The big name gets distracted

J. Michael Straczynski's "Changeling" is one of those blessed and doomed screenplays that periodically floats around Hollywood: a truly gripping read that actors and directors respond to with passion but that nonetheless has a hard time getting made. For a screenwriter, this can be an excruciating reality that only gets more painful when an A-list director is among those flirting with it.

So it has gone with Oscar-winning director Ron Howard ("A Beautiful Mind"), who has long been interested in making "Changeling" but who recently committed to direct the feature version of Peter Morgan's political play "Frost/Nixon," which has drawn raves since its London premiere and which will be moving to Broadway in the spring. Morgan, who may be a major Oscar contender this year for "The Queen" and "The Last King of Scotland," will adapt his own play.

(Straczynski's probably not the only one disappointed. After watching Howard go off and make three quarters of a billion dollars with Oscar winner Akiva Goldsman's adaptation of Dan Brown's mega-seller "The Da Vinci Code," Universal Pictures, to whom Howard owes his next film, had been hoping to steer the director toward similarly commercial fare.)

At one point Howard was smitten enough with "Changeling" to meet with Straczynski, a longtime TV writer ("Babylon 5," "Murder, She Wrote") eager to have his first produced feature. Says Straczynski: "There are all kinds of circumstances that can affect whether or not something goes forward.... I've gotten very Zen about the whole thing."

Set in 1928 Los Angeles, "Changeling" is a psychological thriller that details the real-life account of a single mother whose 9-year-old son disappears. When he turns up four months later, she becomes convinced that the police have returned the wrong boy, even as everyone around her, including City Hall, tries to persuade her otherwise.

Straczynski scatters throughout the script's pages actual newspaper clippings from the various news conferences, developments and trials as they were reported at the time (the script's subtitle is "A True Story"), and the narrative is built around a lead character who slowly, intensely teeters toward a form of madness. It's the kind of rare, weighty female role that has attracted Oscar winner Reese Witherspoon and likely every other A-list actress in Hollywood. But "Changeling" is not exactly "How the Grinch Stole Christmas"; it's a brooding downer, in the mold of Howard's "The Missing," which made only $27 million in theaters.