Zoë Bell and Ed Brubaker make a nice couple

Zoë Bell, stuntwoman extraordinaire and co-star of Tarantino's Death Proof, will finally star in her own show. The gig is called Angel of Death, an online series set to premiere in 2009, exclusively on Sony Pictures' Crackle.com. Zoë doubled Uma Thurman in Kill Bill and Lucy Lawless in Xena: Warrior Princess. Not coincidentally, both Kill Bill and Xena featured some of the best female fights on film and TV respectively. More exciting, however, is the fact that Angel of Death is the brain child of Ed Brubaker, one of the greatest comic book writers pounding a keyboard today. His series Criminal, Sleeper and Catwoman, to only name a few, have been heavily influenced by those old noir films and novels of the 30s, 40s and 50s, which Brubaker admires, but does not copy. One can only hope that Crackle.com, with its lower budgets and Internet distribution, will grant Brubaker and others far more creative freedom than studio feature films. This venture could herald, although at a smaller scale, the end of the 13 re-writes by 13 writers, plus notes from studio execs, lawyers and marketing gurus. That would be exciting and truly innovative. Will a successful, brilliant writer like Brubaker finally be allowed to create a story and get it made the way he intended it? Or, and this is a question for Sony, do you still believe the execs, lawyers and advertisers are the best people to craft compelling fiction?