Walt discovers Mary Poppins, Julia takes a run at the White House and Paula gets a new mission

NO PEOPLE LIKE SHOW PEOPLE: Okay, I admit, Cabin In The Woods is not for me. Okay, hardly anything in the woods is.  But here’s a movie I want to see, even if they haven’t started shooting it yet, Tom Hanks and Emma 

THOMPSON: will she play P.L. Travers?

Thompson are in talks to star in Saving Mr. Banks, a behind the scenes look at the making of Mary Poppins. Hanks would play Walt Disney and Thompson would play Mary Poppins creator P.L. Travers … Paula Patton, so good with Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, is being wooed to join Mark Wahlberg and Denzel Washington in 2 Guns. Sounds good to me … legendary Air Farceur Don Ferguson will interview ex-CBC VP Richard Stursberg at the launch of Stursberg’s new book The Tower Of Babble next week at The Gladstone Hotel — $5 or free with the purchase of a book. For more

LOUIS-DREYFUS: new series

info, click here … and former New York Times critic and columnist Frank Rich is one of Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ executive producers on her new HBO comedy series Veep, in which she plays the vice-president of the United States. The potty-mouthed series is set to premiere on both HBO and HBO Canada this Sunday, and for a saucy sneak peek, click here.

FLYING BENEATH THE RADAR (SO FAR:)  Fresh from his stint in The Hunger Games, big screen favourite Donald Sutherland is taking another crack at TV with Pan 

SUTHERLAND: pilot project

Am’s Mike Vogel and a new pilot called Living Loaded … Tate Donovan, so good with Glenn Close in Damages until he got whacked in season three, is co-starring with Victor Garber in the new Meagan Good pilot, Notorious … John Stamos plays an ex-con who attempts a reunion with his half-brother in his pilot, Little Brother …  Bradley Whitford’s new pilot, The Asset, is a spy drama that revolves around a female agent in the New York office of the CIA (hasn’t anyone in Hollywood seen Covert Affairs?) … Rick Schroder, who just turned 40 (OMG! How did that happen?) co-stars with Angela Bassettin

SCHRODER: OMG, he's 40!

her new still-untitled spy-vs.-spy drama pilot …  Kevin Bacon plays an ex-FBI agent who leads the search to catch a diabolical serial killer (James Purefoy) who has created a cult of serial killers, in his still-untitled new thriller pilot … Cuba Gooding Jr. plays a disbarred defense attorney in his new pilot Guilty … Vampire Diaries alumnus Matt Davis plays an investigative journalist blogger in his new pilot, Cult …  in her new pilot First Cut rising star Mamie Gummer plays a new doctor who discovers that, sadly and comically, life at the hospital where she works is no different than high school … and the storyline for another new pilot, The Selection, sounds strangely familiar.  It’s described as an epic romance set 300 years in the future which centers on a poor young woman who is chosen by lottery to participate in a competition to become the next queen of a war-torn nation at a crossroads.

Wow! … wonder who came up with that one.

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 …

Eric gets Gordoned, Justin gets Facebooked, Ottawa gets Chaperoned & Broadway gets Carrie

NO PEOPLE LIKE SHOW PEOPLE: New Emmy-owner Justin Timberlake has joined the cast of The Social Network, director David Fincher and writer Aaron Sorkin’s take on the invention of Facebook …

TIMBERLAKE: Facebook friend

Heather Locklear, one of the stars of the original Melrose Place, will reprise her role on the current re-invented series … stage and screen favourite Eric Peterson, already slated to pick up an Earle Grey Award later this month at the Geminis, will receive the 2009 Gordon Pinsent Award Of Excellence this week when The Company Theatre fetes him Thursday night at the Windsor Arms. Seamus O’Regan and Allan Hawco will co-host the gala evening … and speaking of excellence, award namesake Pinsent plays the Archbishop in The Pillars of the Earth, the epic drama based on Ken Follett’s bestseller, currently shooting in Hungary and Austria. Also appearing

PETERSON: getting Gordon & Earle

in key roles are Ian McShane and Donald Sutherland.

FOOTLIGHTS: Mimi, or A Poisoner’s Comedy, the controversial new Allen Cole-Melody A. Johnson-Rick Roberts musical, continues its ribald run at the Tarragon Theatre … Bob Martin’s Tony-winning hit musical The Drowsy Chaperone tap-dances into Ottawa next week for a two-week run at the National Arts Centre … Carrie Fisher opened her one-woman show, Wishful Drinking, at Studio 54 last night. Sez Fisher: “Basically, I talk about myself behind my back.”
 Her Broadway stint will run ‘til January … and Monty Python alumni Terry Jones, Michael Palin, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle and John Cleese are set to appear in a rare reunion at the Ziegfeld Theater next week. Did you know that the Pythons have

FISHER: on stage

their own YouTube channel? Seriously! … and tickets are now on sale for the new National Ballet Of Canada season, which kicks off next month with the perennially lavish Sleeping Beauty. To check out the new NBOC season, just click here.

