Why The Steamy Stuff? It Was In His Contract
There’s already talk about House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s racy, soon-to-be-published sci-fi thriller “1945” hitting the big screen, but don’t expect Joe Eszterhas to write the script.
After reading the first 77 pages, Eszterhas (“Basic Instinct,” “Sliver”) responded with an open letter in Variety to Sen. Bob Dole, calling on him “to ask Newt the same question you asked Time Warner: Must you debase our nation and threaten our children for the sake of profits?”
With an opening sex scene involving a presidential aide, he added: “Newt is not only undermining family values, marriage, the missionary position and the nation, (but) the presidency itself … (he) deals with glistening needles, stainless steel gurneys, curling whips and snarling dogs. If he goes to hell as a politician, he’ll have a future writing gangsta rap.”
Mel Gibson, the voice of John Smith in Disney’s upcoming “Pocahontas,” on complaints that the animated movie isn’t historically accurate (in Playboy): “I’m thinking, Historically accurate? My God, there’s a … raccoon that talks in this. What do they want?” We remember back to when he had a future
Michael J. Fox turns 34 today.
Gets boring behind the printing press, eh, Joe?
Conservative newsletter publisher Joseph Farah is fuming over the film version of “The Bridges of Madison County,” complaining that it overly romanticizes “a brief, but intense adulterous affair so powerful, passionate and even mystical that it leaves its participants discontented with their former and future lives.”
The worst part: On the seventh day, he retches
So what does Gene Siskel think of the whole Hollywood flap? “I wish the movies were better - more than you,” the thinner half of Siskel & Ebert told a California convention audience. “You go to one movie a month. I go to six a week.”
Quality, of course, has nothing to do with it
Clint Eastwood castoff Sondra Locke is again suing her former flame, accusing him of setting her up with a phony development deal at Warner Bros. to get her to drop a palimony suit in 1989. Locke says her 30 movie projects got nowhere at the studio.
But it should get the tabloids’ circulation going
Roseanne is resorting to TV Guide in her attempt at a truce with exhubby Tom Arnold. If there’s no divorce settlement soon, she threatens a trial that “will be a huge media circus and not to our benefit.”
We figured he had a little help from his mummy
Closing words from Matthew Balestrieri, age 11, winner of Campbell’s “Art of Soup” contest: “I saw the movie “Stargate” and read the book and was really thrilled with Egyptian people and I asked my mom to take me to a museum so I could learn more. My brother and I then learned to write in hieroglyphics so our parents would not understand us … The hieroglyphic I used in the painting said, ‘Verily I brought to thee a bowl of soup. Rejoice thou in it. Mmm.”’
, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Two Photos
The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Compiled by staff writer Rick Bonino