I'd say it was about time that Woody Allen hired some eye candy that wasn't of the female persuasion. The Hollywood Reporter announced that Henry Cavill (The Tudors) has signed to star in the director's upcoming romantic comedy. The as-yet-to-be-titled film also stars Evan Rachel Wood, Larry David, and Allen. There are very few details about the story, but according to early rumors, Rachel Wood is playing Larry David's love interest. Apparently, Allen originally wrote the starring role for himself, but now feels too old to take it on. Thus, he'll appear in a supporting role.

Cavill is probably best known to most as Charles Brandon, the Duke of Suffolk, but he has also earned the reputation as being one of the unluckiest guys in Hollywood. Cavill was in the final stages of auditions for Batman, Superman and James Bond. Of course, we all know he didn't get those parts, but he did score the lead in Joel Schumacher's upcoming sci-fi thriller, Town Creek. Maybe now that the offers are starting to come in, Cavill can get a reputation for being something other than an 'almost was.' Allen's film is currently in production in his old stomping grounds (aka New York City) and is set for release in 2009.

Aside from the long-in-the-works adaptation of Good Omens, Neil Gaiman would like all of his works made into movies by Terry Gilliam. He told Empire last week that he would "always give anything to Terry Gilliam, forever." That includes Sandman, which the writer said should be Gilliam's if he wants to do it. Currently, though, Gilliam is shooting an untitled movie about the "band" The Gorillaz, and then he's back to familiar territory with The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, about a travelling theater production, which reunites him with screenwriter Charles McKeown (Brazil; The Adventures of Baron Munchausen) and stars Heath Ledger, Tom Waits, Verne "Mini Me" Troyer and Lily Cole. But according to Gaiman, Gilliam is still trying to make Good Omens, based on the hilariously comic fantasy novel by Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. Gilliam is having trouble getting financing for the project; Gaiman said he needs about $70 million, if anybody is interested.

It is great to see Gaiman have so much faith in Gilliam. After the barely tolerable (I did enjoy it) The Brothers Grimm and the barely watchable (I hated my first Gilliam film!) Tideland, I'm a bit worried about my longtime favorite filmmaker. But I must agree with Gaiman that Gilliam would likely be a better choice to adapt his works than anyone else in Hollywood. Certainly better than Joel Schumacher. Gaiman told Empire that he wants the person directing Sandman to have the same passion that Peter Jackson and Sam Raimi had with The Lord of the Rings and Spider-Man, respectively. And that Zach Snyder seems to have with Watchmen. Would Gilliam have that passion? Is he a huge Sandman fan? Who knows? I guess Gaiman, who also said he'd rather have no Sandman movie than a bad Sandman movie.

Was Roman Polanski's The Fearless Vampire Killers or Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are in My Neck the first vampire comedy? Released in 1967, I caught it on TV much, much later, but don't remember laughing very much. Maybe it's a generational thing, but I seem to recall it had a very arch, theatrical feel that kept me from enjoying it. Coming along twenty years later, Joel Schumacher's The Lost Boys was much more in tune with my sensibilities -- and much funnier, filled with smart-aleck one-liners and tight, bloody action. Recently Netherbeast Incorporated tried to combine comedy with vampires in a corporate setting. The AFI Dallas festival audience was very kind to it, but I thought it was a disaster, with very few laughs. Boy, maybe it is a generational thing, and time has passed me by!

Still, I maintain hope that a future vampire comedy will make me laugh and give me some thrills, which is why I'm writing about Barak Epstein's Blood on the Highway. It's a short film that is currently in production in my home base of Dallas, Texas. Filmmaker David Lowery has posted about it on his blog, Drifting: A Director's Log, and he's sparked my interest with his sheer enthusiasm about working 16-hour days as an on-set editor. He volunteered the use of one of his cameras, "whose duties included being strapped to the hood of a car and driven down the freeway at high speeds. Hooray for reckless shooting! Today, I wound up on the opposite side of the lens, playing a vampire. I got some dialogue and my own pair of bloody fangs and everything. It was awesome." In another post, he described what kept things lively (no fair quoting, you have to visit his page to find out). Blood on the Highway is due out in 2008.

For what could either be his next Falling Down or his next Bad Company, director Joel Schumacher is in negotiations to helm a remake of Johnny To's Breaking News. The project has been set up at Paramount Vantage with Alex de Rakoff (The Calcium Kid) penning the adaptation and Paul Brooks (White Noise) producing. Brooks is currently working with Schumacher on the Nazi vampire movie Town Creek, which Lions Gate will release next year. The original Breaking News is a Hong Kong cat-and-mouse actioner about a police inspector on the trail of a bank robber. The game begins with an embarrassing surrender by the police force, which is broadcast through the media. So, in order to boost the public image of the police, the inspector now needs a publicly aired victory, and he hopes this will happen with his capture of one of the robbers, who is hiding out with an innocent father and son.