OUR TOWN: The 14th edition of Eat to the Beat, benefitting Willow Breast Cancer Support Canada, takes over Roy Thomson Hall tomorrow night with culinary creations from more than 60 chefs,  including the Food Network chef Anna Olson, Fiona Lim of George and Dufflet Rosenberg of Dufflet Pastries. And you can still buy a ticket! For more info, click here … also tomorrow night: Royson James moderates a Toronto Star panel discussion on what it takes to create a workable city, with Susan Eng, Kevin Stolarick, Sudz Sutherland and Rahul Bhardwaj, at the new Bram & Bluma Appel Salon at the Toronto Reference Library … Jack Rabinovitch and jurors Russell Banks, Victoria Glendinning and Alistair MacLeod will announce this year’s Giller Prize finalists tomorrow morning at the Four Seasons … and yes, those still-sensational Jersey Boys are still winning standing O’s every night at the Toronto Centre For The Arts.

Will U.S. movie buffs get to see Creation? Will India’s film fans get to see Cate & Hugh? Will Rick Hansen survive Rick Mercer? Stay tuned!

NO BIZ LIKE SHOW BIZ: India has halted location filming of the Cate Blanchett– Hugh Grant drama Indian Summer because the government

CATE: Lady Mountbatten

reportedly fears the movie will portray the rumored love affair between Lady Edwina Mountbatten and national icon Prime Minister Nehru … despite a stellar performance by Paul Bettany as Charles Darwin, this year’s TIFF opener, Creation, hasn’t found an American distributor because the theory of evolution is considered “too controversial” for the United States. Ah yes – as the French say, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose … despite its catchy title, the sci-fi series Defying Gravity couldn’t. ABC has already dropped it, and CTV is shuttling it to its satellite Space station … on the other hand. David

CRONENBERG: defying all odds

Cronenberg’s 1986 remake of the 1958 classic The Fly not only inspired an opera but has also inspired 20^th Century Fox to ask him to do it again. Yes, a Hollywood studio wants a David Cronenberg remake of a David Cronenberg  remake. Talk about defying gravity!

IT’S THE GREAT PUMPKIN! AND HE FLOATS!: Don’t know how you spent your weekend, but Rick Mercer went sailing — sort of. He teamed up with Pembroke, Ont. kayaker and Olympian Sarah Boudens to compete in the

BOUDENS: Olympian

fourth annual Giant Pumpkin Boat Races in the Laurentian Valley Townships and, according to Pembroke Daily Observer reporter Stephen Uhler, “seemed to take particular delight in ramming the pumpkin craft piloted by MP Cheryl Gallant.” Nearing the finish line, Uhler reports, Mercer “was seen to use his paddle to try and shove the MP’s watercraft under, although to be fair, for much of the race the waterline of her vessel was barely above the surface.” Guess we’ll have to wait to find out who won. Meanwhile, brace yourself for a white-knuckle

HANSEN: death-defying

ride tonight when two men-in-motion, Mercer and Rick Hansen, take a death-defying plunge (literally!) on the season premiere of The Rick Mercer Report on CBC.

QUOTABLE QUOTES: “I’ve created an old-fashioned full-service throwback.  We offer radio listeners an alternative to the automated, cookie-cutter radio stations.  We still originate live music and present the ever more rare pop classics from the 30s/40s/50s and 60s.  We celebrate the music of an age when the tempo was slower, you could still make out the words, and people still believed in love.”

ZNAIMER: "old-fashioned"

The speaker? New AM 740 proprietor Moses Znaimer, who is giving his Zoomer Radio station a first-birthday boost with digital stereo sound, a new website and new interactive content. Znaimer’s new maverick station reaches his ‘45-Plus’ target audiences throughout Southern Ontario from Windsor to Kingston, north to Parry Sound, and south into 28 U.S. States.

NO BIZ LIKE SNOW BIZ: Full of admiration for our Canadian athletes as they show their stuff on those eye-catching promos narrated by Donald Sutherland for the CTV Olympics? Me too.  But those snowy hills and mountains we keep seeing aren’t in Whistler. They’re in Chile, because that’s where our athletes are training for the 2010 competition, so that’s where CTV goes to shoot those great spots. And what does South America have that we don’t? You guessed it: Snow.

Ain’t snowbiz grand?

TOMORROW:

Who is Slimey?

And who would willingly choose that name???

