Father Geek here with Elston's review of the Tinseltown events of the past work week... Sooooo check it all out below. Its a long one this week so I'll just set to the side and let you get to the meat of...

The WEEKLY RECAP...

TAKEN FROM VARIETY AND HOLLYWOOD REPORTER

CASTING

* Joseph Fiennes will play Protestant reformer Martin Luther in LUTHER, a project to be shot on location in Germany in April. Erich Till (BONHOEFFER: AGENT OF GRACE) will direct. The film will examine the rebel Catholic's personal battles and his transformation from a simple monk into leader of the Protestant movement. Peter Ustinov, Bruno Ganz and Uwe Ochsenknecht will also star.

* Whoopi Goldberg, Christopher Plummer, Kevin Pollak and Zoe Warner will star in the indie family pic BLIZZARD for director LeVar Burton. Brenda Blethyn is in negotiations to join the cast. Production begins Feb. 18 in Toronto and Quebec City. Murray McRae wrote the script about a young girl and her relationship with Santa's most magical reindeer, Blizzard. The girl is saddened after her love of skating is taken away from her and Blizzard helps the girl find her way back to what she loves most. Meanwhile, Blizzard is in danger of being banished from Santa's kingdom by the chief elf.

* Omar Epps will star alongside Meg Ryan in the drama AGAINST THE ROPES, based on the story of Jackie Kallen, the first female boxing manager. Charles Dutton will direct.

* Sergi Lopez (WITH A FRIEND LIKE HARRY) will star alongside Daniel Auteuil in a historical adventure film set during the Crusades for director Helene Angel and producer Michel Saint-Jean. Emmanuelle Devos and Gilbert Melki will also star. Saint-Jean is also producing a fantasy script by HARRY director Dominik Moll with a fall production start expected.

* Rob Schneider is attached to star in THE ADVENTURES OF SINBAD THE INSURANCE SALESMAN about a claims officer who is unlucky in love until he meets a girl who transforms his life. Mike Reiss ("The Simpsons") wrote the script.

* Wanda De Jesus will play the female lead in BLOOD WORK for actor/director Clint Eastwood. Brian Helgeland wrote the script about a woman who hires an ex-FBI profiler to solve a crime.

* Crispin Glover will star in New Line's horror remake of the 1971 movie WILLARD for writers/producers James Wong and Glen Morgan ("The X-Files," FINAL DESTINATION). Morgan will direct the pic. It's about an outcast whose only friends are his pet rats. When one of the rats is killed where he works, Willard goes on a rampage, using his pets to help him exact revenge.

* French actor Vincent Cassel has left SIN EATER due to creative differences and been replaced by Benno Furman. The feature stars Mark Addy, Heath Ledger and Shannyn Sossamon for writer/director Brian Helgeland.

* Christian Kane joins Brittany Murphy and Ashton Kutcher in JUST MARRIED for 20th Century Fox and director Shaw Levy.

* Ed Harris will star opposite Nicole Kidman, Anthony Hopkins and Gary Sinise in THE HUMAN STAIN. Shooting begins March 25.

* John Cusack, Ray Liotta and Amanda Peet are in final talks to star in Columbia Pictures' ensemble feature I.D. for director James Mangold and Konrad Pictures. The feature begins shooting next month in Los Angeles. It's a modern psychological thriller where 10 people marooned at a roadside motel during a fierce desert storm discover that they are being killed off one by one.

* William H. Macy will star in THE COOLER for ContentFilm about a man whose ability to cool hot hands at casino gambling tables makes him the perfect "cooler" for the shady Shangri-la Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, a job he is forced into to pay off a bad debt. Once his debt is paid off, however, the casino realizes that it has come to rely on him and, in an effort to keep him on the floor, throws a gorgeous waitress his way.

* Gabriel Byrne, Karl Urban and Alex Dimitriades join Desmond Harrington, Julianna Margulies, Ron Eldard and Isaiah Washington in GHOST SHIP for director Steve Beck and Dark Castle Entertainment.

* Kate Hudson and Naomi Watts are in talks to star in the comedy LE DIVORCE for producers Merchant Ivory and Fox Searchlight with James Ivory directing. The project is based on Diane Johnson's bestselling novel about a film school dropout who heads to Paris to serve as an emissary between her pregnant, cuckolded stepsister and the upper-class family of her French painter husband. Ivory and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala wrote the script. Production is expected to begin this September in France.