Following his recent joke of a movie, The Number 23, and after Town Creek, which I can only imagine will be another bad occult-based pic, Schumacher will be in need of a decent police thriller. The thing about Schumacher is he's fully capable of doing a few awful films and then an occasional good one. I'd much prefer Breaking News to be on the level of Falling Down, and not Bad Company, but I'd settle for it to be another Phone Booth, which was somewhere in between those two. Earlier this year Paramount attached Schumacher to another supernatural movie called Inland Saints, but hopefully Breaking News comes first so the director can have a little rest from the spooky films -- he's not going to deliver another Lost Boys or even another Flatliners anyway, and working in another genre may keep him off the crazy idea that he'd be good to direct a Sandman movie.

According to a report in Variety, Paramount has hired Joel Schumacher -- who recently gave us the Jim Carrey thriller The Number 23 -- to direct Inland Saints. The film will be produced by Lorenzo di Bonaventura and Eli Holzman for di Bonaventura Pictures, the company behind the upcoming films Stardust and Transformers.

The story is described as a supernatural urban drama about love, betrayal and need, and is about teens who fall in love. He's the leader of a dangerous street gang; she's the daughter of the detective hired to bring down the gang. There's no mention of what the supernatural angle might be. The project stems from a pitch by writer Kurt Sutter, who is an executive producer on the FX series The Shield, and will soon be working on another FX series Charming, CA. He has also set up scripts for The Unforgettable and In Crime, and based on his IMDB photo he would be a pretty strong contender in a Fabio lookalike contest.

I really liked Schumacher's 80s vamp-fest The Lost Boys, but I can't say I've cared for anything he's done since. The Variety piece mentions that producer di Bonaventura worked with Schumacher on two Batman films, so the notion that not one, but two people behind the franchise-crushingly awful Batman and Robin are making this flick gives me little reason for optimism.

Director Joel Schumacher recently spoke with a Canadian news service about the next movie he's filming, the Nazi-horror film Town Creek. First of all, "there is blood in it, but it's not really a vampire movie," he says. Schumacher also said the first part of the film will be set in 1936, at the height of Hitler's power, and the second half will be set during the present day, the theme being 'ghosts of the past rising up to confront today's world.' "It's about Hitler and Himmler and Goebbels' association with the occult -- this is what they based the Master Race on." He continues "the one thing about the Nazis is that they so loved themselves that they documented everything, and there are these great documentaries on Hitler's obsession with the occult. So it's a 'horror' movie based on that by a very intelligent young writer."

The writer in question is Dave Kajganich, whose sole prior credit is writing the Nicole Kidman thriller The Invasion. The film will hopefully have some impressive visuals -- the effects are being handled by Ian Wingrove, who has worked on everything from Alien vs. Predator to Mission: Impossible to The Avengers, so it doesn't sound like this is a Merchant Ivory drama. No solid plot points were discussed in the interview, nor were any further casting announcements made -- the current roster includes Dominic Purcell, Jesse Metcalfe and Joy McBrinn. Schumacher fans might also be interested in the rest of the article, which delves into Car Wash, St. Elmo's Fire and Schumacher's unlikely mentorship from Woody Allen.

"All the characters in this book are fictitious, and anyone finding a resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, should proceed no further ..." Disclaimer from the novel 'The Number 23.' Sadly no such disclaimer was given to the beginning of this film, which could serve as a warning to people who might be wanting those two hours from their lives back, should they ignore it and watch the film. Okay, that might be a bit harsh, but not by too much. This film reunites director Joel Schumacher with star Jim Carrey, who both worked over-the-top together in 1995's Batman Forever. Oddly enough (although unrelated) that was the same year that gave us Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls. It would still be a few more years, three to be exact, until we would start to see the serious side of Jim Carrey, in 1998's The Truman Show. Since then he's dabbled in more dramatic roles in films like Simon Birch, The Majestic, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and arguably Man on the Moon, but he has never really managed to capture audiences when he plays a dramatic role the same way he does when he's in a comedy.

In fact, Bruce Almighty grossed more than those four films combined. So, with all that in mind, it might seem strange that Carrey would turn to a much darker role in a thriller like The Number 23. Although on paper the film actually sounds intriguing: a happily married man with a teenage son starts to become unraveled by a mysterious novel his wife gives him one day. It taps into a hidden obsession that some people have with "The 23 Enigma," and he soon becomes obsessed with it. He is also convinced that the book is actually written about him, and that somehow the author used his life as a template for the book. In some of the particularly darker scenes in the film, Walter (Carrey) imagines himself as the main character, Detective Fingerling, in the novel, and his wife Agatha (Virginia Madsen) as the dark and sexy Fabrizia, his love interest. His wife's friend and academic Isaac (Danny Huston) who tells Walter about the 23 enigma is also cast in his dark fantasies as psychologist Dr. Miles Phoenix.

