The women have been really hard to come by -- at least when The Women in question is a remake of the 1939 classic. (What is it with the year 1939 lately?) MGM was first focused on the project, but no real headway was made and the title was sold to Ted Turner as part of MGM's library. He, in turn, bought New Line and made the film a starring vehicle for Julia Roberts and Meg Ryan, with James L. Brooks signed on to direct (1994). It was at this point that Diane English was brought on to the production, a writer known for her work on Murphy Brown. It took a handful of years and then she was named director of the project in 2001. It took another 5 years to get further, when Matt Bradshaw posted about the cast of the film, which consisted of Meg Ryan, Lisa Kudrow, Anne Hathaway and Candice Bergen. It was supposed to start shooting in March, but nothing happened when Spring rolled around.

Now Variety has the scoop on The Women, which almost has a finalized cast, and has gotten an actual start date -- August 6 -- over ten years after the adaptation was put in the works. Some of the cast has stayed the same, and some have changed. Along with Ryan and Bergen, actresses in final talks are Annette Bening, Eva Mendes, Jada Pinkett Smith and Debra Messing. That's really one hell of a cast considering that the film has got a budget under $20 million. One of the backers is Dove, you know, the soap? When the film begins to be marketed, I imagine there will be lots and lots of soap-centric commercials with these leading ladies. As for how the title is translated over 60 years later, word has it that English's "script maintains the arch spirit of the original, and the all-female cast, but the gals aren't as relentlessly catty this time around." It is, however, still about the group of female friends and how one's husband is cheating on her.

I don't think any jokes are necessary here -- Lindsay Lohan backing out of a film titled A Woman of No Importance is funny in and of itself. According to her rep via People, La Lohan has simply been taking on too many roles as of late and "doesn't want to just yes everyone and compromise herself anymore." In the pic, she would have starred alongside Annette Bening (who was supposed to co-star with Lohan in Freaky Friday until she dropped out) and Sean Bean.

Honestly, with all her medical problems, so-called addictions and tardiness issues, it's probably best that Lohan take a little bit of a break; not including A Woman of No Importance, the girl currently has three films (Speechless, The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond, The Best Time of Our Lives) in pre-production, one filming (I Know Who Killed Me) and one (Georgia Rule) she will soon need to promote. Oh, and that's not counting her potential involvement in that apocalyptic horror flick, as well as a Steve Nicks project. Damn, no wonder she's a mess.

Right now, there's no word on a replacement for Lohan (might I suggest someone a little less controversial -- Dakota Fanning, perhaps?). A Woman of No Importance is based on the Oscar Wilde play, will be directed by Bruce Beresford (Driving Miss Daisy) and is due out sometime in 2008.

Bestselling author Augusten Burroughs has seen his memoir, Running with Scissors, ride the New York Times bestseller list for over two years; now, the book has been adapted to a film, starring Annette Bening as Burroughs' mentally ill mother. Burroughs was in Seattle recently to promote the film, and graciously sat down with Cinematical to chat about the book, the movie, and what's up next for him. Burroughs was impeccably dressed, soft-spoken at first but more animated once we broke the ice. He was by turns thoughtful, funny, and introspective, elegant and articulate -- as you might expect from a man who boiled and polished his coins to make them shiny when he was a child. The one giveaway to the inner nervous energy hovering beneath the calm surface was his nonstop nicotine gum habit ("Quitting smoking?" I asked upon seeing the skeletons of several packs of nicotine gum in the trash. "Oh, no, I quit years ago," he replied casually, as he popped a piece of gum in his mouth.)

Cinematical: Talk to me about the process of making the book into a movie. I know you were very creatively involved throughout, can you talk a little about how that all came about?

Augusten Burroughs: I first met Ryan in a restaurant in a hotel in Soho . I was meeting him, actually, to tell him that I wasn't optioning Running with Scissors. I just didn't have any confidence that Hollywood was going to get it right. I was kind of worried that the humor I'd used as a coping mechanism to survive my childhood would end up being the focal point of the movie, that it would end up being very campy or kooky.

If you didn't know better, you might find it hard to believe that the things that happen to young Augusten Burroughs in the film Running with Scissors actually happened -- and yet, they did. The film opens at a pivotal point in Augusten's life: His mother's decline into madness. When your mother is mentally unstable, your father is an emotionally walled-off alcoholic, and the two of them spend most of their time together embroiled in violent fights that end in threats of murder or suicide, it doesn't make for the most stable of childhoods. Augusten, who worships his mother and tries patiently to get the attention of his father, compensates by being a painfully neat child.

