‘Fruitcake’ movie about Corsicana’s Collin Street Bakery revived with Jennifer Garner

Christmas came early this year for fans who’ve been wondering about Fruitcake, the movie about a nearly $17 million scandal in Corsicana that never got made.

After disruptions due to COVID and the Hollywood strikes, the film about Collin Street Bakery is back on with a new cast starring Jennifer Garner and Paul Walter Hauser. Max Winkler will direct. Filming will begin this summer in North Texas according to Red Sanders, president of Fort Worth-based Red Productions and a producer on Fruitcake.

“It’s always been this thing of one step forward, one step back,” he said. “We’re stoked to be bringing it to shoot this summer.”

The movie follows Sandy Jenkins, a Collin Street accounting executive who siphoned eight figures from the business from at least 2004 to 2013 while working at its flagship Corsicana location. His story made waves for details like his and his wife’s multi-million dollar watch and jewelry collection, $50,000 wine collection, hundreds of private jet flights, $10,000-plus mattress, Santa Fe vacation home and small fleet of luxury cars.

In 2014, Jenkins pleaded guilty to charges stemming from his scheme of writing checks from the bakery to pay off his personal creditors. A U.S. district judge sentenced him to 10 years in prison. He died in 2019 at age 70.

His wife, Kay, pleaded guilty to a single charge of conspiracy to commit money laundering. She was sentenced to five years probation and ordered to complete 100 hours of community service.

Talk about the film went public in 2019 when Will Ferrell and Laura Dern were announced as its original stars. Julianne Moore later stepped in after Dern bowed out. But by the beginning of 2020, things were already starting to unravel.

“It was the last week of February [2020], we quickly recast it and were ready to go that summer — and then COVID hit,” said Sanders.

When the pandemic abated, the movie hit another snag as the Hollywood strikes entered full swing.

In a statement, Winkler praised the script by Texas writer Trey Selman, who wrote it on spec in 2016 and who will also produce. “For years I have been a fan of Trey Selman’s writing and completely original voice,” Winkler said, adding that Selman, “writes the truth in every subject he approaches.”

A budding screenwriter at the time, Selman told The Dallas Morning News in 2019 that he’d followed Jenkins’ story closely as details emerged. “I think it’s singularly born of a place like Corsicana,” he said. “Corsicana’s weird. If you look on a map, it’s not really in Central Texas, it’s not really part of the metroplex, and it’s not really part of East Texas. So it’s really this sort of conundrum of identity. And even the people there, they’re very stridently like: We’re Corsicanans.”

The movie is based on Texas Monthly writer Katy Vine’s 2016 deep dive into Jenkins. Collin Street president and CEO Bob McNutt will serve as an executive producer alongside Scott Brown and Megan Creydt from Texas Monthly and Brian O’Shea and Danny Gusman of production company The Exchange.

It comes after a Discovery+ documentary revisited the story during the holiday season in 2021.

Garner and Hauser, the film’s new leads, have been busy ahead of production. On Monday, news broke that Apple TV+ had renewed The Last Thing He Told Me, its drama series starring Garner alongside Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Angourie Rice and David Morse. Earlier this year, Hauser won his first Emmy for his turn as killer Larry Hall in Black Bird.