I recently got the chance to sit down for a brief one-on-one with Jim Carrey during a press junket (translate: press torture simulator) for The Number 23. If you've never seen a junket before, they're pretty brutal. They invite dozens of members of the press to show up, give them interview slots with the talent, and then stick to their schedule tighter than KFC sticks to their secret spices recipe. Seriously, if they put the people in charge of scheduling these things in some sort of high-ranking position at the airlines, there would never be a late flight again. It's scary how efficiently they are run.

Now, keep in mind that this wasn't going to be the Ace Ventura Jim Carrey, or the Bruce Almighty one, but the darker and more brooding Jim Carrey -- closer to the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Carrey than any other. I wanted to ask him why his dramatic roles don't perform as well as his comedic ones, but I was worried that he might respond to the question by leaping across the room and tearing my throat out. Of course, this nervousness resulted in me kicking his foot, and finding out that if he was Tommy Lee Jones, I might have been worse for wear.

At any rate, I was ushered into the mysterious hotel room that was decorated in dark motifs for the film, and sat down with what turned out to be a genuinely nervous Jim Carrey. (Because of course, I'm so famous and all, it must have been slightly intimidating for him.) I found him to be real and honest, and he didn't give "canned" Hollywood answers, which I actually half-expected. Maybe the foot-kicking loosened him up. By the way, the Jenny McCarthy questions were "off limits," so I didn't bother asking those. Check out the video, and Jim's long hair, after the jump.

I just got a message from a friend that said: "NOOO!" (with many more O's than that). Why? It seems that Neil Gaiman's beloved comic book series, The Sandman, could fall into the hands of nipply film director, Joel Schumacher. That's right, the man who made Batman one of the biggest jokes in showbiz wants to take on what is one of the most sophisticated and successful comic series out there, or so he told IESB during a junket for The Number 23. It's been over 10 years since The Sandman series ended, and a movie still hasn't been officially attempted. This could be due to the 75 issues of material to choose from, which makes a miniseries or at least a trilogy seem more managable. However, hopeful filmmakers also have to deal with Gaiman himself, who told fans last year at San Diego's Comic Con: "I'd rather no Sandman movie got made than [to have] a bad Sandman movie."

To give Schumacher credit, he has put out some good films like The Lost Boys and Phone Booth, and I enjoyed Falling Down. But they weren't coming from material that has already garnered a large cult following. Even the Potter films, which are in no way nipply failures, get criticized for the directorial choices. I can only imagine the uproar that Schumacher would create. He has enough sense to not be thrilled with the thought of Lost Boys 2, but does he have enough to appease Gaiman and his army of fans?

[via JAM! Movies]

Our pal Jen Yamato recently posted a conversation with Joel Schumacher, and boy did someone know how to get him talking. He's very unnerved at Warner Bros.' idea to take his beloved The Lost Boys and ruin it with a no-budget, direct-to-DVD sequel. "I told them to do 'Lost Girls' and not do 'Lost Boys' sequel," Schumacher said. "There is no Lost Boys' sequel. All the boys are dead. The Lost Boys are all dead. The Coreys are too old. So what would be the movie? You'd have to make up a whole new set of characters."

Schumacher continued: "Do gorgeous teenage biker chicks who are vampires. It'll be great. But they don't listen to me." Schumacher also said that he had been approached to do sequels to other films he's made over the years, with the caveat that they would be made on the cheap if he didn't want to do them up right. "There is no sequel to Flatliners in my mind, but they own those. You don't own them. They're not yours. They did 8mm 2 which we knew nothing about. They slapped the title on a movie that had nothing to do with 8mm."

I completely agree with Schumacher on this score -- Warner Bros. should stop being bloodsuckers and leave our beloved childhood memories alone. The Lost Boys and Flatliners do not need sequels, and they probably wouldn't make much money anyway, so back off.

Dave Kajganich has had a lot of lucky breaks. Originally a teacher from Ohio, he decided to hone his skills by writing a screenplay. From there, it was one swift jump to Tinsel Town. First, he sold his Town Creek spec to Warner Bros. Then, he penned Nicole Kidman's upcoming film, The Visiting. Christopher Campbell reported that the Wachowski brothers were brought in to re-write its ending, but Kajganich is still going strong. He signed on for a Pet Sematary remake and is working with Sam Raimi on Monkey's Paw. Top all those goodies off with a spot on Variety's "10 Screenwriters to Watch", and the man is flying high.

