ONE
MORE NIGHT
Thirty-five years after John Huston chose a sleepy little
Mexican fishing town called Puerto Vallarta as the location for
his Tennessee Williams adaptation, Night of the Iguana,
at least one member of the original team - veteran producer Ray
Stark - is returning for the remake.
In the meantime, of course, Puerto Vallarta has become the Torremolinos
of Mexico - a process which began when Elizabeth Taylor (at
the time still married to Eddie Fisher) began visiting Iguana
star Richard Burton on the set (and, it is reliably reported,
elsewhere). As a result, the remake will be shot near Puerto
Vallarta, on a part of the coast where there are still fishing villages
and not high-rise hotels, with Dennis Quaid in the Burton
role of a New England clergyman who is defrocked because of a sex
scandal and becomes a tour guide south of the border.
The director of the new Night will be Bosnian film-maker
Peter Antonijevic, with whom Quaid made the much-praised
(but little-seen) war drama Savior a year or so ago.
Quaid is also set to star opposite The Thin Red Line's
Jim Caviezel in a time-travel thriller called Frequency,
which Gregory Hoblit is directing for New Line. Caviezel
plays a cop who finds he has a line of communication with his father
(Quaid), who died in 1969 when Caviezel's character was only seven.
YABBA
DABBA DONE
 Readers
will be glad to hear that The Flintstones in: Viva Rock Vegas
rolled on April 12. The sequel has an all-new cast, headed by Mark
Addy, the guy who tried to slim with shrink-wrap in The
Full Monty and was Michael Keaton's buddy in Jack
Frost, as Fred. Kristen Johnston from the first Austin
Powers movie is Wilma. Also along for the trip to the prehistoric
desert oasis are Stephen Baldwin as Barney; Jane Krakowski
(Shut Up and Dance) as Betty; and toast-of-Broadway
Alan Cumming as The Great Kazoo, an alien who occasionally
shows up to help Fred.
 Joan
Collins swings into town in the mother-in-law role which was
patented by Elizabeth Taylor the first time around; and Thomas
Gibson from TV series Dharma & Greg plays Chip
Rockefeller, the richest man in the world. Steven Spielberg
again executive produces, while Brian Levant directs for
the second time. Universal will be opening the movie around the
world next summer.
MINORITY
INTEREST
Tom Cruise continues to keep all the bases covered. Having
moved from the auteurist universe of Stanley Kubrick's Eyes
Wide Shut to planet popcorn (aka Australia) for Mission:
Impossible 2, the Cruiser is now looking to team up with
Steven Spielberg on sci-fi thriller Minority Report.
Having apparently put Memoirs of a Geisha (see Preview
36) on hold until next April, the director is looking to make
what, for him, must qualify as an in-between movie. Neither blockbuster
nor issue picture, neither mega-budget nor relatively cheap, the
$80-million film is based on a story by Philip K Dick, who
has already provided the inspiration for such sci-fi classics as
Blade Runner and Total Recall.
Cruise will play a cop in some future society where crime prevention
has become just what it says it is: his job is to arrest criminals
before they commit the crime. With Cruise due off Mission
by late summer, production on Minority Report could start
as early as this autumn.
Spielberg is also rumoured to be involved in a new version of HG
Wells' classic, The Time Machine, which will be
made under the joint aegis of DreamWorks and Warner Bros (the first
time the two studios have worked together). The last feature-film
version of Wells' story of a Victorian scientist who invents time-travel
was made in 1960, with Rod Taylor in the lead.
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