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Casting News from Middle Earth
(and Elsewhere)
Forget those rumours - aired here in the last issue - that Sean Connery might be playing Gandalf in Peter Jackson’s three-movie version of The Lord of the Rings. He isn’t: Ian McKellen is. The juve lead has also been cast. Frodo, whose quest links the three books in Tolkien’s trilogy, will be played by former child star Elijah Wood, seen most recently in The Faculty and Deep Impact. Currently, he’s just off Shiny New Enemies, in which he appeared opposite Salma Hayek and Jeff Goldblum.
The original hobbit, Bilbo Baggins, meanwhile, will be played by Ian Holm; Liv Tyler recently signed on as Queen of the Fairies; and veteran British horror star Christopher Lee will play the traitorous Lord Saruman of Isengard, who shows up in Book Two and is finally abandoned to the Ents by Gandalf. Production is due to get under way next month (October), which is when spring arrives in New Zealand.
Another long-cherished project - John Singleton’s remake of blaxploitation classic Shaft - is also firming up by leaps and bounds. Joining Samuel L Jackson (who was always pretty much first choice for the title role) is Christian Bale, who will play the killer of the young woman whose murder sets the movie in motion. Shaft is trying to track down the only eyewitness. So is the killer.
It will be quite a change of tone for Bale who, prior to 1999, was best known for playing innocents in a wicked world (The Secret Agent, Preaching to the Perverted, All the Little Animals, The Velvet Goldmine). Whatever else they do, American Psycho (in which he stars) and Shaft should broaden his range a little. Also featured in Shaft will be rapper Busta Rhymes (who was in Singleton’s Higher Learning)
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Jackson, meanwhile, will additionally headline action/comedy The 51st State, which is to be directed by Hong Kong’s Ronnie Yu. The story of an American drug dealer caught up in the Liverpool underworld, the script is one of those fairytale success stories. Writer Stel Pavlou, who was working in an off-license (liquor store to non Brits) in the North of England, wrote it in his spare time, then sent it off to Tim Roth. Roth was busy with his own projects but passed it on to Jackson, who liked it enough to commit to produce it as well as star in it.
Heavy Metal
Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has been absent from the screen for quite a while (but will be back up there this Thanksgiving in Universal’s supernatural thriller End of Days), has earmarked a new superhero role for himself as the pulp magazine character Doc Savage. He will play Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze, which Castle Rock will produce for Warner Bros but which is not likely to go into production this side of the millennium.
Still to be worked out is whether the film will have one director or two. Both Chuck Russell (whom we mentioned on these pages in the last issue as the man most likely to direct Jim Carrey in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty) and writer-turned-director Frank Darabont (whose Tom Hanks-starrer, The Green Mile, will be out in the US the week before Christmas) are attached to the project. They may team up as joint directors, or one may direct and the other produce. We’ll see.
Whatever happens, the Schwarzenegger-powered Doc Savage is unlikely to bear much resemblance to the low-budget 1975 film of the same title, in which Ron Ely played the metal man. That was sci-fi legend George Pal’s final production credit, and it ended up so out-of-tune with the decade into which it was released that Warners tried to market it as a camp spoof.
Times have changed since then, of course, and early 21st-century audiences are likely to have less difficulty accepting what was, when it first appeared in comic form in the thirties, basic no-nonsense entertainment stuff. Given that the Depression was at its height (the first Doc Savage comic came out in 1933), creator Lester Dent made his hero a millionaire philanthropist (not unlike the later Bruce Wayne or, for that matter, the slightly earlier Shadow), whose superhero activities were enabled by his wealth and fuelled by his implacable belief in truth, justice and the American way.
Austria’s No 1 film export, meanwhile, is staying with Marc Abraham and Armyan Bernstein of Beacon Pictures - which produced End of Days - for a remake of Budd Boetticher’s classic 1956 western, Seven Men From Now. For those agog at the idea of Arnie climbing up the side of a horse, however, I should add that the story - which, in its original, had Randolph Scott’s sheriff tracking down the bandits who had killed his wife - has been updated in the remake’s screenplay, which was written by Paul Schrader.
Incidentally, whatever Arnie’s fans might have you believe, other movie stars have been born in Austria, Klaus Maria Brandauer among them. And, while the latter’s post-Mephisto career may never quite have hit the same heights, the actor has recently established quite a niche playing real-life characters. Brandauer it was who, in this summer’s hit HBO biopic Dorothy, played director Otto Preminger to Halle Berry’s Dorothy Dandridge. Now, in the first of two biopics shortly to be released in France, he plays the Dutch artist in Rembrandt, directed by Charles Matton, with Johanna ter Steege as his wife, Saskia.
Brandauer will then down brushes to play the father of the Russian revolution, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, in a Finnish-Russian co-production, Belief, Hope and Blood. Half the film - the Finnish half - has already been shot. But the Russian bit is proving more difficult to set up: not only does the subject matter remain potentially explosive, but the financial crisis in Russia makes setting up any production a dicey business.
Belief, Hope and Blood is more about Lenin the man than Lenin the leader, with the early part of the story (and subsequent flashback) focusing on a love affair he had in Finland, where he was hiding out in 1907. Maria Yarvenhelmi plays his Finnish lover, Marjatta, who was the mother of his child, with Igor Muzhzhukin appearing in the already-shot scenes as the young Lenin. Brandauer will take over when the time-frame of the film moves to Moscow in 1919. Actor/director Nikita Mikhalkov also stars in a unspecified role, guaranteeing that the film will arouse even further controversy in Russia.
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