Now, his favourite script and first sale, Town Creek, is preparing to be filmed next Spring. In September, Erik Davis reported that Joel Schumacher signed on to direct the film. Now the main roles have been cast. Dominic Purcell of Prison Break and Jesse Metcalfe from Desperate Housewives will star as the revenge-filled brothers who find themselves part of an occult experiment. I assume that "occult experiment" is another word for "vampire Nazis," or Kajganich did some script re-jigging.

While I'm interested to see Schumacher's first vampiric film since the eternally entertaining The Lost Boys, I'm also apprehensive. Can he make a film without the leads needing to be nipply? Better yet, will it be able to stand out in the influx of German-themed movies lately? And, is it about vampire Nazis or not?!

Y'know how sometimes a funny actor will get hold of a creepy script and envision it as his next step on the way to dramatic credibility? (It happens to Robin Williams a whole lot.) Well, it looks like Jim Carrey's been bitten by the Psychological Thriller Bug, and he's bringing Virginia Madsen along for the ride.

From first-time screenwriter Fernley Phillips and the consistently inconsistent Joel Schumacher, The Number 23 is about a likable schmo who acquires a very rare book, only to discover that -- uh oh -- it's actually the story of his own life! (Dun dun dunnnnnn!) Even a brief and inattentive glance at the trailer will tell you the "the number 23" has a whole lot to do with the spooky goings-on, although I think the flick will stop short of bringing Michael Jordan in for a cameo.

Co-starring Danny Huston, Rhona Mitra and Mark Pellegrino, the New Line release is presently scheduled for a February 23rd release. Yes, 23. Creeeeepy!

Returning once again to the world of vampires, Joel Schumacher (who also brought us the very awesome 80s flick, The Lost Boys), has signed on to direct Town Creek for Gold Circle. Oh, but this isn't your average vampire movie -- it's got Nazis too! In fact, they're vampire Nazis. Okay, the only way I'll shell out ten bucks to see this is if the following dialgoue is featured:

GUY THAT'S ABOUT TO DIE: Check it out, they're Nazis!

OUR HERO: Oh no, my friend -- they're vampire Nazis! Look out, behind you!

Apparently, the story surrounds a West Virginia man who is forced to question his own morals upon rescuing his brother from the evil clutches of a vampire Nazi. See, this family kidnapped his brother in order to feed him to their pet vampire Nazi, which they keep locked up in the basement. Folks, I kid you not -- that's the plot description. Dave Kajganich (who also adapted the upcoming Nicole Kidman film, The Visiting) wrote the script.

Odds and ends from a fairly slow Monday:

• What's better than a film inspired by the true events in the life of Elisabeth and Andrew Shue? How about hearing that Dermot Mulroney has just signed on to play a part? Is that not a fantastic way to start the day? Directed by Elisabeth's husband Davis Guggenheim, Gracie revolves around a young girl who fights to play on an all-male soccer team after her brother dies. Mulroney will play the girl's father.
• I'll admit I haven't been too up on Jim Carrey's upcoming psychological thriller, The Number 23. Taking charge behind the camera will be Joel Schumacher (who I like to classify as a "hit and miss" type of guy) with a story that centers on a dude who becomes obsessed with a book he feels is based on his life. While there's no trailer yet, New Line has released a pretty interesting teaser site that includes a ton of random links to websites based on the number 23. It's odd, but I'm sure there's a pattern there -- I just don't feel like spending all day trying to uncover one. Feel free to tell us what you find. [via JoBlo]
• With submissions up 30% this year and 18 features in competition, the 14th annual Hamptons International Film Festival announced it will kick things off with the world premiere of The Situation, Philip Haas' Iraq war drama. Fest is divided into two categories with six narratives and six documentaries competing for Golden Starfish Awards and another six taking part in the Films of Conflict and Resolution competition. The Hamptons International Film Festival runs from October 18-22.

For his follow-up to the tepidly received comedy Fun with Dick and Jane, Jim Carrey will make one of his periodic forays into the world of drama, as the star of Joel Schumacher's The Number 23. The film, described as "psychological thriller," is the story of a man who, upon reading an "obscure book" called The Number 23, becomes convinced that the book is about him. His obsession with the book and number escalates "to the point that he...realizes that the book forecasts far graver consequences for his life than he could ever have imagined." Oooooh.

Despite the fact that the IMDB lists the film as completed, it's only just finalizing its cast and won't even start shooting until Monday. Though Elisabeth Shue was originally cast as Carrey's wife, she's about to be replaced (presumably because she's pregnant) by Sideways star Virginia Madsen. Also just added was Rhona Mitra, who will play "Suicide Girl," a character from the book.

While the story sounds potentially interesting, the presence of Schumacher is a wild card at best - when was the last time he made a tight, solid thriller?

[via Cinema Blend]