Will Mr. Limpit utter the sounds, “Heh heh. Heh heh heh?” Mike Judge, the cartoon wunderkind and creator of “Beavis and Butt-head” and “King of the Hill,” is in talks to direct and co-write a remake of “The Incredible Mr. Limpit,” today’s Daily Variety reports.
The project is set up at Warner Bros., which had been developing a version with Jim Carrey. Carrey has since exited the project, and actors on the short list to star include Mike Myers, Adam Sandler and Chris Rock.
In the 1964 original, Don Knotts portrayed a mild-mannered man who fell into the water, turned into an animated fish and helped the U.S. Navy spot Nazi submarines.
SO YOU WANNA KNOW WHAT IT’S LIKE TO BE A ROCK ’N’ ROLL STAR? Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger has teamed up with director Martin Scorsese to co-write and produce a film billed as a no-holds-barred expose of the pop world. A Reuters report says the working title for the film is “The Long Play.”
CANNES IF YOU CAN:The Cannes Film Festival today released the list of the 19 films in its main competition. Among the films and directors are Joel Coen (“O brother, where art thou?”), James Ivory (“The Golden Bowl”), Neil Labute (“Nurse Betty“), Liv Ullmann (“Trolosa (The Faithless)”) and Aoyama Shinji (“Eureka”). French director Luc Besson will head the jury.
BIG DADDY’S NEXT PROJECT: New Line has made a preemptive purchase of “The Five Joes,” a project to be produced by Adam Sandler and his Happy Madison Prods. partner Jack Giarraputo. Sandler’s involvement at this point is limited to producer, according to Variety. The pair most recently executive produced the Rob Schneider hit “Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo.”
THE DEER HUNTER: Actor Jeff Daniels is helming “Escanaba in da Moonlight,” an adaptation of a play he wrote. According to Daily Variety, it’s about a family of deer hunters who are cursed because their eldest son has never shot a buck.
‘THE ONION’ FILM TOPS ‘TITANIC’: Todd Hanson, the lead writer of the Wisconsin-based comic newspaper the Onion will write “10th Circle Added to Rapidly Growing Hell,” a DreamWorks Animation project. Get this: Variety says it’s about an expansion in hell to make way for an influx of demographers, tobacco lobbyists, ad execs, creators of office-based sitcoms and monopoly law experts retained by major corporations.
ARTIST-AUTHOR DIES: Edward Gorey, whose theater set designs, illustrations and humorously macabre stories (which graced TV’s “The Addams Family” and other productions) were once described as “poetic and poisonous,” died Saturday at Cape Cod Hospital in Massachusetts after suffering a heart attack earlier in the week. He was 75.
