Update on Deadwood Creator’s John From Cincinnati

As the third season of John Milch’s Deadwood comes to a close (with plenty of loose ends to tie in the two 2-hour movies planned to end the series), new details have been released on Milch’s new HBO project: John From Cincinnati. Production Weekly lists Austin Nichols as “John”, along with co-stars Bruce Greenwood, Luis Guzman, and Brian Van Holt. Nichols recently played Wyatt Earp’s brother Morgan in Deadwood.

The new series, which Milch has described as “surf noir”, will start shooting next month in Los Angeles. Plot notes from (August 25th) Production Weekly:

The dysfunctional Yost family of Imperial Beach—patriarch Mitch (Greenwood), a former surfing star who can now levitate (slightly), married to the aggressively unhappy Cissy, parents of the drug-addicted, dissolute Butchie (Van Holt), also a former surfing champ and the father himself to the talented but resentful skateboarder Shaun—find their lives disrupted by the arrival of dim but wealthy John From Cincinnati (Nichols), a boarding savant who’s come to take lessons from Butchie, and Barry Cunningham from Azusa, whose personal connection to the Yost family has him returning to Imperial Beach to avenge a wrong done to him, by them, 23 years ago.

Here’s hoping that for one, Milch can make sense of all this, the title listed in PW: “John From Cincinnati Meets the Surfing Yosts”, will revert back to the simpler title of old, and finally, that Luis Guzman (a favorite of P.T. Anderson and Steven Soderbergh) gets some serious airtime (hang-time?) when the series (hopefully) makes it to HBO in late 2007.

Related: HBO’s Lineup on Life Support

Update 8/31 - Ed O’Neill (you may know him as Al Bundy) has also been attached to the cast.

tedzee | Permalink | August 28 2006 | Comments (View)