With his performance in The Master ready to be seen by audiences this weekend, Philip Seymour Hoffman is already setting his sights on the director’s chair.  Hoffman is set to helm Ezekiel Moss, a Depression Era ghost story from Keith Bunin’s Black List script.  This picture would mark Hoffman’s second directorial effort after 2010′s Jack Goes Boating.  The story centers on a young boy in a small town who befriends a drifter who claims he can speak to the dead.  Hit the jump for more on Hoffman and Ezekiel Moss.

New Line Cinema is developing a live-action family comedy by the name Furry Friday.  (Umm… be careful when you google that.)  The story is an animalistic twist on Freaky Friday, where a cat and a dog switch bodies.  New Line took one look at the first draft and said, “No, this does not meet our standards for a cat/dog body-switching comedy.”  Variety reports the studio has hired David H. Steinberg to rewrite the script.  Steinberg is a co-writer on the upcoming Shrek spinoff Puss in Boots, and he’s in post-production on his feature directorial debut, Miss Dial.  Cathy Schulman (The Illusionist) and Adam Stone (Limitless), the team that sold the project on spec to New Line, will produce for Mandalay Pictures.

Hit the jump for a mostly irrelevant clip from the Nickelodeon cartoon CatDog.

And the next young-adult fantasy novel to become a major motion picture is……Firelight! Mandalay Pictures has hired screenwriter Nick Pustay (Ramona and Beezus) to adapt Sophie Jordan’s young-adult fantasy novel Firelight. The book tells the story of a young girl who is of a race that can morph from human to dragon at will. The girl’s family moves to live among humans, but the girl falls in love with a dragon hunter. Heat Vision reports that Cathy Schulman (Crash) will produce the film. No director has been set for the project at this point. Hit the jump to read a synopsis of the novel, the last line of which should tell you what to expect from a film adapation.