Posted: Sun., Apr. 20, 2003, 10:00pm PT
 
Perkins leaps from veep to 'Julio' screenwriter
 
Scribe to pen project for Fox Searchlight
 
By CLAUDE BRODESSER

 
One day you're a foreign sales exec, the next you're an up-and-coming Latino comedy writer. In Hollywood, it can happen almost overnight, and for Ted Perkins, it already has.

Fox Searchlight has hired Perkins, only three months ago a VP at Senator International, to script the Latino comedy "Me and Julio" for low six figures against mid six figures. Pic is based on a concept by Searchlight exec VP Julia Dray.

Described as a Spanish "Barbershop," "Me & Julio" follows a modern day Cheech & Chong-like duo as they inherit and try to save a venerable but failing Mexican restaurant in Manhattan Beach, Calif.

Fox Searchlight was looking for a way to develop a buddy Latin comedy, and after reading Perkins' writing samples, Dray worked with the tyro scribe on a treatment that sufficiently excited Searchlight prexy Peter Rice to approve him as the writer.

Perkins’other executive gig prior to Senator was running foreign sales outfit Latin Universe, and that's the universe in which he remains: He was also just was hired by "Undercover Brother" producer Michael Jenkinson's Urban Entertainment to write "The Nanny Bus" -- a comedy about Latino nannies in Beverly Hills who plot to bring down their evil billionaire boss. "Nanny" will be headed out to studios shortly.

Perkins was repped by the Broder Webb Chervin Silbermann Agency and by Mission Management.
 

© 2003 Reed Business Information  © 2003 Variety, Inc.
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