Joe Carnahan can't catch a break. The erstwhile Narc director, after laboring for over a year on the third installment of the Mission: Impossible franchise before departing over creative differences with star-producer Tom Cruise, finally got back into theaters this Janurary with Smokin' Aces, which was promptly annihilated by critics.

Now Reese Witherspoon, the star-producer of the remake of the 1965 Otto Preminger film Bunny Lake Is Missing, which Carnahan was set to direct, has pulled out of the production just weeks before the movie was set to start filming, according to a piece in today's Los Angeles Times, by John Horn and Sheigh Crabtree. The film is about an American woman whose daughter goes missing from a new nursery school while in England. She is then confronted with discrepancies in her story by police, who eventually suggest that her daughter never existed. The bulk of the production was to be in Los Angeles.

Scripts have gone out to Charlize Theron and Kate Winslet in an attempt to recast the project on the fly, but Carnahan has a limited window of availability, since he starts shooting the 1950s-set crime thriller White Jazz in late July. Well, until star-producer George Clooney pulls out of that project, that is...