At Monday's Why Did I Get Married Too premiere, Tyler Perry reportedly came out with the actual cast of his screen adaptation of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf. And it's decidedly lighter on star power than the "dream cast," with Mariah Carey, Whoopi Goldberg, Janet Jackson, Kerry Washington, Phylicia Rashad, Jurnee Smollett, Kimberly Elise and Macy Gray filling in spots where the likes of Oprah Winfrey, Beyonce Knowles and Alicia Keys were once rumored to be under consideration. It shoots this summer in New York, with an outside shot of being ignored by Perry come Oscar season 2011. [AOL Black Voices]
· Yesterday, Sissy Spacek became the second Oscar-winning actress to be cast in a drama pilot this season as a lead character who was originally conceived as a man. Spacek has agreed to make the Untitled John Wells Medical Drama at CBS her first regular series gig. The project, written by Hannah Shakespeare (Loverboy) and to be directed by Christopher Chulack (Southland), will focus on a mobile team of volunteer doctors led by a driven visionary (Spacek) that travels the world and the U.S. helping those in need. Earlier this month, Kathy Bates was cast as the lead of David E. Kelley's Kindreds, a legal drama that was created with a male lead in mind. [THR]
The Gossip Girl creators build their own Fake Empire, Nikki Blonsky signs up for fat camp, and more TV Bites after the jump.
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· Duh-nuh-NUH-nuh-NUH-nuh-NUH-NUH, duh-nuh-NUH-nuh-NUH-nuh-NUH-NUH... To the digitized loop of "Peter Gunn" comes word that the classic '80s video game Spy Hunter is set to be developed as a feature at Warner Bros. This comes after years of development stops and starts at Universal (where else?). Presumably Hunter will go 3D like all the studio's tentpoles, thus reinventing the deadly smoke-screen weapon for a new generation and, in all likelihood, getting the high-revving thriller banned in Malaysia. [Variety]
Emma Stone doubles down with the studios, John Steinbeck makes his Movieline debut, and more Hollywood Ink after the jump.
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For months, John Corbett has been denying that his Sex and the City character, Aiden Shaw, would be making a surprise cameo in the franchise's second feature film. Diehard Aiden fans reluctantly came to terms with the idea that the sexy, bucket of chicken-eating craftsman would not leave his wife and child for Miss Bradshaw, and slowly began piecing together their broken hearts and dissembling their "Aiden + Carrie 4 Ever" vision boards. But last week, Entertainment Weekly stirred up hopeful feelings when they reported that the furniture designer would appear in Sex and the City 2. Confused, Movieline decided to get to the bottom of the rumors once and for all and discovered that John Corbett was only too happy to help.
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It was a done deal anyway but Dimension Films has given Scream 4 the go-ahead with Wes Craven back directing, Kevin Williamson writing and, sigh, the "triumvirate" of Neve Campbell, David Arquette and Courtney Cox Arquette (second only in history, methinks, to Caesar, Magnus and Crassus, but I digress...) reprising their roles. The release date -- mark it now, kids -- is 12 April 2011 and said to be almost 11 years to the day since the last film of the trilogy slashed into cinemas. You could measure the years since you stopped caring about Ghost Face and discover it's almost exactly the same time frame.
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Meryl Streep and Sandra Bullock really together? Not in the sense of Sandy's Oscar speech but as mother and daughter?
300-D? Zack Snyder, who's making Guardians Of Ga'Hoole in 3-D and is converting Sucker Punch to the format, is open to the retro-stereoscoping of 300. This is surely Spartier!
Bindi Irwin does a spot of panda-whispering to promote straight-to-DVD Free Willy: Escape From Pirate Cove, another production that buccaneered the status quo by adamantly refusing to use falsies.
Rather than just use kids to blurb-quote your movie when no-one else will, why don't distributors find out which 80-100 movies these young'uns had to have so bad and use the "So good your children will beg you to steal it!" angle.
Because Mamma Mia! was a successful song-show-movie, now Tom Hanks is doing the same for Green Day's concept album American Idiot! Tom, after Apollo 11 and From Earth To Moon, why not Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon? It screams out for 3-D and IMAX and a million speakers all blasting out! Upside: repeat business from all the fans who can't remember the first viewing except to say it was "awesome".
James Cameron's biggest acceptance speech clunker and it's probably worse than you remember! Star signs align as M:I-III beauties birthed! Ronnie Raygun lays the Star Wars smackdown!
