HOLLYWOOD—Jake Kasdan, son of acclaimed auteur Lawrence Kasdan and an up-and-coming director in his own right, has just been signed to direct the Sony Pictures comedy Sex Tape, which will star How I Met Your Mother's Jason Segel and a lead actress still to be selected.
Kasdan was chosen to head up the project after a long-rumored deal with frequent Segel collaborator Nicholas Stoller never solidified. Stoller and Segel had worked together on Forgetting Sarah Marshall, which featured several seconds of full-frontal from Segel, and the pair co-wrote Disney's recent release The Muppets, which had been widely slammed by conservatives as being too environmentally friendly.
Sex Tape is about a happily married couple who decide to forget the kids for an evening and have a "night off," during which, among other activities, they decide to make a videotape of themselves fucking their brains out. But come the next morning, the tape has disappeared, and the remainder of the show will likely have the couple searching for it and, one would expect, getting themselves in and out of sticky pseudosexual situations.
Kasdan is no stranger to weirdness, having appeared, at age 10, in his father's acclaimed film The Big Chill, and having himself directed the cult classic The Zero Effect, as well as several episodes of the TV show Freaks and Geeks as well as one episode of Showtime's sexy Californication, starring AVN reader David Duchovny. He currently directs episodes of Fox Television's New Girl, starring Zooey Deschanel.
While the movie's female lead has yet to be cast, a story in today's Hollywood Reporter suggests that the movie's production company, Escape Artists, may be looking at Cameron Diaz, who starred with Segel in the Kasdan-directed sexcom The Bad Teacher, though if one were looking to Segel's past for a co-star, the producers could hardly go wrong tapping Segel's Sarah Marshall co-star Mila Kunis, or perhaps his co-star in How I Met Your Mother, Cobie Smulders, who'll soon be appearing in Joss Whedon's take on Marvel Comics' The Avengers.
In any case, the movie appears to be on a fast track, with Sony having optioned the script (by Will & Grace scripter Kate Angelo) only this past summer, with an expected release before the end of 2012.
