LEO and HOWARD

Leonardo DiCaprio currently looks unlikely to delay quite as long between films as he did after Titanic. With production on The Beach only recently wrapped, the actor has already committed to play the lead in a Howard Hughes biopic for director Michael Mann (who was earlier planning to do a James Dean biopic with DiCaprio).

It won’t, of course, be the first Hughes life story to be filmed - Jonathan Demme’s 1980 Melvin and Howard is the most recent - nor will it be the last: Allen and Albert Hughes (no relation) are also planning one, as is Warren Beatty.

The Mann/DiCaprio pic is some way off being made: the script hasn’t even been written yet. And Mann is still in the midst of post-production on his film about Jeffrey Wigland, the guy who spilled the beans on the way the US tobacco giants do business. That film, which stars Al Pacino and Russell Crowe, has been sheltering under the ‘Untitled’ banner for some time, but now apparently has a label: The Insider. It is due for release on November 5.

GET SYLVESTER

Look at the release schedules of any European country and you will note a fairly regular pattern of the periodic re-releasing of major movies from the cultural heritage of the country concerned. Except in the UK: we Brits are not much noted for bringing back our greatest hits. Or maybe our greatest hits don’t stand up well to being brought back.

A big exception, however, has been the recent re-release of Mike Hodges’ Get Carter, the gangster pic which first revealed Michael Caine’s range (already a star, he played the eponymous hit man, a laconic Londoner sent up north to sort out some business on Tyneside). It becomes a point of reference whenever another British crime movie hits the jackpot. Like The Long Good Friday or Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.

Of course, you can’t have a hit in Europe these days without Hollywood deciding to remake it. And former Sony chief Mark Canton has teamed up with brother Neil plus Elie Samaha of Franchise Pictures to do just that with Get Carter.

I have a feeling, though, that the casting may not please fans of the original: Canton is reportedly in talks with Sylvester Stallone to play the role of Jack Carter, with music-video wunderkind Sam Bayer directing the movie. And it could all happen as early as this autumn.

ANOTHER CARREY ON

Following his recent appearance at the MTV Movie Awards looking like the fourth member of ZZ Top, it should come as no surprise to readers to learn that Jim Carrey is back on track to play the title role in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, the remake of the 1947 Danny Kaye movie about the guy with the overheated imagination.

First reports of the project began to circulate at the end of 1996, when Mitty was scheduled to follow The Truman Show in Carrey’s career. But Man on the Moon - due out in the US in early November - was the first to jump the queue. Then the Andy Kaufman biopic was followed ahead of Mitty by the Farrelly Brothers’ Me, Myself and Irene - which recently wrapped in Rhode Island - and Ron Howard’s How the Grinch Stole Christmas, which is being readied for the first Yuletide of the new millennium.

But at least Mitty now has a director attached: Chuck Russell, who hasn’t worked with Carrey since The Mask - arguably the film which, while it did not actually make him a star, certainly confirmed the actor’s status. Russell has been nowhere near as busy as Carrey since that film: the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle Eraser has been his only completed project, although he is currently in production on a supernatural thriller called Bless the Child with Kim Basinger at Paramount.

When he finishes that, Russell will reportedly transfer his attention to the Mitty screenplay, which New Line hope to get into production early in 2000.