AT LAST - THE SEVENTIES SHOW

WITH FLARES, KNITTED tank tops and other fashion disasters making an improbable comeback and Charlie’s Angels II on the fast track, two more of the top shows on seventies television are getting closer to big-screen playdates: The Incredible Hulk and Starsky and Hutch.

The Hulk project, of course, has received column inches here before, partly due to the fact that Ang Lee, a director who seems able to turn his hand to more or less anything, is lined up to handle the movie version of the story of mild-mannered Dr Bruce Banner whose uncontrollable green alter ego appears whenever he gets angry. It has all now moved several steps further forward, with the casting of Australian comedian Eric Bana - who made his acting debut in the grisly biopic Chopper and has since co-starred in Black Hawk Down - as the unfortunate Banner. And Jennifer Connelly - who seems finally to have graduated from smouldering small-town sexpot roles thanks to Requiem for a Dream and A Beautiful Mind - will play Betty Ross, the scientist who is a close friend of Banner (but less fond of the Hulk).

Additionally, Ben Stiller, fresh off Zoolander, is reported to be trying to set up a movie version of Starsky and Hutch, playing Starsky (originally played by Paul Michael Glaser) to Vince Vaughn’s Hutch (immortalised on TV by David Soul). How serious all this is, I don’t know. But Stiller is also attached, among other projects, to the Farrelly Brothers’ Stuck on You, a script about Siamese twins that they wrote over a decade ago.

Their dream casting for the film was reportedly Jim Carrey and Woody Allen, but they have now apparently settled for Stiller and Steve Martin. To find out exactly how the age difference between the two twins (in both versions of the cast) is accounted for, I guess we’ll have to wait for the film.

TAKING OVER THE ASYLUM - AGAIN

BACK IN 1919, when Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, DW Griffith and Douglas Fairbanks set up United Artists, the businessmen of Hollywood mocked. The actors and directors didn’t stay in charge for long, of course, but the company (admittedly somewhat transformed) still exists.

In the years since then, actors and directors have established their own production companies from time to time, notably Burt Lancaster, who helped set up Hecht Hill Lancaster in 1948; and Francis Ford Coppola, who formed American Zoetrope 20 years later in 1969. Nowadays, every star worthy of the name has his or her own production outfit, sometimes little more than a name on an office door (although, since they’re stars, the offices are always tastefully furnished).

But when four, maybe five, hot young directors announce plans for a joint project, Tinseltown takes notice. That’s what happened in early October, when Steven Soderbergh, Spike Jonze, David Fincher and Alexander Payne - with Sam Mendes as a possible fifth - announced plans for a company which would be backed by USA Films, but over which they would otherwise have total control. Fincher was said to be the driving force behind the deal.

According to the plan, each director would make three movies for the new company in its first five years. Virtually all of them have formal or informal ties with other studios and - rather like Steven Spielberg with DreamWorks - the plan began to be viewed with scepticism as each began talking about projects that would be made under those studio arrangements, rather than for the new company.

But then, at the end of October, Soderbergh - who had, by then, finished post-production on Ocean’s Eleven - announced what looked like being the first project for the new company (which still, as far as I know, doesn’t have a name). He was, the director said, planning a remake of the Russian sci-fi classic, Solaris, made by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1972 from a novel by Stanislaw Lem, which would star George Clooney (with whom, to make things more complicated, Soderbergh is partnered in another production company, Section Eight - see above for the item on Confessions of a Dangerous Mind). Solaris was the first of the ‘haunted spaceship’ movies, recently taken to its gory conclusions by the like of Event Horizon, but the Russian movie had a much more philosophical (not to say spiritual) dimension.

There is no indication where Solaris might fit into the scheme of things - especially as Soderbergh has subsequently announced plans to make a CIA thriller for Warner Bros, working from a screenplay by Stephen Gaghan (who wrote Traffic), based on Robert Baer’s See No Evil: The True Story of a Foot Soldier in the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism War, a book which suggests that the CIA has truly lost the plot.

Mendes, meanwhile, recently completed working with Tom Hanks on The Road to Perdition. And Fincher is planning Seared (also referred to above). No suggestion yet of what projects they - or, for that matter, Payne or Jonze - might make for their new joint-venture. In fact, come to think of it, there has been remarkably little mention of the whole joint-venture thing since October. Ah, well.

ONE COLLABORATIVE PROJECT that does seem to be going ahead, however, links three wildly different art-house titans in a movie called Eros - which, as its title implies, will deal with the sexual side of love.

The three are 90-year-old Italian maestro Michelangelo Antonioni (who, since suffering a stroke 10 years ago, has made only one film - Beyond the Clouds - in collaboration with Wim Wenders); Pedro Almodóvar, the high priest of camp, in whose films love is rarely straightforward; and Wong Kar-wai, whose on-screen love stories have ranged from homosexual frustration (Happy Together) to chaste longing (In the Mood for Love).

According to reports in the Italian press, Antonioni’s segment - scripted by Tonino Guerra - was shot on film and digital video in Tuscany late last autumn. Wong and Almodóvar will reportedly complete their segments later.