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Exclusive: Police Academy veteran Steve Guttenberg and Vacation‘s Christie Brinkley have boarded Michael W. Gray’s coming-of-age family comedy American Summer.

Shooting has begun in Northern New Jersey and will extend into mid-October. Gray is directing from a script he wrote with Jennifer B. White.

Pic follows Mikey (Guttenberg), now in his 60s, who vividly journeys back to his childhood during one of the best summers of his life when he met the girl of his dreams, Kelly, scored a spot on the travel

baseball team, worked his first job and began his growth out of boyhood — all in the sudden wake of his dad missing overseas on a military mission.

Logan Gray stars as Young Mikey and Mia Talerico (Disney’s Good Luck Charlie) stars as Young Kelly. Also starring are Dan Lauria, Cullen Moss, Erinn Ruth, Michael Cuomo (Nanny), Ellen Toland (Inside the Rain), Stephen Krahel, former baseball stars Lee Mazzilli and Luis Sojo, plus newcomers Callie Reese (What Breaks the Ice), Cash Chisum, Jaba Keh, Carter J Thomas, Max Malas, Maximus Virgili, Chance Stout, and Noodle (the family puppy who saves the day).

“American Summer is a tale for a multi-generational audience to enjoy together. I look forward to sharing the film with the world as I want to bring people together to laugh and feel in their own way,” said Gray.

“I’m excited to be working on such a feel-good movie,” Guttenberg said. “The story requires the creative team to put together a narrative that is not only universal, but unique in its own style. American Summer has the potential to bring generations together, and that’s what audiences ask for in a great family film.”

Gray (A Birder’s Guide to Everything Jamie Marks Is Dead) and Michael Cuomo are producing. Guttenberg, Brinkley, Brian Dubin and Stephen Krahel are EPs. Josh Folan and Danny Ward are co-producers.

American Summer is a co-production of Relentless Filmz (Gray) and Brooklyn Owl Pictures (Cuomo). Gray is repped by Ramo Law. Guttenberg is repped by Vault Entertainment and CAA. Brinkley is repped by Artist Brand Alliance and Untitled Entertainment.

Exclusive: Cinedigm has acquired North American rights to the coming-of-age thriller What Breaks the Ice, with plans to release the film in select theaters, on demand & digital this fall.

The first feature from writer/director Rebecca Eskreis is set during the tumultuous summer of 1998. As the sociopolitical landscape is turned on its head, two girls from different worlds form an unlikely friendship in the sweltering summer heat. Their fun and carefree days quickly turn cold as they find themselves at the center of a murder that rocks a nostalgic East Coast summer getaway.

Madelyn Cline and Sofia Hublitz (Ozark) star, alongside Lukas Gage, Catherine Curtin (Homeland), Aimee Mullins (Stranger Things), Shakira Barrera (Glow) and Joel Allen (The Purge).

Eskreis produced the project with Michael Cuomo, Dustin Duke Dlouhy, Michael W. Gray, Courtney Jones and Katie Leary. She developed it under...

Exclusive: Investor and Tony Award-winning producer Kevin J. Kinsella (Jersey Boys) and actress Paten Hughes (Heirloom) have launched film and TV banner Cowboy + Cougar Entertainment.

Kinsella and Hughes will look to write and produce around 4-6 projects per year in the prestige and commercial spaces and will have the capacity to develop, package and finance. Already on the slate are books Confessions Of An Alien Hunter by astronomer Seth Shostak, which Cowboy + Cougar will adapt as a sci-fi TV series called Fermi’s Paradox, and Julia Oliver’s Goodbye To The Buttermilk Sky, which the company will adapt as a feature film.

The latter is a coming-of-age romantic drama in the vein of Bridges Over Madison County about a young woman, Callie, in Depression-era 1938 rural Alabama whose torrid affair with a handsome stranger jostles her life trajectory. Lily Houghton (Day By Day) is writing the adapted feature film script.

Ashley Judd and Neil Patrick Harris will star in “Anita,” a long-gestating biopic of Anita Bryant, the TV pitchwoman and singer who campaigned against local anti-discrimination ordinances in Florida, inadvertently igniting the gay rights movement.

Chad Hodge, creator of TNT series “Good Behavior,” will write and direct, and Howard Rosenman (“Call Me by Your Name”) and Darren Star (“Sex and the City”) produce. Mimi Steinbauer’s Radiant Films Intl. has boarded sales and is at Cannes with the project.

Bryant was a singer and spokesperson for orange juice and the Florida Citrus Commission. She fronted a campaign in the late 1970s called Save Our Children that advocated against rules prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, tanking her career in the process. While researching the history, Hodge spent significant time with Bryant in her Oklahoma home, and that element is recounted in the movie. Harris plays Hodge as he meets Bryant,...

Coming-of-age thriller stars Sofia Hublitz from Ozark, Madelyn Cline of Stranger Things, Boy Erased.

Saboteur Media will handle worldwide sales rights to Afm-bound What Breaks The Ice, a thriller mentored by Richard Linklater that features rising stars from hit shows like Ozark, Glow, and Stranger Things.

The coming-of-age thriller centres on two 15-year-old girls whose summer takes an unexpected turn when they become accidental accomplices in a fatal crime.

Sofia Hublitz (Ozark), Madelyn Cline, Joel Allen (Never Goin’ Back), Shakira Barrera (Glow), Erik Jensen (Messengers), Catherine Curtin and Aimee Mullins (Stranger Things) star.

Rebecca Eskreis makes her feature directorial debut,...

Having flirted with the Sundance festivities with his 2009 selected short film Asshole, and in the sister Next Weekend event back in 2013 with his sophomore film, Chadd Harbold, who so far has several shorts and two features under his belt in Revenge for Jolly! (2012) and How to Be a Man (2013) has had his third film lined-up for a couple of years now. Shiloh Fernandez toplines Long Nights Short Mornings, a drama that some might compare to Steve McQueen’s Shame as it focalizes on one man’s desires in our social app hook up age. Production began in Brooklyn this past June, so this has had a little time to congeal.

Gist: An examination of the romantic life of a young man in New York City and his sometimes fleeting, sometimes profound experiences with the women he encounters.

Production Co./Producers: Dan Berk (Body), Michael W. Gray (Jamie Marks Is Dead), Robert Olsen,...

“Step Up All In” star Ryan Guzman has been cast as the lead in “Hold Your Ground,” an upcoming action film set in the worlds of SoCal surf culture, Brazilian jiu jitsu and mixed martial arts. Ben Nott (“Drift”) is directing the film from a script written by producer Michael W. Gray and Matthew Straquadine. Tim Duffy is also producing the movie, which is scheduled to shoot in southern California this summer. See photos: 49 Summer Movies on Our Radar: From ‘Amazing Spider-Man’ to Tina Fey's Next Comedy Guzman, most recently seen in ABC Family's “Pretty Little Liars,” stars...