DIRECTOR/WRITER ATTACHMENTS

* Jerry Bruckheimer Films has snapped up the pitch SIGNATURE from writers Cormac and Marianne Wibberly. It's a psychological thriller that centers on the way violent serial criminals are rehabilitated in the future.

* Paramount Pictures has grabbed THE ADVENTURERS CLUB, a modern romantic adventure pitch by Dan McDermott, for Mutual Films to produce. It's about a man and a woman who team up to complete the Valley of the Immortals expedition that their grandfathers died on 50 years ago.

* Dan Wilson and David Gilbreath sold their comedy script SMART AND SMARTER to New Line Cinema for Charles Roven to produce. The story centers on two brainiacs who have spent their lives in a think tank. When they head out into the real world to reclaim a lost love, they constantly overthink ways into messy situations.

* Jan de Bont is in final talks to direct the action pic THE COURIER, written by Michael Brandt and Derek Haas, about a mythic figure who makes deliveries to anyone, anywhere, no questions asked. The courier is hired to make a delivery to a legendary underworld figure considered impossible to find.

* DreamWorks Pictures has purchased the comedy spec script UNDERDOGS from Rawson Marshall Thurber about a group of misfits and outcasts who enter a Las Vegas dodge ball tournament in hopes of saving their beloved gym.

* Tony-winning director Susan Stroman will direct the pic CONTACT, based on the Broadway musical, for USA Films. The film will be adapted by John Weidman, focusing on the third act, in which a commercials director who can't connect with anyone finds himself taken with a girl in a yellow dress he sees on a dance floor.

* David Fincher will develop, with an eye to direct, Regency Enterprises' supernatural thriller STAY. David Benioff wrote the script about a psychologist at an Ivy League university who tries to prevent one of his students from committing suicide.

* Bernardo Bertolucci will direct PARIS '68 about a real-life student uprising that took place in France's capital during the late 1960s.

* RAW Entertainment has nabbed Brandon Bodie Beaver's spec script MR. MYSTERIOUS with Simon West's Wychwood Prods. attached to produce. The gothic action/fantasy, set in the 1880s, concerns a blind magician and his traveling troupe of carnival performers who are forced to return to London to stop an evil sorcerer from plaguing the world with black magic.

* Lasse Hallstrom will direct a Miramax adaptation of the David Liss novel A CONSPIRACY OF PAPER this fall. It's a thriller set in London in the early 18th century, framed around the inception of the stock exchange. Robert Nelson Jacobs (CHOCOLAT) will adapt the novel.

* RKO Pictures will develop, finance and distribute a feature film tentatively titled DURHAM GRILL, written by Clyde Edgerton and John Schulian, about the efforts of a large corporation to hoodwink residents of a small Southern town and the Southerners' unusual and successful defense.

* Director Simon Wincer (FREE WILLY) will help bring a prequel to THE BLACK STALLION to theaters for Disney. YOUNG BLACK STALLION explores the origin of the legendary horse in a tale of a young girl and a black stallion who come into each others' lives and rescue one another from dangerous situations. Production begins March 4 in Africa

* Artists Production Group and StudioCanal have picked up the comedy spec NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH from Yoni Berkovits and Tony Dreannan. It's the story of a valet parking guy who chronically lies to impress women until a strange twist of fate forces him to live out his lies and realize that he has been overlooking true love.

* MGM has grabbed SOUL PLANE from writer Chuck Wilson and writer-producer Bo Zenga. It's described an urban version of AIRPLANE!

* Sarah Thorp's script BLACKOUT was sold to Paramount/Intertainment AG for Kopelson Entertainment to produce. The project's story line has been kept under wraps and is described only as a female-driven gritty thriller.

* New Regency has purchased the comic pitch BRAD PITT WANTS MY GIRLFRIEND to be written and directed by Les Firestein. It centers on an attractive couple that grows estranged because the girlfriend feels the guy is taking her for granted. While on a trip to Canada, she meets Pitt as he's shooting a film. The actor takes a shine to her, and the boyfriend tries every way he can to win her back.

