and a bulk of foreign). In addition, Republic Pictures is the label responsible for the 2024 Oscar nominated Munich Olympics thriller, September 5.

Projects coming into Paramount from Clockwork include the next movie from Anora Oscar winner Sean Bailey, Ti Amo! (financed by FilmNation). There’s also Clockwork’s mid-teen millions North American pick-up out of the Cannes market, Park Chan-Wook’s western The Brigands of Rattlecreek starring Matthew McConaughey, Austin Butler, Pedro Pascal and Chinese star Tang Wei (Decision to Leave). Also in the Clockwork portfolio is the Sean Penn directed feature about the January 6th Capitol riots.

Paramount didn’t return request for comment.

Jeffrey Archer, the prolific British author and former politician, has died at the age of 86.

Archer’s publisher HarperCollins confirmed his death in a statement, revealing that the Kane & Abel writer died “suddenly and peacefully at home” on Monday. A cause of death was not disclosed.

Archer, a former Conservative member of parliament, sold more than 300 million books during a writing career that spanned five decades.

HarperCollins claims that Lord Archer is the only author ever to have been a #1 bestseller in fiction, short stories, and non-fiction

Archer’s work was adapted for the screen on many occasions, including the 1985 CBS miniseries based on Kane & Abel, which starred Peter Strauss as Abel Rosnovski and Sam Neill as William Lowell Kane.

ITV adapted First Among Equals in 1986, starring Jeremy Child, James Faulkner, David Robb, Tom Wilkinson, while Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less was adapted by the BBC in 1990.

His political career, which included a spell as the Conservative Party’s deputy chairman, was interrupted by a four-year spell in prison in 2001 after he was found guilty of lying and cheating in a 1987 libel case against The Daily Star newspaper.

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