CHANNEL 4 will re-launch its pay movie channel, FilmFour, as a free service from July 23rd, but a spokesman says it may have to curtail the number of European films it shows because of a new EU audiovisual media services directive.
FilmFour, which showed films uninterrupted as a paid service, plans to show ads during the movies when it goes free of charge. The EU ruling will restrict ad breaks to once every 35 minutes in televised films, news bulletins and children's programmes.
"Unless there's further relaxation beyond the 35-minute rule, we're going to have to go from a launch commitment of 40 per cent to 10-15 per cent European films," the Channel 4 spokesman said. "The 35-minute rule is supposedly meant to help and protect European films, but it will have the opposite effect. A channel that wants to show European films will be showing far fewer than we would like."
Parker thaws out for Ice
Having turned down any number of projects since he made The Life of David Gale five years ago, Alan Parker is set to direct Ice at the Bottom of the World, an ensemble family drama to go into production in the autumn.
Oscar-winning South African actress and producer Charlize Theron pursued Parker to direct this pet project of hers, which is based on a collection of short stories by Mark Thomas, who has written the screenplay. It deals with a US Navy captain who returns home to find his daughter a heroin addict and single mother. Theron, who has owned the movie rights for over a decade, will take one of the leading roles, and casting is underway for the other key roles.
Tune in, turn on with Leo
Leonardo DiCaprio plans to play Timothy Leary in a movie about the 1960s counterculture icon and LSD advocate that will span over 25 years, from his enrolment at West Point in the early 1940s to his escape from prison in 1970.
DiCaprio is doubling as producer on the movie through his own company, Appian Way, which may or may not have been named after the Dublin street near the Burlington Hotel, where DiCaprio attended the post-premiere party for Gangs of New York. He has hired playwright Craig Lucas, whose film output includes the screenplay for Longtime Companion and writing and directing The Dying Gaul, to work on the screenplay for the biopic of Leary, who died in 1996.
DiCaprio will be back on our screens in November, with Matt Damon, Mark Wahlberg and Jack Nicholson in Martin Scorsese's transposition of Infernal Affairs from Hong Kong to an Irish-American Boston milieu in The Departed.
Invisible Madge
Madonna is making a movie comeback, four years after her last leading role in the wretched Swept Away, directed by her husband, Guy Ritchie. This time she will be off-screen, in the voice cast of Arthur and the Invisibles, the English-language version of Luc Besson's animated feature, Arthur et les Minimoys, based on a book by Besson.
Madonna is joined in the decidedly eclectic voice cast by David Bowie, Snoop Dogg, Mia Farrow, and as Arthur, Freddie Highmore, who played Charlie Bucket in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory last year and is in Disco Pigs director Kirsten Sheridan's second feature, August Rush, now in post-production.
The screenplay's the thing Reversing the longstanding tradition of turning stage plays into movies, theatres on Broadway and London's West End are awash with productions inspired by movies: The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, Footloose, Fame, Tarzan, The Wedding Singer, The Color Purple, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Billy Elliot, Whistle Down the Wind, and The Producers and Hairspray, which were adapted as stage musicals and then again as screen musicals.
Although the stage musical based on The Lord of the Rings has been a loss-maker on its debut run in Toronto, it's set for a June 2007 opening in London. Samuel Adamson's stage adaptation of All About My Mother, which has the enthusiastic support of the movie's writer-director Pedro Alomodovar, is going into workshop sessions in London.
And a play based on Midnight Cowboy, the only X-rated film to win the best picture Oscar, has its premiere at the Edinburgh festival next month before transferring to London.
