Item of the day: Elaine May and husband Stanley Donen have co-written a comedy about filmmaking to be produced by Mike Nichols. A private reading took place recently featuring Christopher Walken, Charles Grodin, Ron Rifkin, and Jeannie Berlin … Larry Clark has been up to his old tricks, this time in Paris, with The Small of Us, yet another movie about skateboarding youth, featuring Michael Pitt and a cast of unknowns. After a troubled shoot last summer in which several cast members were summarily fired and which was described by one producer as “the greatest challenge of [Clark’s] career,” it seems likely to finally surface at Cannes. Let’s hope it’s more Kids than Wassup Rockers … Also headed to Cannes is AndrĂ© TĂ©chiné’s thriller L’Homme que l’on aimait trop, based on the real-life 1977 disappearance of a woman who manages a casino in Nice. Catherine Deneuve and Guillaume Canet co-star …
Otar Iosseliani is starting work on his next film, Chant d'hiver, with the help of France’s advances-on-receipts production fund. Other recipients include Jean-Paul Rappeneau for his project Belles familles; Louis Garrel, whose Les Deux amis will team the writer-director with Vincent Macaigne; and Christophe HonorĂ© … Michael Caine will star in Paolo Sorrentino’s In the Future, a drama about “friendship between two old people” … Abdellatif Kechiche is contemplating another helping of wrenching romantic anguish with a movie version of HĂ©loĂŻse et AbĂ©lard … Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini are currently shooting an adaptation of Eleanor Henderson’s novel Ten Thousand Saints, with Ethan Hawke and Hailee Steinfeld, about a young man (played by Hugo star Asa Butterfield) who moves in with his estranged father in Manhattan in 1987 at the height of the East Village punk scene …
Jim Jarmusch is rumored to be planning an opera, and hopes to be shooting his next feature this fall … Steven Soderbergh is producing David Gordon Green’s made-for-TV film Red Oaks. Let’s hope Green’s Suspiria remake stays on the back burner … Next up for Oculus director Mike Flanagan is Diver, a supernatural thriller about a secret project in which crime investigators enter the minds of the recently dead to experience their final memories … Catherine Deneuve, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Chiara Mastroianni, and BenoĂ®t Poelvoorde co-star in BenoĂ®t Jacquot’s next film, Three Hearts, in a love triangle between a man and two sisters…
And “Most Pointless Remake of the Week” prize goes to Michael Bay for his update of The Birds, relocated to England, the original setting of Daphne du Maurier’s 1952 novelette, and to be directed by the memorably named Diederik van Rooijen. The film’s producers have pledged that the film will be a more faithful adaptation than Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 film, but so far it’s taken seven screenwriters and counting to get there …
