Jodie Foster
Photo by: Myles Aronowitz
By: Romeo San Vicente*/Special to TRT–
Jodie Foster gets married to the mob
The next time you see Jodie Foster in front of the camera it’ll be in District 9 director Neill Blomkamp’s 2013 sci-fi epic Elysium with Matt Damon. And though her own directorial career has hit its share of potholes lately with the disastrously received (and, frankly, fairly underrated) The Beaver, Foster has a new direction: television. She will executive produce and direct a female-fronted mafia drama for Showtime titled Angie’s Body. Written by Rob Fresco (Heroes, Jericho), all the available information indicates that this is The Sopranos if they were run by Carmela instead of Tony. Now, that may sound gimmicky, but in a post-Sopranos world, we need something entertainingly mafia-based and right now the best we’ve got is Mob Wives. Now if Foster will just tell us for sure if she’s the star of the show and we’ll be all in.
Hugh Jackman joins Lee Daniels MLK drama
Precious director Lee Daniels had a couple of period Civil Rights Movement dramas in the hopper, Selma and The Butler, as his follow-up to the Oscar-winning film. But then he made The Paperboy with Zac Efron and Nicole Kidman instead. (The one where, yes, really, she urinates on him and apparently it’s completely unhinged and they hated it at Cannes – coming soon to a theater near you.) So now it’s back to the drawing board of the 1960s, this time with a different story called Orders to Kill, starring Hugh Jackman as controversial attorney William Pepper, a man who argued for decades that James Earl Ray, the convicted assassin of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., wasn’t the man behind the crime (his belief: the United States government did it). Hopefully it’ll all come together and be received enthusiastically in the wake of The Paperboy’s eventual success. Lee Daniels did not just pay us to say that. Promise.
Finally, a David Sedaris movie
David Sedaris has, over the past 20 years, turned into one of America’s most beloved humorists (though he’s spent most of that time living in Europe – look, the food really is a lot better in France). So you’d think that in all that time somebody somewhere could have gotten one of the author’s hilarious, first-person stories shaped into a decent script with some funding. This, however, has not taken place, mostly because the author himself is legendary for saying no. Until now. C.O.G., based on a story from Sedaris’s best-selling collection Naked (about his time working as an apple-picker in Oregon), will begin production in October with young filmmaker Kyle Patrick Alvarez behind the camera. Alvarez already won the “Someone To Watch” Independent Spirit Award for his 2009 film Easier With Practice and his dogged determination to win over the reluctant author paid off with Sedaris’s blessing and cooperation. Now, who’ll play his sister Amy?
Such Good People casts such a lot of gay people
This might sound more like the casting of the latest round of Hollywood Squares, the all-homosexual version, but it’s not. It’s something a little more mysterious than that. It’s a film called Such Good People and it’s being billed as “a gay screwball comedy.” It has its own Facebook page and Twitter account, both of which just went up this month. And it has a cast of almost exclusively lesbian and gay names: Michael Urie (Ugly Betty), Lance Bass, Sandra Bernhard, Bree Turner (Grimm), stand-up comic Alec Mapa, Jon Polito (The Big Lebowski), Drew Droege (aka the internet’s own “Chloe Sevigny”), Mitch Silpa (“Flight Attendant Steve” from Bridesmaids) and Randy Harrison (Queer as Folk). What else is it about? Nobody knows; that’s why it’s kind of mysterious. So if you want to pretend you’re the Sherlock Holmes of film production and spy on the process unfolding in real time, just go link up to the movie on social media. You’ll know everything before the official press releases get underway.
* Romeo San Vicente’s whole life is a gay screwball comedy. He can be reached care of this publication or at DeepInsideHollywood@qsyndicate.com.
