Recycling Robert Aldrich movies can be a lucrative business. The Longest Yard, the second remake of Aldrich's comedy-drama of convicts playing prison guards in a football game, took over $60 million when it opened in the US last weekend.
It reunites Adam Sandler with Peter Segal, his director on 50 First Dates and Anger Management, and features Chris Rock, James Cromwell, William Fichtner and rapper Nelly.
The cast also includes Burt Reynolds, who starred in Aldrich's original, with Eddie Albert, who died last weekend at the age of 99. The original was released here as The Mean Machine, a title borrowed for a dire UK remake four years ago co-produced by Guy Ritchie and featuring Vinnie Jones, Irish actor David Kelly and the late David Hemmings.
The new version of The Longest Yard, which is set for Irish release in October, is the second Aldrich remake in six months, following Irish director John Moore's Flight of the Phoenix, a reworking of Aldrich's 1965 picture.
Stars swarm London stage
Movie actors are out in force on the London stage at present. Val Kilmer takes the lead in the much-filmed James M Cain adaptation, The Postman Always Rings Twice. Kevin Spacey stars in The Philadelphia Story, which was been filmed under that name and as the musical, High Society. Brian Dennehy plays the tragic Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman. Brooke Shields has joined the cast of the long-running Chicago. Jane Krakowski (the snooping secretary from Ally McBeal) co-stars with Ewan McGregor in a new production of Guys and Dolls. Friends actor David Schwimmer features in one new Neil LaBute play, Some Girls, while Ben Chaplin is in another, This Is How It Goes.
Gael García Bernal features with Rosaleen Linehan in Lorca's Blood Wedding. Aidan Gillen joins Jonny Lee Miller and David Threlfall in the revival of Frank McGuinness's Someone Who'll Watch Over Me. Tom Courtenay stars in Brian Friel's The Home Place, a transfer from the Gate in Dublin. Eileen Atkins, the veteran allegedly wooed recently by Colin Farrell, joins Finbar Lynch (from the TV series, Proof) in The Birthday Party. John Gordon Sinclair, of Gregory's Girl fame, has replaced Lee Evans in The Producers. Lock Stock actor Nick Moran is in The Countess. Rob Lowe is set to star in the play based on the movie, A Few Good Men, which opens later in the summer. And in an adaptation of the 1973 movie Theatre of Blood, Jim Broadbent plays the homicidal ham actor whose victims are all theatre critics.
Harlem hustler
Terry George is planning to reunite with his Hotel Rwanda star Don Cheadle for American Gangster, which George is directing for Brian Grazer and Ron Howard's company, Imagine, as a Universal Pictures release. The film, which came close to going into production last year with Antoine Fuqua directing and Denzel Washington in the lead, deals with Frank Lucas, a powerful Harlem drug dealer who, after his arrest in the 1970s, helped to end the corruption and legal loopholes that allowed him to import heroin from Southeast Asia.
Minghella plans a break-in
Shooting is underway in London on Anthony Minghella's new movie, Breaking and Entering, his first based on an original screenplay of his own since his 1991 debut, Truly, Madly, Deeply. A contemporary drama, the new film is described as "a story of theft, both criminal and emotional". Following The Talented Mr Ripley and Cold Mountain, it's Minghella's third consecutive film to feature Jude Law, who plays a landscape architect whose office is burgled, triggering the drama that spins out into the lives of disparate characters. The movie also reunites Minghella with Juliette Binoche, an Oscar winner for his film of The English Patient, and with Ray Winstone, who also was in Cold Mountain. Completing the central cast are Robin Wright Penn, Martin Freeman and Vera Farmiga. The movie is a co-production between Miramax Films, from which Harvey Weinstein departs in September, and his new outlet, provisionally known as The Weinstein Company.
Who's still here
The two surviving members of The Who, Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend, are planning a documentary on the band's history, My Generation: Who's Still Who. The director, Murray Lerner, made a film of The Who performing at the 1970 Isle of Wight festival, and won an Oscar for the 1980 documentary, From Mao to Mozart: Isaac Stern in China.
Sith sense
Showbiz headline of the week, from Variety on the lead held by Star Wars Episode III at the US box-office: "'Sith' Degrees of Separation".
