What an irony! Just as Joan Rivers fights for her life, a movie about her sort of mentor is being planned.

A film about Phyllis Diller, the iconic and ground breaking female comic, is being planned. Producers Shaun Redick and Ray Mansfield of the Movie Package Company are producing, also with manager Heidi Rothbart and Alan Gasmer. Playwright Jonathan Tolin and Seth Bass are writing the script. No director has been announced.

Diller died at age 95 in the summer of 2012. She was quite a legend, and easily recognized as Rivers’ if not mentor, the trailblazer who made Joan possible. Rivers would pick up the ball and run with it, herself becoming the reason so many female comics soon blossomed.

Right now, a casting call has gone out for an actress to play Diller from around age 35-60. The film concerns her heyday years from the mid 1950s to the 1970s. This was when Diller was a staple on every single TV variety show, regular with Bob Hope and Ed Sullivan, with her wild wigs and caftans.

If it’s done right, and not kitschy, the movie could be a real awards-buzzer for some actress. The producers are looking for a star to play Phyllis but what they really need is a very solid director. Penny Marshall, you should come out of retirement for this.

David James, the famed photographer who took Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s wedding photos, tells me he did the job for free. James called me this afternoon from the set of “Star Wars 7,” where he’s the stills photographer. James doesn’t usually shoot weddings. But he knew Brad and Angelina from “Unbroken,” Jolie’s coming film with a lot of Oscar buzz.

How much notice did he have? “About two weeks,” he told me. And he really worked at the wedding. Even though there were only 22 guests, James and his staff stayed busy the whole time. “We were treated very well,” he assured me, but he was not a guest. He didn’t talk to the guests and didn’t know who they were really. But he did work for free, knowing the money for the pictures would go to charity.

To that end, this afternoon Brad and Angie announced all the money from the sale of the pix– upwards of $10 mil– will go to their Jolie Pitt Foundation. As I predicted. They are very good at distributing funds to charitable orgs. It’s a win win.

Joan Rivers‘ daughter Melissa has issued a statement this afternoon. “At this time she does remain on life support. I know my mother would be overwhelmed by the continued outpouring of kindness and I want to thank everyone for keeping us in their prayers.”

In the meantime, watch this classic video of Joan and Lucille Ball on the Tonight Show:

Here’s a new video in which tennis ace John McEnroe gets waterboarded– for real. It’s supposed to show how awful torture is. It’s, uh, torture.

“It’s a pretty powerful clip,” says McEnroe in a press release. “A friend involved with the project asked if I wanted to participate, saying he was making a video about living in a police state where people are punished for the smallest of infractions – sort of a ‘this could happen to you’ scenario. It seemed like a sci-fi concept at the time, but given everything that’s been happening around us lately, this video could easily be mistaken for an evening newscast. As for what it was like to shoot my scenes, let’s just say it was an experience I’ll never forget. I read about waterboarding and all the debates, and let me tell you from firsthand experience, it’s a brutal and terrifying form of torture. No one—American or otherwise—should ever have to endure that.”

The music is by a group called Future User.