PERISH the thought - Diana Ross hopes to kick start sporadic movie career, with an Americanised version of Jean Jacques Beineix's wonderful 1981 movie, Diva; after a year's negotiations, Ross's production company, Anaid, acquired the remake rights.
Remake madness continues with Before The Rain director Milcho Manchevski lined up for a remake of Hitchcock's Dial M For Murder, scripted by Patrick Kelly and with Nicole Kidman tipped for the Grace Kelly role. Another Patrick Kelly project is a remake of Louis Malle's first feature, the 1957 Lift To The Scaffold, to be directed by Lee Tamhori, who made Once Were Warriors. And producer Dawn Steel is developing what's described as "a freewheeling take" on Wim Wenders's Wings Of Desire, itself the subject of a freewheeling take by Wenders himself in Faraway! So Close.
INSPIRED by the very first public screening - which took place in the Grand Cafe on the Boulevard des Capuchines in Paris on December 28th, 1895 - Cinema 100 will present a special Grand Cafe evening at the Powerscourt Townhouse in Dublin next Friday night. A similar event was very successful at the Cork Film Festival last year.
The Powerscourt programme will include a selection of early cinema from Ireland and all over the world, including the Lumiere brothers' 1895 programme - the films actually presented at the first cinema show. A narrative will accompany the programme and will lead the audience through the early years of a century of cinema. Piano accompaniment will be provided by Richard McLaughlin of Cine Chimera, whose fine work graced the Cork event last year, are £7.50.
Tickets for the evening are £7.50 each. For further information, call (01) 679-3477.
JOHN SAYLES has been signed by James Cameron's Lightstorm Entertainment to write and direct an adaptation, of Patrick Anthony's science fiction novel Brother Termite, about an alien humanoid race fighting prejudice on Earth. Sayles's The Secret Of Roan Inish, filmed in Donegal three summers ago, finally goes on release here this summer, while his new movie, Lone Star, is screening in the Director's Fortnight at Cannes this month.
Francis Ford Coppola, who chairs this year's Cannes jury, is set to direct the movie of John Grisham's best seller, The Rainmaker, in the autumn. Meanwhile, with Danny Boyle passing on directing Alien Resurrection, Jean Pierre Juenel, who co directed Delicatessen and The City Of Lost Children with Marc Caro, has taken over as director. Sigourney Weaver, as the resurrected Ripley, will co star with Winona Ryder.
Director David Fincher will follow his riveting Seven with the thriller The Game, featuring Michael Douglas as a high powered businessman and Jodie Foster as his daughter who gives him a gilt of a mysterious new form of entertainment, The Game, an all consuming contest with no rules. By the time he realises that he's in too deep, it's already too late to get out.
Michelle Pfeiffer and Jessica Lange will co star in A Thousand Acres described by PolyGram as a heart wrenching family saga of a father and his daughters, and their tribulations as sisters and wives, with family secrets too long hidden". It will be directed by the Austialian, Joyce Moorhouse, who made Proof and whose first US film, How To Make An American Quilt, opens here in June.
Pfeiffer is also set to play the artist George O'Keeffe in the biopic, O Keeffe, to be directed by Gregory Hoblit, whose thriller Primal Fear opens here on May 4th. And Sylvester Stallone - who badly needs a hit after The Specialist, Assassins and Judge Dredd makes a rare expedition into the realm of the low budget movie with the Miramax pictures Copland, to be directed by James Mangold, who made Heavy.
FOUR feature films and seven television films are included in the new round of projects from the BBC Single Drama Department. The four features are: Stephen Poliakoff's The Tribe, dealing with present day inner city cults and alternative lifestyles in Britain and starring Joely Richardson, Jeremy Northam and Anna Friel; Udayan Prasad's My Son The Fanatic, written by Hanif Kureishi and set among an Asian family torn apart when one of them discovers Islam; Paul Pawlikowski's Deadline, in which a young political innocent gets caught up in corruption during Russia's presidential election campaign in the summer of 1996; and Kevin Wong's Peggy Su, a romantic comedy set in a Chinese laundry in 1960s Liverpool.
The television films include the new Graham Reid screenplay, Into The Light, a BBC Northern Ireland production which is set in present day Belfast and is now shooting there. It stars Amanda Burton as a woman intent on finding and wreaking vengeance on the man who murdered her husband 12 years earlier. John Woods directs the film, which will be shown on BBC 2 next month.
And Troy Kennedy Martin makes his return to the BBC for the first time since the riveting 1985 series, Edge Of Darkness, with Boomer, the true story of a nuclear submarine disaster.
ENTRIES are invited for the fifth annual Jesuit Film and Video awards before the deadline of July 31st. With over £4,000 in prizes, the awards are open to 18 to 25 year olds, or anyone attending a third level college. Entries should deal, with the theme of Social Justice in Irish Society and awards will be presented in the following categories - best drama, best documentary, best Irish language entry, best use of contemporary Irish music and best use of traditional Irish music.
For further information, contact the Jesuit Communication Centre, 36 Lower Leeson Street, Dublin 2.