MISCELLANEOUS PRODUCTION TIDBITS

* Singer/Jensen Entertainment has purchased the rights to Nicholas Sparks' bestseller A BEND IN THE ROAD about a sheriff in a small town whose wife was killed several years before. He romances his child's schoolteacher, only to discover a trail of clues related to his wife's death. Singer/Jensen also has optioned MEPHISTO, a Top Shelf comic by Jason Hall and Matt Kindt, about a couple trying to save their troubled marriage. They attend a magic show and the wife volunteers for a disappearing trick, but the magician dies midway through. The wife is nowhere to be found, and the husband, not sure if she's dumped him, journeys through a metaphysical world to try to find her. The company is also developing two projects with W.R. McKinney (TEACHERS), one is a drama called ONE SHOT ONE KILL, the other for BOOKER AND CHANCE, a Western about two scam artists who hype themselves as famous outlaws as an easy way to rob a town.

* Southpaw Media Group co-founder Richard B. Lewis has teamed with Pandemonium to co-produce a pair of event movies: THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD, an action love story set amid NASA's early lunar missions, and an intergalactic epic adventure set in outer space dubbed ACROSS THE UNIVERSE.

* Gran Via Productions is teaming with Pacifica to acquire rights to remake the 1955 Orson Welles-directed film THE CONFIDENTIAL REPORT. Joshua Safran will pen the remake about a grifter who's hired by a wealthy financier to trace figures from his past. The grifter gets more than he bargained for when he falls in love with the power broker's daughter.

* New Line has grabbed the rights to co-produce HIS DARK MATERIALS a trilogy of kids' books by Philip Pullman.

* Artists Production Group has partnered with MGM to option Michael Connelly's latest novel CHASING THE DIME, about an L.A. computer researcher who becomes obsessed with a missing woman whose former phone number is randomly assigned to him. His private investigation leads him through the murky world of online adult entertainment.

* MGM is developing a remake of FOXY BROWN, a 1974 pic starring Pam Grier as a woman seeking revenge. Tyger Williams (MENACE II SOCIETY) will adapt the script.

* Industry Entertainment has optioned Jonathan Safran Foer's first novel EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED about an American Jew who is looking for his family's roots in Eastern Europe. Liev Schreiber is producing the project with Industry, adapting the script with Foer, and also considering making the picture his directorial debut.

* Warner Bros. Pictures has acquired the rights to THE INFORMANT: A TRUE STORY that Steven Soderbergh is developing at his Section Eight shingle with an eye to direct. Scott Burns will adapt the book, which was written by Kurt Eichenwald. The book's protaganist is Mark Whitacre, who wore an FBI wire for more than two years to uncover a major price-fixing scam with ADM's Japanese competitors that gave the company millions of dollars in profits. ADM pled guilty in 1996 and paid a $100 million fine, but the whistle-blower winds up doing more time than the corrupt leaders he helped nab.

* Disney bought rights to the THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS, based on the classic tale by Kenneth Grahame, treatment, art and related aterials developed by Corey May, Michael "Dooma" Wendschuh and Baruch Inbar .

* Swedish writer.director Lukas Moodysson's TOGETHER, is getting an English remake by FilmFour and production company Number 9. The duo is also working on a film version of the 1941 novel THE DEADLY PERCHERON, a surreal crime story by American author John Franklin Bardin.

* MGM and Hyde Park Entertainment will develop a remake of the 1973 actioner WALKING TALL with David Klass in talks to write the script.

* Paramount Pictures has grabbed the screen rights to Doug Marlette's novel, THE BRIDGE, about a cartoonist fired from a Gotham newspaper, who moves his family to the North Carolina house in which he grew up and tries to come to terms with his past and family. Mark Andrus (AS GOOD AS IT GETS) will adapt the screenplay.

GUNN SHOTS

* See 6 short films at This Nice Little Site . Titles include "C.O.P. Tales" and "Fear of Robots."

* Quinn Rollins' Fisher Price Little People site has been updated, bringing the total to just over 600. New characters include U2, Love Boat (with Charo) and Fat Albert. Check it out Here

* There's new UK independent film making website at: This Spot where they're looking for personalized accounts of what it is that everybody does on a film.

* Watch "85 seconds of cute girls, crazy music, and seizure inducing CG!" at This Cool Location

Until next week... Happy Valentine's Day.

Elston Gunn

elstongunn@hotmail.com