Nothing is sadder than watching someone who has it all throwing it away.
Sources inside the Scorsese camp say that despite taking a public position that it wouldn’t allow the Chinese to influence its release of Kundun, Disney is planning on pulling the film after four weeks and not spending much in its Oscar promotion. Of course, it’s possible that the studio just isn’t enthusiastic about the film. People angered by the lack of a distributor for the new Lolita tend to blame the sexual politics and forget that R-rated sex-themed films don’t do much box office.
Speed Racer is back on track at Warner Bros. with Alfonso Cuaron, who has the current-day version of Great Expectations on tap, at the helm. The expectations aren’t that great, with budget cutting becoming the primary factor in generating a green light on the film. So much for the CG Chim Chim.
Tori Spelling continues to warp reality. In Scream 2, she appears as the butt of a joke from the original film (Neve Campbell‘s Sydney jokes that Tori would play her in the movie — and in this one, she does) and now she plays a college student who’s kidnapped by mistake. The bad guys were looking for the daughter of a millionaire and they get a chemically unstable Tori.
George Clooney has left the West. The Wild Wild West. The project, which stars Will Smith as the heroic Jim West just wasn’t fitting Clooney’s image of himself as Artemus Gordon. Or something like that. All I know is that Clooney, Smith and director Barry Sonnenfeld are some of the easiest-going people in Hollywood, at least interpersonally. Something really interesting must have happened. But more importantly, who will play the evil little person, Dr. Miguelito Loveless?
Don’t forget, I’m always open to e-mail.