He obsesses over his hair being perfectly conditioned and styled, he dresses nattily in jackets and sweater vests, he decorates his mother's dog, Cream, with aluminum foil, and he boils his allowance and then polishes it with silver polish. When you're a kid whose adult support system is out of control, you take your stability where you can find it, and so Augusten carefully controls those things that are within his limited power.

Over at The Hollywood Reporter on her Risky Business Blog, Anne Thompson informs us that all the buzz after the LA premiere of The Queen was about Helen Mirren and an inevitable Oscar win, and notes that the Miramax folks on hand looked like "deer in headlights" at the chatter. No one wants to be the early front-runner for the Oscars, then you have to try to sustain momentum over a long while.

Thompson gives the film a detailed, positive write-up, which might just be enough to compel me to see it. When first I heard "movie about the Queen after Diana died," I thought "Lifetime Movie." I'm glad to hear that the end result sounds pretty good, because I do like Helen Mirren a lot. However, of the actresses that seem most likely to garner a Best Actress Oscar nod, my chips are still on either Kate Winslet for Little Children or Annette Bening for Running With Scissors -- both powerful performances. I'm still holding out hope that Maggie Gyllenhaal might get some love for her performance in Sherrybaby, too. And don't discount the possibility of Penelope Cruz for Volver, which will surely be a front-runner for Best Foreign Pic and might just get a Best Director nod to boot.

Yeah, I know, it's early to be talking about Oscar buzz, and really, who cares, anyhow? And yet, Cinematical and every other film industry site out there will relentlessly cover the Oscars, won't we? Who's in front? Who's going to get a nom? Who will have the best cleavage? The hottest date? Okay, so those of you who care (and heck, even those of you who don't): Who's your early pick for Best Actress? Will it be Mirren as the dowdy Queen? Kate Winslet as the depressed stay-at-home-mom/adultress? Bening as the tragical nutcase of a mother? Cruz as the woman whose dead mother comes back? Or will someone else come from behind and leap into a nomination and maybe even a win?

Best-selling author Augusten Burroughs, whose memoir Running With Scissors has been adapted into a film starring Annette Bening and Jill Clayburgh, already has another film deal in the works -- for a book he hasn't even finished writing yet. Burroughs notes on his website that he is writing a memoir about his father, which -- although not even written yet -- has been optioned by Universal. Red Wagon, the prodco behind Jarhead and Memoirs of a Geisha, will produce. Universal bought the rights to a book that doesn't yet exist, says Burroughs, all because they heard him talk about his father and believed in his passion. Burroughs says of the deal, "People complain - endlessly, it seems - about "Hollywood" and the quality of "Hollywood" pictures. But here we have some of the biggest names in the business, going forward with a project only because of the passion of the author. Is it a risk? Technically, yes. To buy something before you've even seen it? Yes, that's a risk. But it's only by taking risks that we get to the really, really good stuff in life."

I just saw Running with Scissors this week (review to come at the end of the month), and if Burroughs' book about his father is anywhere near as good as Running with Scissors and his other work, I could get pumped about it. I suppose it's a little naively hopeful to feel excited about a film adaptation of a book that's not yet been written, but what can I say? I'm a lit geek and a film dork; you put those two things together, and my heart goes all a-flutter. Burroughs was closely involved creatively with the film adaptation of Running With Scissors. I wonder if he'll get Ryan Murphy to direct again, and whether Joe Cross will reprise his role (assuming Burroughs will be a character in the yet-to-be-written source material). Burroughs' fans will also be glad to know that in addition to all this writing of books and creating of films, he's also developing a new weekly, hour-long series for Showtime.

Tonight, the Icon Awards will be distributed to five sensational women in Hollywood by Premiere Magazine. Specifically, the awards will go to Cate Blanchett, Sofia Coppola, Sally Field, Annette Bening and Evan Rachel Wood. In the interests of cinematic justice, I'd like to provide a little fair and balanced context for each recipient:

Ms. Blanchett -- Obviously, the high point of her career at this moment is her dead-on portrayal of Katherine Hepburn in The Aviator, for which she deservedly won an Oscar. I reluctantly cite The Missing for balance, not because she was bad in it, but because the movie can only be described as desperately cheesy, and I wonder what convinced her to do the project after reading the script.

