The Irish director Paddy Breathnach is set to follow Ailsa and I Went Down with the $10 million production, Blow-dry, a serious comedy which he will direct in Yorkshire in April. The screenplay by Simon Beaufoy, who scripted The Full Monty, is set during the British Hairdressing Championships. "I really liked the script when I was sent it," Breathnach says. "Like The Full Monty, it deals with characters who have real issues going on in their lives, but it's very funny, too. The characters are very interesting, strong and warm." Offers have gone out to a number of actors and he hopes to have casting in place shortly. The film is financed by Miramax Films and InterMedia, and it will be produced by Ruth Jackson of West 11 Films with Sydney Pollack's company, Mirage Films.
Meanwhile, Treasure Films, the company run by Paddy Breathnach and Rob Walpole, goes into pre-production next week with its next feature project, Still Water, the screen adaptation of Conor McPherson's play, This Lime Tree Bower, which McPherson himself will direct with Walpole producing. The new title is, in fact, the working title under which he wrote the play. Peter McDonald and Brian Cox are the first cast members confirmed for the production, which starts shooting in Skerries, Co Dublin in March. The project is funded by the BBC, Bord Scannan na hEireann, RTE and a Spanish pre-sale. Treasure's most recent project is the Francis Barrett documentary, Southpaw, which opened well at eight Irish cinemas last weekend.
The bad news from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is that Billy Crystal will not be presenting this year's Oscars ceremony. Instead the compere will be Whoopi Goldberg, an Oscar winner herself in 1991 and a just-about-adequate host on the awards show in 1994 and 1996. Still, it could have been worse. They could have brought back David Letterman.
This year's Oscars, scheduled for March 20th, will be preceded by a half-hour scene-setting show presented by another former Oscar winner, Geena Davis, who will cover the arrivals and behind-the-scenes activity.
The Irving Thalberg Memorial Award will be presented this year to the Canadian director, Norman Jewison, whose many credits include In The Heat Of The Night, The Thomas Crown Affair and Moonstruck. And an honorary Oscar will be given to Elia Kazan to mark what the Academy cites as his "long, distinguished and unparalleled career". Kazan won the best director Oscar twice, for Gentle- man's Agreement in 1947 and for On The Waterfront in 1954.
Paul Schrader's film of the Russell Banks novel, Affliction, is the top nominee for the 14th annual Independent Spirit Awards to be presented in Santa Monica on March 19th, the eve of the Oscars ceremony in Los Angeles. High Art, Gods And Monsters and The Opposite Of Sex are among the other multiple nominees for this year's Spirits, which are presented for independent US productions.
John Boorman's The General is one of the five nominees for best foreign film, along with Thomas Vinterberg's Festen (The Celebration), Shohei Imamura's The Eel, Walter Salles's Central Station, and Takeshi Kitano's Hana-Bi (Fireworks). The nominees for Best Feature are Affliction, Claire Dolan, Gods And Monsters,Velvet Goldmine and A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries. Short-listed for Best Director are Wes Anderson (Rushmore), Todd Haynes (Velvet Goldmine), Lodge Kerrigan (Claire Dolan), Paul Schrader (Affliction) and Todd Solondz (Happiness).
Nominated for Best Female Lead are Katrin Cartlidge (Claire Dolan), Christina Ricci (The Opposite Of Sex), Ally Sheedy (High Art), Robin Tunney (Niagara, Niagara) and Alfre Woodard (Down In The Delta). Up for Best Male Lead are Dylan Baker (Happiness), Ian McKellen (Gods And Monsters), Nick Nolte (Affliction), Sean Penn (Hurlyburly), and Courtney B. Vance (Blind Faith). The nominees for Best Supporting Male are James Coburn (Affliction), Charles S. Dutton (Blind Faith), Gary Farmer (Smoke Signals), Philip Seymour Hoffman (Happiness) and Bill Murray (Rushmore). And up for Best Supporting Female are Stockard Channing (The Baby Dance), Patricia Clarkson (High Art), Lisa Kudrow (The Opposite Of Sex), Lynn Redgrave (Gods And Monsters) and Redgrave's niece, Joely Richardson (Under Heaven).
Both The General and Butcher Boy figure among the nominees for the annual awards of the Chicago Film Critics Circle, with both John Boorman and Neil Jordan on the shortlist for Best Director. They are joined on that list by Terrence Malick (The Thin Red Line), Steven Spielberg (Saving Private Ryan) and Peter Weir (The Truman Show).
In the Best Film category, The Butcher Boy has been nominated along with Life Is Beautiful, Saving Private Ryan, Shakespeare In Love, The Thin Red Line and The Truman Show. The young Cavan actor Eamonn Owens is nominated for Most Promising Actor, as are Jim Caviezel (The Thin Red Line), Joseph Fiennes (Shakespeare In Love), Adrian Lester (Primary Colors) and Jason Schwartzman (Rushmore). The Butcher Boy received a fourth nomination, to Elliott Goldenthal for Best Original Score. The awards will be announced on March 1st.
