Stroll through the usually crowded confines of Hollywood’s favorite watering holes Orso, Campanile and The Grill and you can feel an almost palpable tension as the writers’ and actors’ strikes loom closer and closer.
Executives pull you aside and ask what you’ve heard. Producers try to explain the baffling gap between the Writers Guild’s estimate of how much its demands are likely to cost (under $100 million) and the studios’ version (over $1 billion). And all of them admit to a creeping terror that production will soon grind to a halt, and so will many of their jobs.
Given this, it was almost a relief to hear any buzz at all this week even the not-so-positive buzz that several crew members working on MGM’s “Hart’s War” were mugged by locals while shooting in Prague until star Colin Farrell sent his attackers flying.
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On the legal front, director Francis Ford Coppola’s battle with Warner Bros. over his aborted “Pinocchio” project took a stunning reversal when the California Court of Appeals reversed an earlier award of $80 million in Coppola’s favor. Coppola maker of “The Godfather” trilogy had sued Warner, claiming that the Time Warner division wrongfully prevented him from making a live-action “Pinocchio” with Columbia Pictures, after he had developed a similar project with Warner. Now, with his $20 million in compensatory damages and $60 million in punitive damages gone, Coppola has to decide whether to appeal or let the matter die.
Three other major directors were extremely active this week. Mike Nichols, something of a legend in Hollywood, where he is known for hits from “The Graduate” to “The Birdcage,” signed a deal to develop new material for HBO quite a coup for the cabler, where Nichols just made the acclaimed Emma Thompson TV movie “Wit.”
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Ed Zwick an Oscar nominee as producer of “Traffic” signed on to work with fellow nominee Tom Hanks in “Khe Sanh,” a 20th Century Fox drama about a priest in the Vietnam War. The picture, which Hanks will produce and possibly also star in, is being scripted by Hanks’ “Cast Away” collaborator (and former Newsweek editor) William Broyles Jr. It is unclear if Hanks will star or just do behind-the-scenes chores on the film.
Lars Von Trier, the controversial Danish director behind “Breaking the Waves” and “Dancer in the Dark,” lured Nicole Kidman to star in his latest venture, the $10 million “Dogville,” a drama set in a small American town in the 1930s. The picture almost certainly won’t be shot in any small American town, since Von Trier is travel-phobic and hasn’t ever set foot in the United States.
Not that Von Trier need worry about that any time soon. Like almost every other project around, “Dogville” is on hold until after the dreaded strike.
Contributing columnist Stephen Galloway can be reached via e-mail at [email protected].