Ms. Coppola -- I think we're all in agreement regarding the high point of her career so far, but I'd like you to note I have high hopes for Marie Antoinette (confessing I've yet to see it), because the trailer is so ebullient. To balance the context, I direct you to her bit part as Kathleen Turner's little sister in the otherwise delightful, infinitely re-watchable Peggy Sue Got Married. (She was a drag in another of daddy's projects a few years later -- one that doesn't count, and is not the third film of a trilogy, but rather a tragic epilogue to two masterpieces).

Odds and ends from Wednesday:

• Production Weekly reports that Meg Ryan may replace Annette Bening as Antonio Banderas' co-star in the previously reported flick Homeland Security. Currently, there's no word on why this change is being made, though I imagine it probably has something to do with scheduling conflicts. George Gallo will direct off his own script, which is said to be a "mystery in the tradition of Alfred Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief."
• Finally, there's some good news regarding the planned Pink Panther sequel that we're all just dying to wrap our arms around and love forever and ever. That's right, Beyoncé Knowles will not be reprising her role as Xania in part two. (I'll wait a minute while you high-five those people crowded around the screen. Um, you do gather people around the computer when you read Cinematical, right?) According to Moviehole via Sky News, the pop singer-turned-actress rejected the role because she's too busy planning her next album. Yeah, and I have to take a shower once a week ... but you don't see me complaining.
• It's hard to knock this next story because we're talking about a worthy cause here. As part of a promotion for Ashton Kutcher's upcoming film The Guardian (in which he co-stars alongside Kevin Costner), Kutcher will donate one dollar for the first 50,000 people that ask to be friends with the actor on his MySpace page. All proceeds will go towards post-Katrina rebuilding efforts. MySpace is slowly becoming a studio exec's wet dream, as a number of actors and filmmakers (see: Kevin Smith) are beginning to use the website to market their films. Yeah, so head on over to this dude's MySpace page and help provide someone with a better life. Heck, it can be your Mitzvah for the day. [via JoBlo]

In a rare bit of weekend casting news, Production Weekly reported last night that Antonio Banderas and Annette Bening (which, for some reasons, strikes me as a vary odd pair) will play the lead roles in Homeland Security -- not to be confused, mind you, with Homeland Insecurity, a Robert J. Siegel-penned comedy spec recently picked up by Miramax. The film is being called "a mystery in the tradition of Alfred Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief," a description that, if it's actually accurate, could be promising indeed. There's nothing wrote with pretty people flirting over a robbery or two, right? The problem, of course, is that when today's Hollywood tries to follow that path, the results tend be things like The Real McCoy and Entrapment, so it's anyone's guess how this one will turn out.

The film was written and will be directed by George Gallo, a man who, though he is to blame for the "story" behind Bad Boys and the screenplay for Double Take, also wrote Midnight Run, which is a very good thing indeed. Production is set to begin in Louisiana this fall.

The latest in casting news from Cannes:

• Laura Dern has joined the cast of Tenderness, the Russell Crowe-starring indie flick we told you about last month. The movie takes on the unsettling subject of a teenage serial killer and his romantic entanglement with a damaged runaway girl. Crowe plays a cop who tries to figure the kid out; it's not clear what role Dern will play. The movie begins shooting this week in New York.

• Sean Mathias is directing Colossus, based on Ann Harries' Manly Pursuits, a novel about the Boer War. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the film's scored a pretty impressive cast, considering that its budget is a relatively small $15 million: Colin Firth, Rachel Weisz, Ian McKellen and Susan Sarandon are all on-board. Though it's not yet been announced which roles the stars will play, the movie "tells of ailing arch-colonist Cecil Rhodes' [probably McKellen] belief that he can only recover his health if he can hear the sound of English song birds outside his window in Cape Town." Get this: Someone is sent from England with 500 freaking songbirds. When he gets there, he falls in love and decides he needs to stop the Boer War from happening. Ah, if only all men in love would immediately resolve to end wars -- what a lovely world this would be.
  

• Oscar Wilde is coming back to the big screen, this time in the hands of Janusz Kaminski, who is directing an adaptation of A Woman of No Importance. Set to begin filming this fall, the movie is about "an ambitious young man, Gerald Arbuthnot, who introduces his prospective employer, Lord Illingworth, to his mother." Because this is Wilde, it turns out the man has a bit of a history with the mother, and in fact is Gerald's dad. Oops. Set to star in the film are Annette Bening, the ubiquitous Lindsay Lohan and the under-appreciated Sean Bean. Thank the lord someone is letting Bean do something funny -- he's been sporting a macho glower for, like, two decades.