Fresh from co-starring with Emily Watson in Dublin on Alan Parker's film of Angela's Ashes, Robert Carlyle next month starts work on the new James Bond movie, The World Is Not Enough, to be directed by Michael Apted with Pierce Brosnan returning as 007. Carlyle will play Bond's latest nemesis, Renard, a villain rendered immune to pain by a bullet lodged in his brain.
Carlyle will next be seen here opposite Jonny Lee Miller in the anachronistic highwaymen tale, Plunkett And MacLeane, which opens on April 2nd, and soon afterwards in Antonia Bird's Ravenous, in which Carlyle and Guy Pearce play cannibals.
Two young Irishmen who moved to the US earlier this decade launch their first movie at the New York Independent Film Festival in Manhattan's Tribeca cinema next Sunday afternoon. Characters was co-written by Anthony M. Davis, who also produced it, and Bryan Baker, who directed it. They first met when working in the same Manhattan bar and their movie was inspired, they say, by some of the "strange things" they saw while working the bar late at night.
A low-budget comedy, Characters deals with Brian, a bartender played by Bryan Baker, and Edward (Ed Beausang), a social worker as they, in the words of the synopsis, "stumble through life from the head of one creamy pint to the other, in pursuit of true love". They end up falling for the wrong women - in one case, the niece of a local mobster - with comic consequences.
Bray Film Society has a value-for-money special offer of £20 membership, which covers admission to all six films yet to be shown in the current season. Screenings are on Tuesday nights at 8.15 p.m. and include The Sweet Hereafter, Chasing Amy, Mrs Dalloway, L'Appartement, Kundun and Smilla's Feeling For Snow. The venue, which is close to the DART line, is Jim Doyle's Bar on the seafront in Bray. For further information, call (01) 2860682 or 282-1500.
The Boogie Nights star and former rapper Mark Wahlberg is set to play the Bronx-born pop singer Dion DiMucci, of Dion and the Belmonts, in the biopic, The Wanderer, which takes its title from one of Dion's biggest hits. The film will deal with how the singer's life and musical career were marred by heroin addiction.
The screenplay is by the actor Chazz Palminteri, who also plans to direct the film. "It's a story of a triumph of spirit," says Palminteri, whose most recent film role was in Hurlyburly with Sean Penn and Kevin Spacey. Dion's other hits included Teenager In Love, Run- around Sue and Abraham, Martin And John.
Tom Cruise has finished filming a supporting role in Magnolia, the new movie from Boogie Nights director Paul Thomas Anderson, in which Cruise plays a fast-talking television pitchman peddling a videotape that teaches men how to seduce one woman after another.
Cruise, whose role calls for the use of sexually explicit terms, insisted that filming was carried out in strict secrecy and he has stipulated that his billing is no bigger than that of his co-stars Jason Robards and Julianne Moore.
Cruise's next movie will be Mission Impossible II, which shoots in March with John Woo directing and a cast that includes Ving Rhames, Thandie Newton and Dougray Scott.
More and more movie actors are turning to theatre to stretch their creative abilities. Among those performing on Broadway at present are Jennifer Jason Leigh and Alan Cumming in Caba- ret, Nicole Kidman and Iain Glen in The Blue Room, and Martin Short in the musical, Little Me.
Now Christian Slater has joined the cast of Warren Leight's play, Side Man, which deals with how a young musician's obsession with jazz affects his family life. David Strathairn, a regular actor in John Sayles movies, co-stars with Lindsay Duncan in Karel Reisz's production of Harold Pinter's Ashes To Ashes, now in previews offBroadway.
Brian Dennehy, who featured in The Iceman Cometh at the Abbey in Dublin, is joined by Kevin Anderson in Robert Falls's new Broadway production of Arthur Miller's Death Of A Salesman, also now in previews - while Kevin Spacey heads the cast in the marathon production of The Iceman Cometh which played London last summer and opens on Broadway in April.
Matthew Broderick, a Broadway regular, takes the lead in John Tillinger's new production of the Emlyn Williams drama, Night Must Fall, which Karel Reisz filmed in 1964 with Albert Finney starring.
Woody Allen, who recently provided the voice of the principal ant in the animated feature, Antz, is in discussions with Bobby and Peter Farrelly, who made There's Something About Mary, about starring in their next comedy.
He would play one-half of Siamese twin brothers joined at the hip, and the Farrellys are hoping to tempt "someone like Matt Damon" to play the other brother. "Woody's character doesn't have a liver so he's ageing at a horrible rate," says Bobby Farrelly. "So we can get two guys from different age groups."
