After more than 15 years in gestation, The Mayor of Castro Street, based on the book by the late Randy Shilts, is set to go into production with Bryan Singer directing from a screenplay by Brandon Boyce, who scripted Singer's Apt Pupil, a Stephen King adaptation.

The film will chronicle the life and death of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man elected to any significant political office in the US when he became a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. A fellow board member, Dan White, assassinated Milk in November 1978, and the story formed the basis of the Oscar-winning 1985 documentary, The Times of Harvey Milk.

The Shilts adaptation has been through many hands down the years. Oliver Stone was set to make it with San Francisco resident Robin Williams cast as Milk, until Stone withdrew after drawing flak for his portrayal of gay characters in JFK. Among the directors said to have circled the project were Gus Van Sant, Rob Cohen and the late Brian Gibson, along with actors Daniel Day-Lewis, Kevin Kline and Richard Gere.

On the Australian set of Superman Returns, Singer says he has been passionate about making the Milk film for over eight years. He added that the late Marlon Brando will feature as Superman's father Jor-El in the new movie, in footage purchased by Singer from the 1978 Superman featuring Christopher Reeve in the title role.

Bar room brawler

Russell Crowe has been speaking out about Killing Russell Crowe, a play now running in Los Angeles. Written by Jeremy Kehoe, it features a barman and a customer fantasising about killing Crowe as a representative of the privileged classes, and then Crowe arrives in the bar and beats them up.

Crowe objects to the depiction of him as someone who neither pays for his drink nor tips the barman. That "drains the last drops of credibility from this desperate plea for attention," he said. He also told the Australian paper, the Herald Sun, that "somebody who writes a play about American iconography and power systems, and uses somebody born in New Zealand and living in Australia as their icon, is a tosspot."

Short and sweet

Irish filmmaker John Corcoran has won the award for best director of a short film in the international category at the New York International Independent Film and Video Festival. His film, Virtues of a Sinner, was the only Irish short selected for the festival. Its theme is described as "the process carried out by God's angel and Satan's angel when they need to decide the fate of deceased souls, using childish tit-for-tat tactics that ultimately fail when they meet their last soul."

The cast features Ned Dennehy, Karl Shiels and Pat McGrath. It was produced as part of a training programme run by Screen Training Ireland and brought together with remarkable speed. Under severe time constraints, Corcoran wrote the film on a Friday, cast it over the weekend, crewed and designed it on the Monday and shot it on 35mm two days later over the course of just nine hours.

Give a dog a good name

Although Alfred Hitchcock famously observed that actors should be treated like cattle, there are endless awards opportunities for actors, but none for cattle in movies, as far as I'm aware. There is, however, the Palm Dog, presented for the fourth year at Cannes last weekend. The eponymous greyhound in Irish movie The Mighty Celt was a nominee, but was pipped to the post by a small Mongolian shepherd dog in the Cannes market presentation, The Cave of the Yellow Dog.

Paris-based film journalist Toby Rose, who initiated the award, was on the jury along with, among others, Tartan Films supremo Hamish McAlpine and critics Jonathan Romney and Derek Malcolm, who commented: "There were a lot of dogs at Cannes this year." There is a strong case for cats to be given an equal opportunity for awards, given that there were some fine feline performances on show at Cannes this year - chiefly the cat who expresses a low view of the Bill Murray character to Jessica Lange's animal communicator character in Broken Flowers, and the clever cat adopted under different names by the British and French forces in the wartime drama, Joyeux Noel.

mdwyer@irish-times.ie