SOMEBODY'S FABULEUSE!

What with American television gobbling up all Britain’s best TV series (and generally turning them into something quite different in the process), you might have expected Hollywood to view the British box with equivalent enthusiasm. Alas, a similar success rate has not generally been attained, however: anyone remember The Avengers?

So, with French businessmen currently calling the shots in Hollywood, it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that it is Paris rather than Tinseltown that is currently making our small-screen series into big-screen events. Or they are as far as Absolutely Fabulous is concerned, at any rate. Plans for a US TV version having fallen through a couple of years ago, French producer Pascal Houzelot pounced, and Absolument fabuleux went in front of the cameras in and around Paris at the end of November.

The adaptation is by Gabriel Aghion (Belle maman, Le libertin), who will also direct. And the roles of Patsy and Eddie have been taken by two of France’s top stars. The former will be played by the ever-glamorous Nathalie Baye (seen most recently in Une liaison pornographique, above). And the French Eddie will be Josiane Balasko, a director in her own right who is probably best known outside France for being the rather plain object of Gérard Depardieu’s affection in Trop belle pour toi.

STRAIGHT-FACED JIM

Speaking of ‘fabulous’ - which, in response to the many queries we’ve received, is what Jim Carrey is telling somebody they are in the much-admired soundchip in the cover of our Christmas issue - the man of many faces will be using his own mug, plain and unadorned, in his next film.

Bijou, which begins shooting on March 1 in Los Angeles and Ferndale, (northern) California, is about a screenwriter accused of leftist sympathies during the McCarthy era, who loses his memory in a car crash. It’ll be a slightly less frenetic subject for Carrey, and his first teaming with director Frank Darabont.

It will also be the first film directed by the latter not to be set in a prison - he did The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile - although he has just finished producing The Salton Sea (director DJ Caruso), starring Val Kilmer and Deborah Kara Unger, for Castle Rock.

FINCHER COOKING WITH GAS

DISHING IT: Big Night was the ultimate feelgoodmovie. But it's unklikely that David Fincher's version of Anthony Bourdain' Kitchen Confidential - in which Brad Pitt will reportedly star - will be quite so digestable.

Ever since Big Night proved that restaurants could be a prime setting for multi-character dramas - a kind of hip millennial equivalent to all those doomed airliners of the disaster-movie era, but without the special effects - the world has been waiting for the first studio eatery epic. It may not have known it, but it has definitely been waiting.

Well, not for much longer: David Fincher and New Line are developing a movie based on the book that set the catering classes chattering last year: Kitchen Confidential. If you don’t eat out, you may not have heard about it: indeed, you may not be much interested in it. But I’ll tell you anyway: Kitchen Confidential is the bestseller in which chef Anthony Bourdain revealed the horror (the Horror!) of working at the cookface of a top New York restaurant - the bullying, the petty rivalries, the exhaustion and the food abuse that goes on.

Fincher and his producer, Art Linson, are working with writer Jesse Wigutow on a loose adaptation of Bourdain’s book (which, of course, has no real storyline and wouldn’t easily adapt into a mainstream movie). The film is currently called Seared, and early reports are that Brad Pitt - who worked with Fincher on both Seven and Fight Club - is interested in playing the film’s central character. He, appropriately enough, is a cook who rises through the ranks to become New York’s equivalent of royalty: a celebrity chef.

Next up for Fincher is the Sony movie, Panic Room, but he is expected to turn on the heat for Seared later this year.