Many projects go through growing pains during development.  James Cameron’s Titanic was labeled the biggest bomb of all time before it even hit theaters, Martin Sheen had a heart attack during the year-long shoot of Apocalypse Now, and filming on Men in Black 3 halted for a few months so that they could work on the script.  David O. Russell’s Nailed, however, was a bona fide production nightmare.  The film has yet to be finished and it’s unlikely it’ll ever see the light of day, but none of this is the fault of the creatives involved.

The political comedy satire was filmed in 2008 with Jessica Biel, Jake Gyllenhaal, Catherine Keener, and Tracy Morgan and centered on three people with serious health issues that stormed Washington D.C. to demand treatment. Production was shut down multiple times during filming, and just as Russell was getting to the filming of the film’s centerpiece scene the project was shut down for good.  The story behind Nailed’s filming and subsequent permanent limbo is stranger than fiction, and Steve recently got a lot of background on what exactly went down from producers Doug Wick and Lucy Fisher (of Red Wagon Entertainment) when he spoke with them in anticipation of the release of Lawless.  Hit the jump for the full story.

Following last week’s news that Natalie Portman would star in and produce the adaptation of the horror-comedy novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which is Seth Grahame-Smith’s twist on Jane Austen’s classic period romance story, Pajiba reports that David O. Russell (Three Kings, I Heart Huckabees) will direct and and pen the adaptation.  O. Russell wrapped production on The Fighter (starring Christian Bale, Mark Wahlberg, and Amy Adams) last August, so presumably this would be his next film, while his health-care comedy Nailed will apparently continue to languish in post-production limbo due to its financial problems and James Caan quitting the project in the middle of filming.

Russell has a bit of a rep for being a hothead ever since the video of his fight with Lily Tomlin on the set of Huckabees landed on YouTube.  However, he’s an auteur who will bring a unique vision to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, but I am curious what drew him to the project, which, based on its premised, would probably be his most mainstream movie to date.