How good was this Oscar legend? Well, try as he might, even Roger Ebert couldn’t catch him acting

“All the real motion picture people have always made family pictures. But the downbeats and the so-called intelligentsia got in when the government stupidly split up the production companies and the theaters. The old giants — Mayer,

WAYNE: with his Oscar presenter Barbra Streisand

Thalberg, even Harry Cohn, despite the fact that personally I couldn’t stand him — were good for this industry. Now the goddamned stock manipulators have taken over. They don’t know a goddamned thing about making movies. They make something dirty, and it makes money, and they say, ‘Jesus, let’s make one a little dirtier, maybe it’ll make more money.’ And now even the bankers are getting their noses into it.”

The speaker? John Wayne, vintage ’76, in Roger Ebert’s wonderful appreciation of the American screen legend commemorating the 30^th (!!!) anniversary of his death last week.

“He wasn’t a drunk,” Ebert writes, “but he didn’t shy clear of the stuff.”

“Tequila,” Wayne told Ebert, “makes your head hurt. Not from your hangover. From falling over and hitting your head.”

EBERT: appreciation

“What people didn’t understand,” Ebert notes, “is that he could be very funny.”

But then, perhaps Ebert’s powers of perception have never been so acute and, accordingly, so astute, as they are now.

“Why did he become, and remain, not only a star but an icon?” he muses. “He was uncommonly attractive in face and presence. He was utterly without affectation. He was at home. He could talk to anyone. You couldn’t catch him acting. He was lucky to start early, in the mid-1920s, and become at ease on camera even before his first speaking role. He sounded how he looked. He was a small-town Iowa boy, a college football player. He worked with great directors. He listened to them. He wasn’t a sex symbol. He didn’t perform, he embodied.”

For more of Ebert’s remarkable tribute to Duke Wayne, as well as the responses of his unusually well-versed reader-contributors, click here.

SMITH & FRIEND: renovated website

QUOTABLE QUOTES: “If you want to hire a great salesman, look for an ugly guy with a beautiful wife.”

The speaker? Enignmatic lady-killer Red Green (a.k.a. brilliant comic actor and saga-spinner Steve Smith,) celebrating his debut as a tweeter on Twitter.

P.S.: Did you know that construction has been completed on the redgreen.com website?”Check it out,” says Steve — “but you might want to keep your hardhat on and watch out for damp areas.”

FELICITATIONS, L’OREAL! Bilingual beauty Jane Fonda was in Paris last week filming commercials for L’Oreal Paris in French and English. L’Oreal is celebrating its 100^th birthday – hey, they must be doing something right — “and this is my 5th year as brand ambassador for women over 65,” she says proudly.

FONDA: L'Oreal birthday girl

La Fonda admits that although she’s addicted to L’Oreal’s Age Perfect Pro-Calcium creams, she was actually filming commercials for a new line of skin cream that will be launched in 2010. “I understand that the company doesn’t like to brag about itself.” she adds, “but I want people to know that #1 they don’t do animal testing, #2 they are investing in the development of reconstituted (synthetic) skin for use in testing, and #3 they just won an environmental award for their corporate ethics (reduced water use and waste dumping and reduced use of plastics).”

FISHER: bumper sticker

At times she imagines her old acting teacher, Lee Strasberg, looking down and saying, “So Jane, it’s come to this!” But, she says, there’s a certain discipline to acting in a commercial. “You must leave behind all questions of motivation and just do what they ask. Little minute details take on huge importance–how I hold the match to light the candle; the way I set the pot of cream down on the table.

“I wish right now I had Carrie Fisher’s gift for le bon mot. She’d have such a hilarious way of describing commercial-style acting. She just wrote me and said she’d written a bumper sticker: ‘Celebrity is just obscurity biding its time.’

“For me it becomes possible,” she says, “because I really believe in the product.”

SUTHERLAND: epic thriller

COMING NEXT YEAR TO A TV MOVIE NETWORK NEAR YOU: Lots of good stuff, I’m happy to report. Highlights for me include Bloodletting, an eight-part drama series based on Vincent Lam’s best-seller Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures, which starts production at the end if the month in Toronto and Hamilton; The Pillars of the Earth, an eight-part limited drama series based on Ken Follett’s bestselling epic novel, with a stellar international cast headed by Donald Sutherland and Ian (Deadwood) McShane; Living In Your Car, a new half-hour comedy series from This Is Wonderland creators George F. Walker, Dani Romain and Joseph Kay, set to begin filming in September with director David Steinberg at the helm; and Fakers, a TV movie about three apparently ordinary teenagers from one of Canada’s most elite schools who created a major counterfeiting operation under the noses of their teachers and parents.

Also intriguing: A four-hour mini-series “re-imagining” of the intriguing comic strip hero Phantom with an equally intriguing cast which includes the always intriguing Isabella Rossellini.

Sounds promising.

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