Article
In brief: Attack on foreign film system at Oscars
Plus: Nintendo plans film production arm, Quaid to star in Cooley biopic, and The Fog to descend again
Hollywood producer and Academy member Samuel Goldwyn Jr has attacked the rules governing the best foreign film category at the Oscars - which say that only one film can be nominated per country, and a movie must have been made in the country providing its backing. "The system doesn't work," Goldwyn told the Los Angeles Times. "The academy's job is to pick the best foreign-language picture of the year. But what happens when two of the best pictures of the year are made in France? Or suppose you had Italy's The Bicycle Thief and La Dolce Vita in the same year. It would be criminal if you could only pick one." Among films already disqualified because they were made in countries other than that which would be nominating them are Pedro Almodovar's Bad Education, Walter Salles' The Motorcycle Diaries and Jean-Pierre Jeunet's A Very Long Engagement.
Nintendo is preparing to be the first video-game company in the world to establish a film production unit - with the company likely to open an in-house arm developing animated features based on its GameBoy and GameCube games. The company intends to begin work on their first production in the near future, Japanese papers report, with a view towards theatrical release in 2006. Until now, Nintendo's involvement in the movie business has been limited to licensing its characters to US studios for production there: the company's Pokemon inspired a series of commercially successful features for Warner Bros, while Super Mario Bros gave rise to a rather less well-received movie in 1993.
Dennis Quaid is to write, direct and star in a biopic about the notorious 1940s band leader Spade Cooley, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Cooley was convicted of killing his wife in front of their teenage daughter while living in the Mojave desert in 1961; he then spent the remainder of the 60s in jail, before being released in 1969 to perform at a benefit concert in Oakland, California, at which he suffered a fatal heart attack. Quaid is slated to play Cooley himself, with Katie Holmes in negotiations to star as his wife.
British director Rufus Wainwright is to direct a remake of John Carpenter's seminal 1980 horror movie The Fog, says the Hollywood Reporter. Wainwright, whose credits include 1999's Stigmata, starring Patricia Arquette, was due to direct an adaptation of Annette Curtis Klause's novel Blood and Chocolate, but is now expected to leave that project.