THERE's quite a lot of interest at the moment in Dublin gangster movies," says James Mitchell of Little Bird Productions in what would seem to be an understatement, given the number of underworld movies that have been mooted in the media recently. While many of those projects are unlikely ever to be filmed, Little Bird is pressing ahead with its gangster project, Ordinary Decent Criminal.
The screenplay is by Gerry Stembridge and it will be directed by Thaddeus O'Sullivan in his fourth drama for Little Bird after December Bride, In The Border Country and Nothing Personal. Hubbard Casting are working on the project now and it will be shot in September.
"It will be a major motion picture financed by prominent American sources together with some Irish sources," James Mitchell told Reel News this week. "We decided there was a cracking good story to be told. We didn't want to do a biopic, but a purely fictional film loosely inspired by the character of The General."
John Boorman and Kieran Corrigan of Merlin Films have acquired the rights to the Paul Williams book, The General, which they intend to shoot in August. Boorman will direct the film from his own screenplay. "We're actively preparing to do the film," he said on Wednesday evening. "I haven't any cast in place yet, but it will be an all-Irish cast and will have an all-Irish crew."
Meanwhile, Michael Sheridan plans to direct an untitled crime thriller developed by himself, Ronan Gallagher and the late Veronica Guerin. Due to shoot here in August, the film will star Winona Ryder and Patrick Bergin. And Jerry Bruckheimer, producer of today's new release, Con Air, told Reel News in Cannes last month that he has assigned a screenwriter to his film based on the GQ article, The Martyrdom Of Veronica Guerin by Mike Sager. Contrary to some media reports that the movie will shoot this summer and will star Jodie Foster, Bruckheimer says that the project is still in script development, that production is down the line and that it's much too early to deal with casting it.
IN a recent poll carried out by the French weekly arts and entertainment magazine, Telerama, Woody Allen emerged as the most popular film-maker of all time among readers from 15 to over 65 years of age. Readers aged between 15 and 20 picked Allen as their favourite, followed, in order of preference, by Quentin Tarantino, Tim Burton, Alfred Hitchcock and Steven Spielberg. Woody was tops again with the 20-30 age group, with Orson Welles second, Martin Scorsese third, Stanley Kubrick fourth and Rrzysztof Kieslowski and David Lynch tied for fifth.
Woody led the poll of 30 to 40-year-olds, ahead of Ken Loach Hitchcock and Francois Truffaut, with Kieslowski again tied for fifth, this time with Pedro Almodovar. The top five with fortysomething voters were, in order, Woody again, Truffaut Fellini, Renoir and Bergman. However, Truffaut topped the poll of the 50-65 age group, followed by Fellini, Hitchcock, Bergman and Woody. And the over-65s opted for Jean Renoir ahead of Woody, Charlie Chaplin, John Ford and Marcel Carne. What impeccable taste the French have, regardless of their age.
THE summer season of open-air screenings in Meeting House Square in Dublin's Temple Bar area begins tomorrow night with Joe Mankiewicz's scintillating classic, All About Eve, which will be introduced by writer and director Gerry Stembridge. The season, organised by Temple Bar Properties, promises Woodstock (June 21st), The Godfather (June 28th),
My Left Foot (July 12th), Gone With The Wind (July 19th) and Jaws (July 26th), with a number of additional screenings yet to be finalised. Screenings begin at 10 p.m. Tickets, which are free, must be obtained in advance from the Temple Bar Information Centre, 18 Eustace Street, Dublin 2.
FROM over 600 applications, the Irish producer, Ed Guiney, is among the eight candidates selected to participate in the film executive development programme, Fast Lane, set up by PolyGram Filmed Entertainment and the EU Media
II Programme. It takes the form of a six-week business training programme based at PolyGram's offices in London and Hollywood. Ed Guiney's films as a producer include Ailsa and Guiltrip, and his next project, The Tale Of Sweety Barrett, to be directed by Stephen Bradley, starts shooting here in the autumn.
THE director Nicholas Hytner will follow The Madness Of King George and The Crucible with The Object Of My Affection, a comedy set in New York and dealing with the relationship between a heterosexual woman (Jennifer Aniston) and her gay roommate (Paul Rudd). The cast will feature Stephen Baldwin, Alan Alda, Tim Daly and as a theatre critic, Nigel Hawthorne (from King George).
TONY Kirkhope, who died in London last week at the age of 49, was one of the most imaginative and risk-taking film distributors anywhere in the world. He started out in the mid-1970s with The Other Cinema, a left-wing London repertory cinema and set up a separate distribution company of the same name which released radical films such as The Battle Of Algiers, Themroc and The Hour Of The Furnaces, along with the films of Chris Marker, Chantal Akerman, Steve Dwoskin and Ousmane Sembene.
In 1985 he opened the distinctively programmed twin Metro cinema in Rupert Street off Leicester Square, and six years later he joined forces - with hamish McAlpine in Metro Tartan, a film and video distribution company which released such notable movies as La Haine, The Last Seduction and Man Bites Dog. In 1989 he and his partner, Eva Tarr, whom he married in 1994, established the wide-ranging Latin American Festival in London.
A witty and immensely likeable man, Tony Kirkhope was a great supporter of the Dublin and Galway film festivals, which he and Eva visited annually to keep in touch with their many Irish friends. He will be missed by all of us.
