Along with the drug dealers, prostitutes, homeless and other assorted street people, Hollywood Boulevard has recently hosted another group of street people - the cast of "Where the Day Takes You."
The movie is one of the more unlikely current projects in that its subject is about homeless teens and most of the cast is an ensemble of new Hollywood faces. It finishes shooting this weekend.But as the cast has hung around the boulevard these past few weeks, dressed in their realistic street costumes, some have often been mistaken for real panhandlers.
Lara Flynn Boyle, who played Donna Haywood on TV's "Twin Peaks," has made a couple of bucks at a time, she says. "Most people just assume she's in need and give her money," says fellow actor, Dermot Mulroney, who has appeared in "Young Guns," "Bright Angel" and "Longtime Companion," and now has the central role in the movie about street kids.
Besides Mulroney and Boyle, the other cast members are Balthazar Getty, Sean Astin, James LeGros, Will Smith (of TV's "Fresh Prince of Bel Air"), Peter Dobson, Ricki Lake, Alyssa Milano and David Ar-quette. The cast also includes Rachel Ticotin, Kyle MacLachlan, Adam Baldwin, Nancy McKeon, Laura San Giacomo and Debbie James.
"It's like a family drama, except it just happens these kids don't have a home," Mulroney says of the film, which tackles subjects like abusive families, neglect, incest and drugs. "It will open people's eyes, but it doesn't offer any solutions," he added, noting the ringleader character he plays is a "stretch" since he grew up "in the 'burbs of D.C., with a nice family and soccer and sledding."
It was the movie's subject of homeless kids that drew most of the cast to the project. "The real young people who live on the streets have stories you wouldn't believe . . . but not all of them walk around gloomy all day. Not all are wanting to leave. "But this movie says: It looks like fun, but look what can happen."
Boyle said that the script "smacked her with reality . . . one day when I was thinking about doing the movie, I passed Hollywood and Highland Avenue, and looked over and saw 30 kids hanging out. I thought of the movie and that sight made me eager to do it."
The film, directed by Marc Rocco, is a Cinetel production for New Line Cinema and may be released by the end of the year. Cine-tel president Paul Hertzberg said that the shooting has involved locations all over Hollywood, and meant the closing of the boulevard on some nights. "Hundreds of people from the streets were hired and paid $40 for extra work." - DAVID J. FOX
- Inside Columbia Pictures, it has already been dubbed "Girlz N the Hood."
But the real title of John Singleton's probable next film project is "Poetic Justice."
The project breaks fresh ground by telling a coming-of-age story from a young black woman's point of view - and one source describes it as "very different" from Singleton's critically acclaimed "Boyz N the Hood."
Singleton is now at work on the screenplay, about a teenager named Justice who finds refuge in her poetry after her boyfriend is killed. The film, likely to go into production next spring, will be set in South-Central Los Angeles and Oakland, Calif.
With the critical and commercial success of his "Boyz N the Hood," Singleton is much in demand as a director for projects other than his own. But he remains committed to directing his own screenplays. As he recently put it: "My emphasis is on writing. I'm only a director so I can protect my vision." While his own screenplays take top priority, he is reviewing outside scripts. Among those under consideration, sources say, is a screenplay about the legendary boxer Joe Louis, "Brown Bomber," which was written by Los Angeles Times sports columnist Mike Downey. Forest Whitaker has expressed interest in starring if the project goes forward.
Now that he is famous, the 23-year-old Singleton is attracting a flock of wanna-be film makers. Since the release of "Boyz," Singleton's production company on Columbia's Culver City, Calif., lot has been inundated with scripts from young blacks who aspire to be screenwriters.
Most of these are returned for legal reasons because they were submitted unsolicited and without talent-agent representation. But Singleton's aides say that they try to encourage the young aspirants by directing them to workshops and writers' organizations. - NINA J. EASTON -
In most cases, by the time a successful movie is released in home video, its theatrical run is long over. But not so in the case of "Home Alone."
More than 8 million copies of the surprise blockbuster, which opened in November, are going to hit the video stores Aug. 22. Yet it is still drawing people at just under 300 theaters nationwide. Now in its 37th week of release, the picture surpassed the $280 million mark last weekend, qualifying it as filmdom's top-grossing comedy and the No. 3 movie (after "E.T." and "Star Wars") of all time. Abroad, the picture has also done well, bringing an additional $165 million into the 20th Century Fox coffers.
While its $852-per-screen weekend average may not sound impressive, it was good enough for "Home Alone" to edge out recent summer issues such as "Soapdish" and "Dutch" - another Fox vehicle that dropped 64 percent in its second weekend out.
