They say only about 10 percent of working actors become movie stars, and the studio execs coming up with the major movies roles don’t have a creative bone among them. When you combine these two facts, you get my weekly Role Call. Here’s the skinny on who’s doing what–in all its good, bad and very ugly glory.
Sandler redoes Gilligan?
Now that Bob Denver has passed on, Adam Sandler is hoping to fill his shoes by bringing Gilligan and the beloved TV show Gilligan’s Island to the big screen. According to movie gossip website DarkHorizons.com, the funnyman has roped Brian Dennehy to play the Skipper, Australian actor Michael Caton, as millionaire Thurston Howell III, and Sandler‘s best buddy Rob Schneider as, well, I’m not sure. It didn’t say. Maybe the Professor? That’d be funny. I’m really sort of torn about this. On the one hand, it may just be better to letting sleeping dogs lie rather than try to redo something so classically archaic. I mean, they’ve already done a reality show around Gilligan’s Island, for heaven’s sakes. How much lower can you go? But on the other hand, it’s Sandler. Whatever he touches, no matter how stupid, turns to gold. Guess we’ll have to wait and see. “Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip…”
Farrell, Norton take Pride
Edward Norton, Colin Farrell and Noah Emmerich are in negotiations to star in Pride and Glory, a generational drama about a family of police officers in New York torn apart by a corruption scandal. Gavin O’Connor will direct a script he wrote with Joe Carnahan. Norton is poised to play a homicide detective who is assigned to investigate the precinct run by his older brother (Emmerich). Farrell plays the investigator’s best friend, a cop in that precinct who might be dirty himself. “My father was a New York City detective, and I grew up in that world,” the director told Variety. “It’s a celebration of honest cops, which was everything my father was about. Though it is fictional, it is an homage to my father.” New Line production president Toby Emmerich said he has been a fan of the script for several years. “This is a police drama that has qualities of family, corruption and redemption that ring true,” he told Variety. Ah, that’s true. The bad cop/good cop story works every time.
Coppola gets back into the director’s chair
Helming a movie for the first time since directing 1997’s The Rainmaker, Francis Ford Coppola will begin filming Youth Without Youth in Romania on Oct. 3. Starring Tim Roth, the film is adapted from a novella by Romanian philosopher-author Mircea Eliade and takes place right before World War II. It chronicles how a professor’s life is altered after an “extraordinary change” late in his life, which leads to Nazi interest in studying him.. “It’s a parable, it’s a fable. It’s almost like an intellectual Twilight Zone,” the Coppola told The Associated Press. “In a way it’s like a Hitchcock picture and Tim Roth is the Jimmy Stewart–the guy who gets caught up in something fascinating and big.” Already immersed in pre-production, Coppola feels a “pleasant, stage-fright kind of nervous” about his directing return. Anticipating a release date of late 2006 or spring 2007, he envisions Youth Without Youth as a return to his roots in personal filmmaking–before The Godfather set him on a path of big studio projects. “I just feel that at a certain point you have to go back to the beginning again,” the 66-year-old director said. “The best thing for me at this point in my life is to become a student again and make movies with the eyes I had when I was enthusiastic about it in the first place.” Not quite sure he can pull that one off, but we’re certainly glad he’s willing to try.
Danes Flocks to Gere
Did anyone catch the twisty-turny foreign film Infernal Affairs? If you haven’t, it’s definitely one to see. Claire Danes was so impressed with the film she’s just signed to star with Richard Gere in The Flock, Affairs‘ co-director Andrew Lau‘s first American flick. The story is about a hypervigilant federal agent (Gere), who, while training his young female replacement (Danes), must track down a missing girl he is convinced is connected to a paroled sex offender he is investigating. “My character [who’s a federal agent] is about to replace Richard Gere‘s character because he’s ‘retiring,’ aka being fired,” Danes told Entertainment Weekly. “He had an unorthodox method of getting information from sex offenders–he really empathizes with them to become aware of their thought process–during these two weeks [of training], we share an intimacy and rescue each other literally, but emotionally, too.” Don’t they all. Meanwhile, Napoleon Dynamite‘s Jon Heder is busy bee these days. In addition to playing sidekick to Rob Schneider and David Spade in The Benchwarmers and to Billy Bob Thornton in School for Scoundrels, as well as having a minor but memorable role in the recent comedy Just Like Heaven, EW reports the squinty-eyed, shaggy dog-haired actor will headline Mama’s Boy, an indie comedy about a 30ish slacker who finds his ideal life of living at home with his angelic mom endangered when she falls in love with a self-help guru and prepares to marry him. I’m laughing already.
Creepy Turn comes to the big screen
Henry James’ classic eerie tale The Turn of the Screw is getting updated for the big screen.
Universal Pictures has acquired The Turning, a pitch to be written by Chad and Carey Hayes, whose credits include House of Wax and an upcoming remake of The Blob. OK, I don’t think listing those credits is necessarily a glowing recommendation, but I guess it shows they know horror. The brothers have come up with a contemporary take on the story of a caretaker hired to look after two orphaned children at their family’s isolated estate. Upon the caretaker’s arrival, the young woman finds that the children are not quite what they seem, and that she might be losing them to malevolent spirits with a secret tie to their past. According to the Hollywood Reporter, the story was first published in serialized form in 1898 in Collier’s Weekly and has been hailed by literary critics as one of the ghost story genre’s finest tales. Well, the James’ book may have come first, but the movie adaptation sounds suspiciously like another excellent ghost story, The Others.
Hardwicke’s stuck in the ’70s
Catherine Hardwicke, who most recently directed Lords of Dogtown, is bringing late novelist Edward Abbey’s comedic bestseller about environmental activists The Monkey Wrench Gang to the big screen. The 1975 tale is about a rambunctious gang of environmental activists who fight over-development in the American West by any means necessary and has been the subject of some controversy over the years because of its depiction of “eco-terrorism.” “Political subjects are difficult in general, but it was also a challenge to find a way to connect it to a younger generation,” producer Edward Pressman told the Reporter. Despite its ’70s setting, Pressman said the film “connects to today’s cultural zeitgeist.” A soundtrack filled with original ’70s songs and covers by current rock artists (many of whom hold the book in high regard, as evidenced by the Foo Fighters’ song “Monkey Wrench”) also is in the planning stages. The script will be adapted by William Goldman, whose credits include Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All the President’s Men. This might be a winner. Let’s just see who gets cast.
The Ying and Yang of it
Rap group The Ying Yang Twins are taking their act to the big screen for the first time, signing on to star in the comedy Viagra Falls. Oh dear, here we go again–more rappers turning into actors. What’s the deal with that? The ironic thing is, they usually do a good job. Bow Wow (Roll Bounce), Eminem (8 Mile), Ludacris (Crash), Mos Def (Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), to name a few. Not sure if The Ying Yang Twins will fall into that category, though. Their project revolves around two best friends in Atlanta who struggle to make enough money from their minimum-wage jobs to pay for a trip to spring break in Daytona Beach, Fla. Their plans change when a box full of Viagra falls into their laps. Wonder how that changes things, specifically? No, on second thought, I don’t really want to know.
Until next week…
