Next Tuesday, July 4th, is Independence Day in the US, but at the Taormina Film Festival in Sicily it will be Irish Day. The festival's theme this year is Made in English and each day the event will focus on the films from a country where English is the principal language. The Taormina Arte Diamond Award, a precious diamond-studded jewel courtesy of De Beers, will be presented to a distinguished actor or film-maker from each of those countries.
Liam Neeson has been selected as the Irish recipient of the award and three of his films, chosen by the actor himself, will be shown - Ethan Frome, Schindler's List and Michael Collins. The Irish Day will also include the world premiere of Peter Sheridan's The Borstal Boy, featuring Shawn Hatosy, Danny Dyer, Michael York and Eva Birthistle, and Gerard Stembridge's About Adam, starring Stuart Townsend, Frances O'Connor, Charlotte Bradley and Kate Hudson.
The other national representatives to be feted include Jane Campion (New Zealand), Peter Weir (Australia), Stephen Frears (Britain), Darrell James Roodt (South Africa) and Melanie Griffith (US). The 46th Taormina Film Festival opens tomorrow night with Mission Impossible II, which will be attended by its star Tom Cruise and director John Woo.
One of world cinema's most adventurous and most staunchly independent producers, Saul Zaentz, will give a masterclass for Irish producers at the IFC in Dublin on July 11th. Zaentz has won the best picture Oscars three times - for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Amadeus and The English Patient - and he is executive producer of Peter Jackson's current production of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The fee for the masterclass is £35 and applicants should contact the organisers, Screen Training Ireland, at Canal House, 563 South Circular Road, Dublin 8, or e-mail: film@fas.ie
Ireland's first mobile cinema, Cinemamobile 2000, is set to take to the road, and Celine Curtin, a television producer and former manager of Galway Film Centre, has been appointed as its director. The project is funded by the Government's Millennium Committee, along with RTE, the Arts Council and the Irish Film Board. A pilot programme, held in October 1996, visited places along the Border with a programme of recent Irish films, and the organisers report that audiences were "enthusiastic about the comfort and the visual and audio excellence" of the 100-seater state-of-the-art Cinemamobile. There are three mobile cinemas in France and one in Scotland.
The Oscar-nominated actress Terry Moore, who was married to Howard Hughes from 1949 to 1956 and wrote the 1984 book The Beauty and the Billionaire about their relationship, is working on a script about the reclusive tycoon. Moore, an Oscar nominee for Come Back Little Sheba in 1952, claims she is frantically fending off calls from Hollywood stars wanting to play him. George Clooney, John Cusack, Nicolas Cage and John Travolta are among the actors who have expressed interest in playing Hughes, she says, adding that Travolta even bought Hughes's old plane, while Cage told her he has been taking flying lessons. Film-makers who have considered bringing the Howard Hughes story to the screen include Michael Mann, who has been working on a project with Leonardo DiCaprio, and Warren Beatty.
Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen's company, Clear Blue Sky Productions, is preparing a six-part mini-series on blues music, for which Martin Scorsese will be executive producer. Each instalment will be directed by a feature film-maker, and those already signed are Michael Apted, Wim Wenders, Charles Burnett and Marc Levin. Scorsese is also considering directing an episode for the series.
The Screen Actors Guild (SAG) reports that its active members earned $1.52 billion under SAG contracts in 1999 - an all-time record. However, once again men got the lion's share of the fees, earning $982.7 million compared with $539.5 million for women. The disparity is partly explained by the fact that there are more men in the guild than women - 49,827 men and 34,651 women. Men, however, also make more than women on average. The average woman earned $15,570 while the average man earned $19,723.
Men also out-earn women in all but one age group, though the disparity is virtually non-existent in performers under 30. Girls aged nine and under were the only females to earn more than their male counterparts. Last year, girls in this age group earned $14.6 million, compared with the $14.2 million for boys.