"Home Alone" isn't the only old-timer holding its own, however. Orion's "Dances With Wolves," still playing on 387 screens in its 38th week, added almost $860,000 to its cumulative gross of $181 million, while the studio's "The Silence of the Lambs" added $545,000 in its 23rd week for a $128 million total.
These films benefited, no doubt, from what everyone agrees is a rather lackluster summer season. Two movies have broken the $100 million mark: Warner Bros.' "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves" ($128 million despite critical pans) and Tri-Star's "Terminator 2" (at $134 million the highest-grossing film of Arnold Schwarzenegger's career). And, with $98 million racked up, "City Slickers" is coming close.
Still, pickings for adults - an audience that always seems to go wanting during the summertime - are relatively slim. Though Disney's "The Doctor" opened very well in limited release, it must overcome downbeat subject matter (a doctor diagnosed with blood cancer) as Fox's "Dying Young" could not. Paramount's "Regarding Henry" ($24 million after two weeks of release) has been another disappointment, especially because the combined salaries of director Mike Nichols and star Harrison Ford approach $9 million.
That the summer's biggest box-office surprise (almost $31 million) is Columbia's "Boyz N The Hood" - a low-budget Los Angeles street gang drama directed by an unknown 23-year-old - further confounds an industry in search of barometers.
"Hollywood likes guidelines," says one industry observer. "And there are none this summer. It's not like the `small' movies are working . . . or that all the `big star' vehicles are doing well. Without hints about what direction we should be moving, it's harder for projects to get a green light. We seem to be floundering a bit, almost gun-shy. It takes a little more courage to fire shots in the dark and hope against hope that you hit something." - ELAINE DUTKA
- With all the publicity surrounding the making of Oliver Stone's John F. Kennedy assassination movie, a bit of history is in order.
Former New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, the central figure in Stone's "JFK," first sold the rights to his story to the producing-directing team of Jerry Zucker, David Zucker and Jim Abrahams (known mostly for comedies like "Airplane!" and "Naked Gun").
Team Zucker got interested in Garrison's story in the early 1980s, approached him and subsequently bought the rights to Garrison's life story. The flamboyant Garrison came to national attention when he challenged the Warren Commission's version of events surrounding Kennedy's assassination.
In 1983, screenwriter William Stadiem spent several months with Garrison and wrote a 200-page script (which translates into about three hours on screen) that covered Garrison's investigations and his fall from office. The Zuckers encouraged Stadiem to take an ambitious, serious approach to the project, Stadiem recalls, because the Zuckers were convinced that their success in Hollywood at that point would give them the liberty to make a serious movie with the scale of Stadiem's "Garrison."
Instead, "Top Secret" (1984), a comedy after the hit "Airplane!"(1980), was a disappointment at the box office. "That really shook their confidence to do something so far afield," Stadiem says, adding that their interest in his project sagged.
But Abrahams and the Zuckers - all of whom continue to hold the script in high regard - said that they did shop the script around, without success. "Back then, whenever you mentioned the J.F.K. assassination, people's eyes would glaze over," Abrahams says. "Eighty percent of Americans were saying they thought Oswald didn't act alone. But nobody in Hollywood wanted to take it the next step."
This year, when details of Stone's movie surfaced, they were shocked to hear that Garrison (who also plays a small part in the movie) had sold Stone similar rights. But the Zuckers' lawyers said their contract left enough wiggle room for Garrison to also sell certain rights to Stone.
A couple months ago, the Zucker project almost got a new lease on life. Hoping to capitalize on the publicity surrounding the Stone project, TV producer Preston Fischer obtained the Zuckers' permission to shop Stadiem's script to the networks and cable stations. Despite a "very good" script, Fischer says, no one wanted to produce it.
Apparently, the Zucker project was news to Stone too. Sources say that Jerry Zucker recently received an angry phone call from the director after he heard about the attempts at a TV production. During later conversations with Stone's agent at Creative Artists Agency, Zucker reportedly suggested that the director talk to Stadiem about buying his script, but nothing came of it.
Stadiem believes that it was Stone's "brilliant stroke" of casting Kevin Costner in the role of Garrison that made his project viable. "Jim Garrison was considered crazy, a questionable character," Stadiem says. "But when you cast Costner in it, that gives him a dignity as a folk hero." (Except, of course, to vocal critics of Garrison, who have already begun their attacks on Stone's project, now in production).
Is there any future for Stadiem's script? "You never know," says the screenwriter, adding that his account covers more time than Stone's. "There's still a story that hasn't been told. Maybe Garrison will become a folk hero. Maybe people will want more."
Ironically, Stadiem once suggested Costner for the part. But at that point, he wasn't considered a big-enough star. - NINA J. EASTON