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Michael Bay Will Single-handedly Sully the Entire History of Horror
Bay Remakes Baby: Not content with pointlessly remaking The Birds, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Friday the 13th, and Nightmare on Elm Street, Michael Bay’s Platinum Dunes is in talks to remake Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby. God is dead! Satan lives! [HR]
DreamWorks Unleashes Monsters: Seth Rogen, Reese Witherspoon, Will Arnett, Rainn Wilson, Hugh Laurie, Kiefer Sutherland, Paul Rudd, and Stephen Colbert will all provide voices for DreamWorks Animation’s Monsters vs. Aliens, a send-up of fifties monster movies. Colbert will lend his voice as the president of the United States, as he has approximately the same level of executive-branch experience as Hillary Clinton at answering the red phone at three in the morning. [Variety]
Raimi, Too, Unleashes Monster: Paramount has snagged the rights to Doug TenNapel’s upcoming graphic novel Monster Zoo. Pic, about an ancient idol that ends up in a zoo and mutates the animals, will be produced by Sam Raimi, Josh Donen, and Ellen Goldsmith-Vein. No director yet, but we hear Tim Hill is trying to break into the animal genre. [HR]
Hurt’s a Top Girl: Triple Tony nominee Mary Beth Hurt has joined the cast of Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls, which opens in May at Broadway’s Biltmore. Hurt joins Mary Catherine Garrison, Elizabeth Marvel, Martha Plimpton, and Marisa Tomei in the already-awesome cast. [Playbill]
School of Pop: MTV gives the go-ahead on an unscripted musical drama from Nick Lachey. Described by the network as a reality version of Fame, the show follows students at Cincinnati’s School for Creative and Performing Arts and will “blend performances by the students with the narrative about what takes place in the school.†Call us sentimental, but we’re really excited to see Jessica Simpson’s ex-husband present awkward high-school romantic encounters intercut with awkward high-school oboe recitals. [Billboard]
Epic Builds a Palace: Judith Thompson’s 2008 Blackburn prize-winning play, Palace of the End, presented by Epic Theater Ensemble, will open June 23 at Playwrights Horizons. Palace is a “powerful triptych of monologues†about the Mideast crisis. Characters include a British weapons inspector, an Iraqi citizen, and American naked-soldier-pyramid-building Abu Ghraib prison guard Lynndie England. We give this one two thumbs up. [Playbill]