For a while there it looked like Jonathan Levine's directing career wasn't getting him anywhere. His horror thriller All The Boys Love Mandy Lane was a festival success but languished for years without distribution, and his 90s coming-of-age film The Wackness was lovely, except that nobody saw it. But when he snagged the job directing the Seth Rogen-Joseph Gordon Levitt dramedy Live With It, apparently he started setting things right, and just as that film wraps he's already moving on to the next thing.

According to Variety, Levine has signed on to direct an adaptation of Richard Aleas's crime novel Little Girl Lost, about a New York City detective who learns his high school ex-- whom he believed to be an eye doctor in the Midwest-- was actually a stripper, and now she's dead. The novel was a finalist in the Edgar Allan Poe and Shamus Award competitions for mystery novels, and Aleas is actually the pen name for Cahrles Ardai, who also writes for the Syfy series Haven.

Michael Bacall is adapting the screenplay as a follow-up to his work with Edgar Wright on Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, so he and Levine can bond over what an enormous change of pace this is from their most recent work. Levine showed a real skill for capturing New York locations in The Wackness, and the detective story seems like an irresistible genre for many filmmakers, so why shouldn't he take a crack at it? I'm just glad to see the guy working, and if Live With It turns out as promising as it looks, he should have plenty more opportunities like this ahead of him.