Casting Couch: Osbournes Return; Spike Tunes Up; 90210 Expands
Maybe it’s time for Black Sabbath devotees to renounce their fanhood: Ozzy Osbourne is moving into Osmond territory.
According to Variety, Fox has given a six-episode pickup to an hour-long variety show hosted by the 59-year-old erstwhile Prince of F–king Darkness, 55-year-old wife Sharon, 23-year-old son Jack and 22-year-old daughter Kelly, that’s said to be a throwback to such programs of yore asgulpABC’s Donny and Marie and CBS’ The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour.
The untitled Osbourne project is being overseen by James Sunderland, the executive producer of NBC’s America’s Got Talent, on which the family matriarch serves as a judge.
Unlike their heady days on The Osbournes, the reality show that ran from 2002 to 2005 on MTV and earned the family Emmys, the new format will attempt to mix musical guests, comedy skits and game-show segments with in-studio audience participation and man-on-the-street-style bits.
One idea being bandied about, per the trade, is a segment titled “The Osbournes Meet the Osbournes,” in which the heavy metal clan hang out with another Osbourne family.
The show will be shot in Los Angeles and Fox aims to kick things off with a Christmas special.
Speaking of variety, Spike Leewho’s tackled all sorts of genres on the screenis reportedly headed for the Great White Way.
The Oscar-nominated helmer plans to film three performances of the Broadway musical Passing Strange for a future broadcast on a cable network.
Lee will record two of the black-themed production’s shows in front of audiences and a third without. No word when shooting will get under way, but Passing Strange, about a young black musician on a spiritual journey to Amsterdam and Berlin, could use the added television exposure.
Even though it won a Tony for Best Book last month, the musical has played to half-empty houses and seen its ticket sales slip from $300,000 a week to $245,000 for the week ended June 29.
Meanwhile, in other casting news:
- Per the Hollywood Reporter, Robert Duvall will direct and star in The Line, a four-hour Showtime miniseries about life on the American-Mexican border. The Oscar winner will play a Department of Agriculture “tick rider” who patrols the border for pests and accidentally becomes a target for Mexican drug lords, Mexican police, the FBI and Texas Rangers.
- Meghan Markle and Kellan Lutz have been added to the cast of the CW’s upcoming Beverly Hills, 90210 spinoff, simply titled 90210. The former will play Wendy, a sexy student who uses her looks to get what she wants, while the latter will fill the role of George Evans, a star lacrosse player who hails from a wealthy family.
- The Shield’s Jay Karnes has been tapped for a recurring role on FX’s new dramatic series Sons of Anarchy, about a vigilante outlaw motorcycle gang’s attempts to protect a small California town from predatory corporate developers and drug pushers. Karnes will essay the part of an ATF agent.
Spike Doing Time Traveler Thing
Spike Lee did Clockers. In keeping with the theme, his next project: Time Traveler.
Per Variety, the filmmaker will cowrite and direct the drama based on the memoir by Ronald Mallett, the physicist famed for working on plans for a real-life time machine
The 63-year-old Mallett was one of the first African-Americans to receive a doctorate in theoretical physics and currently teaches at the University of Connecticut. But he’s perhaps best known for his obsession with bending time to his own will.
His inspiring pursuit was documented last year on an episode of public radio’s This American Life. When he was 10 years old, Mallett’s father died suddenly of a heart attack and ever since, Mallett sought to make time travel possible so he could rewind to that fateful day and change his dad’s fate.
“[It’s] a fantastic story on many levels [and] also a father-and-son saga of loss and love,” Lee told Variety.
Lee apparently has a soft spot for time traveling.
The helmer was previously attached to the Fox thriller Selling Time, about a man who trades years off his life expectancy for the chance to relive the worst day of his life. He’s since exited that project. Lee’s next film is Miracle at St. Anna, about a division of all-black soldiers trapped behind enemy lines during World War II.
Spike Lee’s Time Traveler
Spike Lee will co-write and direct an adaptation of Ronald Mallett’s memoir Time Traveler: A Scientist’s Personal Mission to Make Time Travel a Reality. Spike Lee describes Time Traveler as a “fantastic story on many levels (and) also a father and son saga of loss and love.” Kirkus Reviews called the book a “hokey but inspiring blend of personal narrative and scientific exploration.” Basically, it’s a time travel movie without the time travel.
Mallett (pictured right with a model from the movie The Time Machine) is actually a very interesting living subject for a feature film. Co-written by best-selling author Bruce Henderson, the memoir tells a story of Mallett’s rise from poverty to becoming a distinguished academic, one of the first African Americans to earn a Ph.D in theoretical physics. As a child, he became obsessed with developing a working time machine after reading a comic-book version of H.G. Wells’s science-fiction classic, The Time Machine. His goal was to travel back in time to save his father who died prematurely when he was 10-years old.
And he is still trying at age 63, working as a professor of physics in the University of Connecticut, while raising funding for his Space-time Twisting by Light project. His time travel research has been featured in an hour-long TV special, “The World’s First Time Machine,” as well as publications as diverse as The Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone, New Scientist, The Village Voice, The Boston Globe and Pravda. Mallett’s time machine concept uses a ring laser and the theory of relativity. Check out the illustration below.
source: Variety
Eastwood and Spike Go to War!
Clint Eastwood and Spike Lee are bickering, and we’d suggest the directors take the high road but they might just use it to get a better shot at each other.
To catch up: At the Cannes film festival last month, Lee said if reporters “had any balls” they’d ask Eastwood why he didn’t include any African Americans in his films based on the battle of Iwo Jima, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima. Aside from suggestion that Cannes reporters are eunuchs, Lee was also promoting his own war film, Miracle at St. Anna.
Eastwood responded that he was being historically accurate about the make up of the soldiers who raised the flag on the island, and added that “A guy like him should shut his face.” Sounding stung by Lee’s criticism, Eastwood, whose next film The Human Factor is about South African rugby and Nelson Mandela, also added, “Yeah, I’m not going to make Nelson Mandela a white guy.”
Lee’s latest salvo was a mixture of sugar, saying Eastwood is “a great director,” and spice, saying Eastwood sounds like “an angry old man.” Despite adding that “we’re not on a plantation,” Lee announced he was going to end the feud with “peace and love.”
Cool. So, does this mean he’s going to apologize to the Cannes reporters, too? They’re a pretty sensitive bunch.
In any case, what do you think? Is Spike right? Or Clint? Or should they both get back to making movies and stop insulting each other?