THE WHOLE NEW HOLLYWOOD SHOW

He satirised not so much the day-to-day reality as the very essence of television with The Truman Show. Now he’s looking to do the same thing to Hollywood in an as-yet untitled screenplay which New Line is going to make and in which Al Pacino is expected to star.

The ‘he’ in question is New Zealand-born writer/director Andrew Niccol, who scripted Truman and directed the sci-fi thriller, Gattaca, which he also wrote. The new movie, which Niccol will produce and direct as well as writing, is apparently a kind of serious Bowfinger, about a failed producer trying to make a major Tinseltown comeback. It’s currently known only as ‘The Hollywood Project’.
Like Gattaca, it will involve Danny DeVito, Michael Shamberg and Stacey Sher of Jersey Films, who had been working on another Niccol screenplay, River Road, which would have been made at Columbia. The ‘Hollywood Project’ now reportedly leapfrogs that one to the front of Niccol’s queue.
Hollywood movies about Hollywood have always been popular, but they have seen something of a revival in recent years, encompassing complete turkeys like An Alan Smithee Film (aka Burn, Hollywood, Burn), critically acclaimed satires like Wag the Dog (which was as much about Washington as it was about the movie capital) and John Waters’ recent Cannes selection, Cecil B. Demented. Niccol’s movie, meanwhile, is reportedly on the fast track at New Line and could be in production before the end of the year.

SOFTLY CATCHES CHEN

Every time he had a film in selection at Cannes (which has been more often than not over the past decade), there has been talk about ‘fifth generation’ Chinese director Chen Kaige making an English-language feature. Ironically enough, however, it was on one of his off years - Cannes 2000 - that this finally looked most like happening.

Mind you, Miramax announced last year that he would be making a movie version of the Martin Cruz Smith novel, Rose (which he hasn’t). And then there was the report that he would direct the film of A Tale of Two Cities, in which Mel Gibson was set to star...

This time, however, it all looks more likely: the director - who spent some time in New York in the early eighties, where he shot a number of music videos before returning to China to concentrate on feature films - will start work this autumn on Killing Me Softly, a thriller with strong erotic undertones, in which Heather Graham is expected to star.

It is based on a novel by Nicci French (the pen name of British journalists Nicci Gerrard and Sean French) about a research scientist who has a normal, happy relationship with her live-in boyfriend but who starts an affair with a stranger who has a very dubious past. The scientist is British in the novel. But, with Graham playing the role, she is now likely to be American.

LEWIS LURED BY TRUFFLES

And finally, it may not be true that the French are alone in thinking Jerry Lewis a genius (I myself have been known to make a pretty strong case for the original Nutty Professor: Lewis’ Buddy Love is on a par with anything Eddie Murphy managed 35 years later). But it is certainly fitting that the 74-year-old American comic’s first film in nearly a decade (not counting a cameo appearance in the aforementioned Murphy remake) will be set in France.