BELIEVE it or not, it's musical chairs time once again at the Hollywood studios. Paramount Pictures has postponed production on Tim Burton's Ripley's Believe It or Not, with Jim Carrey cast as the eponymous explorer and newspaper columnist. The film's escalating budget had exceeded $150 million, but Paramount insists that the project will go ahead at a later date. Coincidentally, another Carrey project, Used Guys, in which he was to co-star with Ben Stiller under Jay Roach's direction, has been delayed by 20th Century Fox for budgetary reasons.
Meanwhile, Australian director Peter Weir has departed from Shantaram, citing "creative differences" with Johnny Depp. Along with producing the film, Depp will play an Australian heroin addict who escapes from a maximum security prison, reinvents himself as a doctor in the slums of India and fights against the Russian troops invading Afghanistan. Warner Bros will proceed with the production next spring after a new director is signed.
The result of all these changes is that Burton and Depp are free to collaborate on their sixth film together, Sweeney Todd, based on the Stephen Sondheim musical which was recently revived on Broadway. It earned six Tony nominations and won two awards at the ceremony last Sunday night.
Purple gain
History almost repeated itself when the stage musical The Color Purple received 11 Tony nominations this year. In 1985 Steven Spielberg's film version collected 11 Oscar nominations, but lost out in every category. Last Sunday night the musical fared a bit better, winning a single Tony award for LaChanze as best actress in a musical.
24 hours packed into 2
Plans for a movie spin-off from the TV series 24 have gathered momentum, but unlike Andy Warhol's Empire (1964) the movie will not run for 24 hours. Robert Cochran and Joel Surnow, who devised the TV series, have closed a deal with 20th Century Fox to bring 24 to the cinema screen, and Kiefer Sutherland has declared his interest in reprising his role as Jack Bauer. Production is expected to get underway early next year, after the sixth series starts on US TV in January. It is most unlikely that the plot will play out over a single day, as in the TV series. This will allow the producers to move the thriller on to international locations.
Fox is also planning a movie spin-off from The Simpsons next year, and the studio is considering a second cinema spin-off from The X-Files.
Webcast
CastingsWorldwide.com is a new online casting agency for actors, models and extras, and the first website providing casting information on productions around the world. It will include a phone text service giving daily updates on castings alerts. Log onto www.castingsworldwide.com
In Irish only
The Arts Council, TG4 and Bord na Leabhar Gaeilge are inviting submissions for a series of six half-hour documentaries on contemporary Irish-language literature for the Splanc! series. All six films will be in Irish. The series is open to creative interpretation, and to stimulate imaginative approaches, a workshop will be held next Tuesday at Filmbase in Dublin.
For further information, e-mail splanc@filmbase.ie
A tight fit for Jack
Jack Black plays a friar moonlighting as a wrestler in tights for the comedy Nacho Libre, which opens in the US today and here in August. "This movie was a lot about facing fears for me," says Black, who, despite his ample physique, performed many of his own stunts. "The fear of getting injured. The fear of being in super-tight pants and shirtless. The fear of showing my body, even though I've done tons of underpants stuff in the past. But if I'm embarrassed, that usually means I'm on to something good."
