SFFWorld News – 7/20/08

1) Casting News: Night at the Museum II: Battle of the Smithsonian will have indie-god Christopher Guest play Ivan the Terrible. Jon Bernthal will be Al Capone, Bill Hader appears as Gen. George Armstrong Custer, and Alain Chabat as Napoleon. Ben Stiller, Robin Williams, Ricky Gervais and Owen Wilson return from the first movie. 
 
2) Dark Horse Entertainment, Blur Studios and David Fincher are working on an animated film version of cult comic The Goon. Created by Eric Powell in 1999, the comic follows the adventures of a muscle-bound brawler who claims to be the primary enforcer for a feared mobster. The stories include ghosts, zombies, mad scientists and "skunk apes." Dark Horse has been publishing the comic since 2003.

3) Warner Brothers has optioned the rights to comic mini-series Hiding in Time, with Beau Thorne doing the screenplay. The comic, created by Christopher Long and illustrated by Ryan Winn for Image Shadowline, is set in a near future where the U.S. Witness Protection Program uses time travel to relocate and hide high-value criminal witnesses.
 
4) Actor Gary Oldman will play three different characters in Robert Zemeckis’ upcoming motion-capture animated version of Charles Dickens’ classic A Christmas Carol. Oldman will play Jacob Marley, Bob Cratchit and Cratchit’s crippled son, Tiny Tim. Jim Carrey will play the starring role of greedy Victorian curmudgeon Ebenezzer Scrooge, who is taught the true meaning of kindness and Christmas by visits from a series of ghosts on Christmas Eve. Oldman can currently be seen in the live-action Batman film The Dark Knight.

5) Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions Group has picked up U.S. distribution rights for the CG-animated Planet 51, with TriStar Pictures set to release the film. The film will star the voices of Dwayne Johnson, Jessica Biel, Justin Long, Seann William Scott, Gary Oldman and John Cleese. The alien adventure comedy concerns an astronaut who lands on Planet 51, thinking he's the first to set foot on it. To his surprise, he discovers it's inhabited by little green people who live in a white picket-fenced world reminiscent of 1950s America. The film is produced by Ilion Animation Studios and is due out in November 2009.

6) Paramount has benched director David Fincher’s attempt to re-make the 1981 R-rated animated cult movie Heavy Metal, inspired by the 1970’s SFF magazine of the same name. Blur Studio, which is doing the animation on the project, and Heavy Metal’s current publisher Kevin Eastman, along with Fincher, are shopping the film to other studios. The original film offered an anthology of storylines written by SFF writers such as Steve Niles, Joe Haldeman, and Neal Asher. The re-make plans to use 8 of the original 10 vignettes and have each one helmed by a different director, one of them Fincher.

7) German-based media conglomerate Bertelsmann is selling its North American book club division, Direct Group North America, to a U.S. private investor, Najafi Companies. The division operates book, music and DVD clubs in the U.S. and Canada, including Columbia House and the Book-of-the-Month Club. The group saw sales of $1.4 billion in the U.S. last year, but sales rates have dropped in favor of digital downloads and on-line shopping. Bertelsmann is also closing its Book Club China operation and its 21st Century retail book business in China.

8) U.S. cable network American Movie Classics (AMC) has decided to give the Sci Fi Channel a run for its money by re-adapting classic sci-fi movies and television shows for its line-up. The channel is kicking off its new program with a mini-series re-make of tv cult classic show The Prisoner. The channel will also air past sci-fi and horror movies, such as Species, Timecop, The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Lost World.
9) Author Harry Harrison will be honored as the next Damon Knight Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America during the 2009 Nebula Awards Weekend in Los Angeles, California. The ceremonies will be held April 24-26, 2009, with the awards presentation banquet to be held on the UCLA campus to tie in with the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. Past SFWA President and Grand Master (2004) Robert Silverberg will be presenting the award to Harrison. Harrison, born in 1925 and a World War II veteran, is well known for his satirical Bill, the Galactic Hero series, his The Stainless Steel Rat series, and the novel Make Room! Make Room!, which was adapted into the film Soylent Green. His most recent works are the best-selling alternate world trilogies West of Eden and Stars and Stripes Forever!

Harrison is the 26th writer recognized by SFWA as a Grand Master. He joins Robert A. Heinlein (1974), Jack Williamson (1975), Clifford D. Simak (1976), L. Sprague de Camp (1978), Fritz Leiber (1981), Andre Norton (1983), Arthur C. Clarke (1985), Isaac Asimov (1986), Alfred Bester (1987), Ray Bradbury (1988), Lester del Rey (1990), Frederik Pohl (1992), Damon Knight (1994), A. E. van Vogt (1995), Jack Vance (1996), Poul Anderson (1997), Hal Clement (1998), Brian Aldiss (1999), Philip Jose Farmer (2000), Ursula K. Le Guin (2003), Robert Silverberg (2004), Anne McCaffrey (2005), Harlan Ellison (2006), James Gunn (2007) and Michael Moorcock (2008).

10) The U.S. re-make of British fantasy series Life on Mars for the ABC network is back up and running after a parting of ways with producer David E. Kelley. Josh Appelbaum and Andre Nemec, who’ve worked on such series as Alias and October Road, are now helming the show, which will now be set in New York instead of L.A. Most of the cast were fired, except for star Jason O’Mara, who plays Sam Tyler, a modern cop who finds himself back three decades in time to 1973 after being hit by a car. Michael Imperioli has been cast to play a 1970’s police detective, Ray Carling, who clashes with Sam. The original BBC One series, which ran for two seasons of 16 episodes, left it ambiguous as to whether Sam was in a coma, in the afterlife, or had somehow time traveled. A spin-off series, Ashes to Ashes, in which the same situation happens to a female police detective, premiered on BBC One this year.

11) Fox Television has teamed up with Journeyman creator Kevin Falls and former ABC Entertainment president Jamie Tarses to do a mid-season t.v. series based on an Argentina telenovela about a man who becomes trapped in a woman’s body. No announcements on casting as yet.