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It was just yesterday we were parsing paycheck roles and today the Hollywood It Crowd's A-Listiest ingenue joins the club -- at just 24 and while she's on the way up! Speaking to Vanity Fair, Amanda Seyfried says it's hard to turn down rom-coms because, "they pay a lot of money. Sometimes, when you want to buy an apartment in Manhattan, you gotta do one or two." She even helpfully tells us which roles paid for what real estate. There's no talk of the remuneration for her latest, the limited-release, non-rom-com Chloe, though VF practically commands readers to scour the web for sapphic segments featuring Seyfried and Julianne Moore. Perhaps Seyfried's on some sort of clicks-for-cash back-end deal? If that's the case, she'll be getting another apartment very soon. [Via Vanity Fair]
· Greenberg star Greta Gerwig shared a lot of things in her interview with us, but not this anecdote about the Berlin Film Festival, which she saved for the T Magazine blog:
'For the first press conference, I didn't really express what I needed to the makeup person. I looked like I walked off the set of "Designing Women." I look like I'm 40. I have the biggest hair. The makeup's really heavy. My friends even Photoshopped a picture of me into "Designing Women" and gave it to me when I got back. And then everyone started e-mailing me and was like, "Hey Greta, how's the weather in Dallas in 1986?!" Oh my God, it was the first time that pictures of me were everywhere, and I look crazy. And the best part of it was that my mom thought I looked amazing.'
[Photoshop rendering a Movieline recreation]
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Our nationwide crisis is finally over, everyone: After a grueling Captain America audition process that saw virtually every adult male try out for the role, including John Krasinski, Ryan Phillippe, Dane Cook, everyone who's ever been a day player on Gossip Girl, David Archuleta, House minority leader John Boehner, and Sean Young dressed in an off-brand Captain America costume purchased from Party World (that, due to licensing issues, was named "Admiral United States"), the role has finally been filled!
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Thought awards season was over? You were wrong! On March 27th at the Beverly Hilton, Matt Damon will be presented the 24th American Cinematheque Award by his longtime wonder brah, Ben Affleck. Damon is the youngest recipient of the award, deemed to recognize "an extraordinary artist in the entertainment industry who is fully engaged in his or her work and is committed to making a significant contribution to the art of the motion pictures." Past winners include Nicolas Cage, Bruce Willis and Bette Midler. Basically, this is "the famous person award" -- just roll with it. On hand for the ceremonies will be Casey Affleck, Don Cheadle, Bill Clinton (via videotape), George Clooney, Clint Eastwood, Jimmy Kimmel, Greg Kinnear, Ben Stiller, Charlize Theron and Robin Williams. Is that all? How many people do we really need to say, "Good job, Matt! Keep up the good work with the movies and the charity work and the conscience and the level-headedness and the being a great guy?" Seems like 5 or 6 should do the trick. And in another first, ABC will air the ceremony at a later date. If it goes anything like last year, when kooky drunk aunt Julia Roberts went on a potty-mouthed tirade about some of honoree Tom Hanks's lesser-beloved films, it should make for mildy distracting viewing! [toh!]
After weeks of perplexingly accurate leaks about the actors who would be Captain America, I'd almost forgotten how fun it is to deal with a casting rumor invented by a British tabloid! Today's fun bit of prevarication is that Slumdog Millionaire's Freida Pinto and House star Olivia Wilde be joining the next James Bond film as Bond's arm candy, an idea advanced as fact by the British Mirror. Actresses, what do you have to say in response?
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Neither Kellan Lutz nor Mickey Rourke ended up in Conan when all was said and done, but at least they'll have another chance to share the same craft services table and muscle mass supplements. Variety says Lutz is joining Rourke in Tarsem Singh's War of the Gods, where he'll play Poseidon. Between this, Clash of the Titans, Percy Jackson, and God of War III, Greek mythology is really having a moment, no? [Variety]
Who's that famous, finger-mangled runner who placed #5825 at this weekend's Los Angeles Marathon? Why, it's Transformers star Shia LaBeouf, who finished the race with a time of 4 hours and 35 minutes. Naturally, the important context to evaluate that time is examining which other celebrity runners he beat (and more importantly, which stars beat him).
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Fox revealed today that this week's celebrity mentor on American Idol will be Miley Cyrus, offering a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Crystal Bowersox to engage in a meaningful, chick-to-chick discussion on "finding the hurt" in lyrics like "and a Britney song was on." As if that weren't reason enough to tune in, Wednesday's results show features a performance from two other stars from the Disney Channel stable: real-life couple Joe Jonas and Demi Lovato, singing their duet, "Make a Wave." Yes, it's shaping up to be the best Teen Idols-themed week at American Idol ever. Except the theme has just been changed to "Billboard No. 1 Hits." Who's the theme-nixing culprit for whom "teen" is a dirty word?
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