The notoriously widescreen Marlon Brando has seduced notoriously picky novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez into allowing The Grandfather Godfather to adapt his novel, Autumn of the Patriarch, as a movie. In turn, Brando says that this film, which is centered around an aging Latin American dictator, will be his last. If the film does get made, one can only hope that it’s great, sweetening the first consummated Hollywood experience of the much-beloved Marquez, and allowing Brando to exit with the grace that his skill as an actor deserves. Good luck, gentlemen.
Hugh Grant‘s set for Mickey Blue Eyes, a romantic comedy about a high-flying Manhattan art dealer whose nuptials are threatened by his fiance’s father’s day job as a Mafioso. Grant is co-producing the film with his permanent fiance, Elizabeth Hurley, who would likely agree that for a relationship to be so endangered, something would have to really suck.
What can you say about a project that people have been trying to finance for four years, but whose massive budget left Paul Verhoeven making Showgirls and Arnold Schwarzenegger in a Mr. Freeze costume? Verhoeven is saying, “Let’s try again.” With Starship Troopers about to hit theaters with some major thunder, the RoboCop/Basic Instinct director is anxious to get his Arnold-attached Crusades back in the pipeline. One little problem, Verhoeven told Variety, “It can’t be made for less than Titanic.” That’s before you get ready for the protests from the religious right. If you think they were upset when the current “Greatest Filmmaker Alive,” Martin Scorsese, made The Last Temptation of Christ, just wait until they see this trailer: “From The Director Of Showgirls and That Bug Movie, Arnold wants the Grail and he’s killing Jews by the thousands to get it! (image of Arnold’s rippled, sword-carrying torso, ready to hack someone to death) “Cwucafy you? It’s naught dat kind a Cwusade!” (Arnold swings the blade, cut to black on the sound of the decapitation and then a card, reading, “Coming for The Cup, Christmas 1999”).
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