We can expect a slew of new music-related biopics on subjects as diverse as Keith Moon, Liberace, Sammy Davis Jr, Giacomo Puccini and Gustav Mahler. Brad Silberling, who made City of Angels, is developing a movie on the late Who drummer Keith Moon, with the full co-operation of the band's surviving members. Nicolas Cage, who starred in City of Angels, has already offered his services to play one of the band, declaring, "I am Pete Townshend!".
Before making that film, Silberling is set to direct Baby's in Black, dealing with a man who falls in love again after his fiancee is murdered. Silberling wrote this personal project in response to the murder of his own fiancee, the 21-year-old actress, Rebecca Schaeffer, by a stalker.
Director Philip Kaufman is set to follow his imminent movie on the Marquis de Sade with a biopic of Liberace - pipping Tim Burton who has long planned to make a movie about the same flamboyant entertainer, with Johnny Depp in the leading role. Kaufman has yet to cast the star of his film, which will follow Wladziu Valentino Liberace from his emergence as a child prodigy at the age of 11 to his death in 1987.
The Puccini biopic will be directed by William Friedkin, who made The French Connection and The Exorcist, and will star Placido Domingo as the composer. The screenplay is by Luciano Vincenzoni, who wrote The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and Marta Domingo, the singer's wife, and it will focus on Puccini's life between the years when he wrote Madame Butterfly and The Girl of the Golden West.
Meanwhile, Jonathan Pryce is to portray Gustav Mahler in Bride of the Wind, Bruce Beresford's film about the composer's wife Alma, who will be played by Sarah Wynter. Filming begins in Vienna next month.
And casting is about to begin on a movie dealing with the controversial inter-racial love affair between Sammy Davis Jr and Kim Novak. Based on a Vanity Fair article, it will be directed by Earle Sebastian, who has made pop promos for Bono and Madonna, among many others.
Brenda Fricker co-stars with Anna Friel, in War Bride, which starts shooting on April 24th, and is a factually based story dealing with two London women who marry Canadian soldiers during the second World War. Moving to Canada while their husbands go to war, they find themselves faced with hostilities in this drama to be directed by Lyndon Chubbock.
All award winners at the BAFTA ceremony last Sunday, Sam Mendes's American Beauty, Pedro Almodovar's All About My Mother and Damien O'Donnell's East is East are the nominees for best foreign film in the Italian equivalent to the Oscars, the annual David di Donatello Awards, which will be presented next Wednesday evening. With nine nominations each, the front-runners for awards in the key categories for Italian films are Ricky Tognazzi's romantic drama, Canone Inverso, which stars Hans Matheson, Melanie Thierry and Gabriel Byrne, and Silvio Soldini's comedy, Bread and Tulips, featuring Licia Maglietta.
From more than 100 entries, Terenure College in Dublin took first prize in the Irish Schools Video Competition at last week's Fresh Film Festival in Limerick. The winning entry, The Jock Club and the Mellon Collie Death of Eugene Nerdlinger, deals with organised bullying and was directed by Anthony Kinsella. Second place went to Cryptic Youth Drama Group/Balbriggan Youth Development for Voodoo Barber, and Sanity Deferred Productions from Kenmare came third with Prognosis Negative.
Further to some recent items in Reel News: three Irish directors - not two - were nominated for last Sunday's BAFTA awards. In addition to Damien O'Donnell, who won best British film for East is East, and Neil Jordan, winner of the adapted screenplay award for The End of the Affair, Billy O'Brien was nominated in the best animated short film category for The Tale of the Rat That Wrote.
The recent Woody Allen film, Sweet and Lowdown, finally has a distributor here and in Britain - Columbia TriStar Films will release it on June 9th. And in response to a number of inquiries regarding the recent story about the allegedly controversial Bo Gusse, please note that this story was devised for publication on April 1st.
Michael Dwyer can be contacted at mdwyer@irish-times.ie