Denzel Washington will receive a $20 million fee for a movie, even though Universal Pictures has now cancelled the production.
Washington and Benicio Del Toro both signed "pay-or-play" deals for American Gangster, which means that they have to be paid their full salaries if they do not take up other film work over the period when the cancelled picture was to be shooting.
However, this does not apply to stage work, so Washington will pocket the full salary while he appears as Brutus in a Broadway staging of Julius Caesar - set to open in March - for which he will receive the lowly stage actor's wage of $1,200 a week.
McGuckian on Fleet Street
On Tuesday this week, Irish writer, producer and director Mary McGuckian began shooting her fifth feature film, Rag Tale, which is set in the ruthless world of British tabloid newspapers.
The impressive international cast includes Jennifer Jason Leigh, Malcolm McDowell, Simon Callow, Lucy Davis, Kerry Fox, Rupert Graves, Ian Hart, David Hayman, Bill Paterson and John Sessions. In the film, the paper's tyrannical chairman and his obsequious editor, who is sleeping with the chairman's wife, battle for political supremacy, using staff journalists as pawns in their power games.
McGuckian previously made Words Upon the Window Pane, This Is the Sea, Best and the yet-to-be-released The Bridge of San Luis Rey, starring Gabriel Byrne, Geraldine Chaplin and Oscar winners Robert De Niro, Kathy Bates and F. Murrray Abraham.
More honours for 'Rwanda'
Having triumphed over 250 other movies to take the prestigious audience award at the Toronto Film Festival in September, Irish writer-director Terry George's Hotel Rwanda, starring Don Cheadle, last weekend scooped the audience award at AFI FEST, the Los Angeles International Film Festival, winning out over such popular attractions as A Very Long Engagement, The Sea Inside, House of Flying Daggers, Bad Education and Les Choristes. The audience award for best documentary went to Wash Westmoreland's Gay Republicans.
Hanks signs for 'Da Vinci'
Still on the New York Times hardback best-sellers chart after 86 weeks, and the subject of some debate on the letters pages of this newspaper, Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code is moving closer to a film version now that Tom Hanks is in negotiations to play the central character, a professor who unravels the mystery of the Holy Grail. Hanks has been chosen by director Ron Howard and producer Brian Grazer for the film, which they intend to shoot next year for Columbia Pictures. Akiva Goldsman, who scripted Howard's Oscar-winning A Beautiful Mind, is working on the screenplay.
Hanks earlier worked with Howard and Grazer on Splash (1984) and Apollo 13 (1995). His new film, The Polar Express, opens here on December 10th. Howard's latest movie, The Cinderella Man, a boxing drama starring Russell Crowe, opens next summer.
Cave pens Aussie western
Singer Nick Cave turns screenwriter with The Proposition, which is described by its producers as "a powerfully gripping story with a truly epic sweep". Now shooting in Australia, the film deals with outlaws in the 1880s and stars Guy Pearce, Ray Winstone, Danny Huston, John Hurt and Emily Watson. The director is John Hillcoat, who made Ghosts of the Civil Dead.
mdwyer@irish-times.ie
