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The original was a sci-fi classic with a script by one the genre’s greatest writers, Richard Mathieson (probably best known for futuristic vampire tale I Am Legend, which Ridley Scott was trying to remake with Arnold Schwarzenegger a few years back). The 1957 version has already been spoofed once, in 1981, as The Incredible Shrinking Woman, with Lily Tomlin playing three roles and Joel Schumacher directing.
Odds are that the Murphy version, which will be directed for the Nutty teaming of Universal Pictures and Imagine Entertainment by Peter Segal - whose most recent outing was with the gross-out comedy Tommy Boy, starring the late Chris Farley - will also take a comic approach. Those of us who remember the genuine frissons provoked by Grant Williams (as Scott Carey) battling with a giant moggy in the original may quietly shed a tear. But we’ll probably be laughing all the way home, too.
Towards the end of March, one of the British ‘quality’ papers ran two shots side by side: one was of Johnny Depp in the title role of Edward Scissorhands; the other was of the romantic poet Alfred Lord Byron. Linking the two was a vaguely outraged headline noting that the former was in line to play the latter in a future biopic.
Think, then, what the British tabloid press could make of plans for Depp to play another historical English character more closely linked to at least some bits of Edward Scissorhands: Jack the Ripper.
The Hughes brothers, Albert and Allen, are planning to make the movie for Fox, and are understood to be in negotiations with Depp to play the role of the mysterious murderer who terrorised the East End of London at the close of the century before last. The Ripper has been featured more times on the screen than I could begin to list here, but one can be pretty certain that the Hughes Bros - whose most recent outing was the controversial documentary American Pimp - would not err on the side of gentleness in depicting his distinctive way of despatching his victims, not least because the basis for the screenplay is understood to be a graphic novel by Allan Moore and Eddie Campbell.
If the film gets made in this form, it will be the first time that the Hugheses and Depp have worked together. An earlier plan for the actor to portray Howard Hughes in one of several biopics currently on various burners around Hollywood, seems to have fallen by the wayside.
Meanwhile, the repressed world of Victorian England also seems to be on the mind of Independent Pictures boss Cary Woods, since he has just greenlit a screen adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray.
The film will be updated and set in modern-day Hollywood, where the story of a never-ageing star who keeps a secret portrait showing his true age hidden in an attic shouldn’t be too hard to believe. The director will be Alexander Payne, who recently won a WGA Award for his much-acclaimed movie Election, which he co-scripted (with Nate Goodman) and also directed. The duo will team up again on the Wilde adaptation. Payne has got one other project to do first - either Side Ways for Artisan; or About Schmidt, starring Jack Nicholson, for Columbia - so the Dorian Gray movie won’t be rolling before the end of the year.
It may not have shifted a lot of lucre among les rosbifs (which is what the French call us when they’re feeling the way about us that we do about them when we call them ‘frogs’), but Astérix and Obélix contre César - released in the English-speaking world as Astérix Versus Caesar - was a huge hit in France (where it took $52 million against an estimated production budget of $48 million), and a medium-sized hit elsewhere in Europe (about $45 million). So a follow-up - the movie business apparently doesn’t like the word ‘sequel’ at the moment - was always on the cards.
Although the series’ creators, René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo were, in fact, Belgian, the original movie, despite the presence of Roberto Benigni as Caesar, was a very French affair, with Gérard Depardieu and Christian Clavier in the lead roles. Clavier, in case you are scratching your xenophobic heads, is almost as big (in the box-office sense) as Depardieu on his home turf, having starred in the two Visiteurs films. And they still hold most of the box-office records in France, despite the extraordinary recent performance of another film-with-the-same-title-as-an-earlier-one, Taxi 2.
Anyway, the irascible, diminutive Gaul and his monument-toting sidekick are scheduled to go back in front of the cameras towards the end of the summer, when production starts on Astérix et Cléopatre. Clavier and Depardieu will be returning to the fray but, at time of going to press, there was no word on who would be playing Cleopatra. I guess if the first film had been a worldwide hit, we could have expected a Hollywood actress for the one-that-came-after. But it wasn’t, so my money would be on Monica Bellucci.
Astérix et Cléopatre will film in France, Morocco and Malta. Veteran French director Claude Berri will again produce, with actor Alain Chabat taking over from Claude Zidi behind the camera.
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