Warner Bros's Clash of the Titans remake is fast taking shape with Ralph Fiennes in advanced negotiations to play the lord of the underworld, Hades. To be directed by Louis Leterrier, the film is described as a reimagining of the Greek myth of Perseus, as per the trade magazine Variety. Liam Neeson has already signed on to play Zeus. Neeson lost his wife, the actress Natasha Richardson, in a skiing accident last month.
When a Hollywood veteran called a friend to ask if he had seen the front cover of the Los Angeles Times last week, he wasn't referring to the earthquake in Italy or Barack Obama's latest movements. In Tinseltown, there was only one story on everyone's mind: Peter Bart, the long-time editor-in-chief of the entertainment industry magazine Variety, being named vice president and editorial director of the paper. It was an announcement that meant, many hoped, Bart had finally been "kicked upstairs".
Bart, who is famous for his weekly Memo To columns, which hand out unsolicited and often critical advice to Hollywood's elite, thus found himself on the receiving end of some of his own best advice, not to mention some collective Schadenfreude gathered over 20 years at the paper. In one column, the Los Angeles Times writer Patrick Goldstein wrote a witty "Memo To: Peter Bart", while others delighted in concluding that recent rumours about Bart falling on the wrong side of the paper's publishers, Reed Elsevier, were true. The editor Tim Gray has been put in charge of news operations and no longer reports to Bart. One insider who begged to differ was one of Bart's former writers who now works for a rival publication. "Nothing happens at Variety without Bart wanting it to happen," she said.
Hollywood and American politics have always enjoyed a special relationship. Think of the late US President Ronald Reagan graduating to the country's top job following a career in acting, or The Terminator's Arnold Schwarzenegger becoming the governor of California. Now Kal Penn, one of the stars of the hit television show, House, has quit his glamorous day job to work for the White House. Penn will serve as the associate director of the public relations office where he will focus on forging alliances with the Pacific Islander and Asian-American communities. Penn was born in New Jersey but his parents are both Hindu Gujarati immigrants from India. As for political pedigree, his grandparents reportedly marched with Gandhi for Indian Independence. Penn's character was suddenly killed off from the show last week in an apparent suicide - a common ploy for television productions that need to work in a quick exit. Penn worked tirelessly as a campaigner for Obama, according to reports.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Al Pacino has been tapped to play Napoleon in Betsy and the Emperor, a long-gestating project on the French emperor's last years in exile. Based on Staton Rabin's children's book of the same name, the film will be produced by Christine Vachon's Killer Films, and is set to begin production this autumn. John Curran will direct.
Manhattan's predominantly downtown Chinese community will be heading uptown to the prestigious Lincoln Center, which is running a spotlight on Chinese contemporary cinema from April 24-26. The programme opens with the Korean-Chinese director Zhang Lu's Chongqing and Ying Liang's The Other Half. The series will also present several Chinese films that are unlikely to make it past China's stringent censorship regulators back home.
Proving that bad times generally bode well for the movie business, the North American box office has enjoyed its biggest Easter weekend on record, bringing in $137 million (Dh503m) from Friday to Sunday, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The previous Easter record was set in 2002 with a total take of $132.1 million (Dh485m), according to the data tracker Nielsen. The top-grossing film was Disney's Miley Cyrus-starring Hannah Montana: The Movie at $34 million (Dh124m). Second place went to Universal's Fast & Furious with DreamWorks' Monsters vs. Aliens coming in third.
Jeff Goldblum and Diane Keaton are joining the cast of the Paramount comedy Morning Glory. The film follows a TV producer (Rachel McAdams) who tries to save a failing television show from its feuding hosts (Keaton and Harrison Ford). Goldblum will play McAdams' boss. JJ Abrams (Star Trek) is producing with Roger Michell (Notting Hill) directing, according to Variety.