GANGING UP ON MARTY

Due to start shooting at Cinecittà in Rome in August, Martin Scorsese’s The Gangs of New York has been adding gilt-edged cast members recently, including Cameron Diaz and Daniel Day-Lewis, with talks reportedly underway with Liam Neeson and Pete Postlethwaite.
Given that Alberto Grimaldi will (following a somewhat terse bout of legal action) produce, Gangs is beginning to have echoes of Sergio Leone’s epic Once Upon a Time in America, a movie which took the late Italian maestro nearly two decades to put together, and which likewise created bits of New York on the Rome backlot.

Progress on Scorsese’s Miramax movie has been somewhat swifter, but the real similarities lie in the determination to focus on the lesser-known aspects of the Big Apple’s underworld: Jewish gangsters in Leone’s case; the very beginnings of organised crime in the mid-19th century in Scorsese’s.

Leonardo DiCaprio is, of course, already lined up for the lead role: a character known as Amsterdam, whose ambition is to unite the warring ethnic street gangs as a way of combatting political corruption. Day-Lewis - making his first film since The Boxer in 1997 - will play Amsterdam’s nemesis, Bill the Butcher, a role that was originally written for Robert De Niro. Diaz is cast as Jenny, a character described as a street-smart thief who becomes involved with Amsterdam both personally and professionally.

RICKY AND NATALIE GET DOWN

It says as much about Cannes 2000 as it does about Hollywood that one of the biggest deals to be announced on the Croisette - by, you will not be surprised to hear, that master of marketing spin, Harvey Weinstein - was a sequel to the 1987 hit, Dirty Dancing.

Called (again, no surprise) Dirty Dancing 2, the story will be relocated from the Catskills (where the original was set) to Miami, with Latin music star Ricky Martin top of the wish-list for the Patrick Swayze role, and Natalie Portman in talks for the part of the rich girl who discovers the delights of... well, various things, when she escapes the protective embrace of a vacation with her parents for a little dance-floor action. The role was played in the original by Jennifer Grey, daughter of Joel.

The new film will see a one-off teaming between Weinstein’s Miramax and Artisan Entertainment, whose library boasts Dirty Dancing as one of its most profitable titles (the original movie took upwards of $150 million at the box office, and the soundtrack album sold a staggering 22 million units).

FROM FIDELTY TO SERENDIPITY

With two cult hits in the past six months - Being John Malkovich and High Fidelity - John Cusack is well on his way to becoming off-Hollywood’s most significant alternative movie star. British actress Kate Beckinsale, meanwhile, has gone from being a supporting actress to a bona fide star in her own right, with a series of gradually bigger roles, starting with The Last Days of Disco and progressing by way of Brokedown Palace and Cannes competition entry The Golden Bowl to the Jerry Bruckheimer/ Michael Bay summer epic, Pearl Harbor, in which she stars opposite Ben Affleck.

Now Cusack and Beckinsale are to star opposite one another in the romantic comedy Serendipity, about the 10-year aftermath of a college love affair: one of the pair is about to get married (to someone else), when they both decide that they are destined for each other. A bit like My Best Friend’s Wedding, in other words, but more romantic and less funny.

The film will go into production this month (July), once Pearl Harbor has wrapped, and will be directed by Peter Chelsom, who desperately needs a little love and affection. Hear My Song made him flavour of the month, but his follow-ups have been disappointments: Funny Bones and The Mighty were fairly well received critically but neither did much business.