Brad Kane

Richard Pryor’s widow hired Brad Kane to write a biopic about the famed comedian. Hollywood just loved the writer’s work last year. Now it’s starting to look like the scripts could actually get made.

The best writers are skilled ventriloquists. Just the same, it’s a bit jarring to meet Brad Kane. The screenwriter of two gritty, popular, unproduced screenplays — a Richard Pryor biopic and an epic drama about a black pimp in 1980s New York City — Kane turns out to be a white former child actor and Broadway veteran who sang the part of Aladdin in the 1992 Disney film.

"There were always a lot of conflicting aspects of my personality that I was trying to work out," says Kane, now 33.

No kidding. His mother was a singer at the Copacabana in the ’60s, and by the age of 10 Kane was acting in commercials, television and musical theater ("Evita," "Sunday in the Park With George") around New York.

After dropping out of NYU’s undergraduate film school and moving to L.A. in the late ’90s, Kane (sometimes credited as Caleb, his middle name) burned out on acting and "did the prototypical L.A. thing, which is I picked up a guitar and wrote about my misery." Warner Records released an EP of his songs (they’re on iTunes), which have been used in several TV shows.

But strolling the theaters of 42nd Street as a working 11-year-old had brought him into contact with scores of Port Authority runaways and their criminal exploiters, a moving canvas that a few years ago he finally turned into a sprawling ensemble piece called "These City Walls."

"It was my youth," Kane says. "In 1983, Times Square was not Disneyfied. It was pimps, prostitutes, muggers, grifters, runners — all those kids. . . . I have so much passion for that place, that time, those people — that New York that doesn’t exist anymore — that it just came through in the writing."

Kane’s music manager got "Walls" to Pryor’s widow, Jennifer, who wanted Kane to bring that tone to a biopic about her late husband (who died in December 2005). Ultimately, both the untitled Pryor script and "Walls" ended up on the unofficial Black List of the industry’s most-liked reads in 2006.

Now, after acting and music successes, Kane’s screenwriting career seems poised for its breakthrough. The Weinstein Co. is in discussions with Oscar-winning writer-director Bill Condon ("Dreamgirls") to develop and direct the Pryor project, and director Antoine Fuqua ("Training Day") is beginning casting for "Walls." Kane is also about to turn in his adaptation of Elizabeth Kostova’s bestselling 2005 novel, "The Historian," and he’s negotiating a deal to rewrite the assassin-in-exile action film "Matt Helm," DreamWorks’ answer to Universal’s "Bourne" blockbusters.

It’s enough to make a guy want to break out in song.