News out of the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival has Patrick Wilson (Insidious) and Alec Baldwin (30 Rock) teaming up to star in Caught Stealing.  The adaptation of author Charlie Huston’s first installment in the “Hank Thompson Trilogy” was adapted by David Hayter (X2).  The wrong-man picture finds Wilson as the trilogy’s title character, a one-time California baseball prospect who ended up as an alcoholic bartender in Manhattan.  His life takes a turn for the worse when his neighbor leaves him with a cat who is the key to a secret sought after by Russian mobsters, a Samoan hitman, two psychotic brothers and one sadistic cop (Baldwin).  Hit the jump for more on Caught Stealing.

If you’re HBO, and Alan Ball comes to you and says “I want to adapt this series of books into a series,” you say yes.  True Blood — Ball’s adaptation of Charlaine Harris’ Southern Vampire Mysteries novels — has been an immense success for the pay network, even landing an Outstanding Drama Emmy nomination yesterday.

So naturally, HBO has ordered a pilot based on the 2009 Charlie Huston crime novel The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death, which Ball will produce and direct.  Huston scripted the adaptation himself, which centers on “an inveterate twenty-something slacker who stumbles into a career as a crime scene cleaner, only to find himself entangled with a murder mystery, a femme fatale, and the loose ends of his own past.”  Hit the jump for Ball’s comments as to his approach.