Fifteen Years Later, Claire Danes Returns to Television
Sure she did that Temple Grandin thing, but that was a TV movie. This is a TV series. Also today: Leonardo DiCaprio goes back in time again, Kelsey Grammer returns to the cable waves, and Dane Cook breaks our heart.
Everyone's going to TV these days! The next person on the dockets is Latisse commercial star Cleo Dinkins (stage name Claire Danes). Yes, she's filming a pilot for Showtime called Homeland, and it is not some gooey lady half-hour about feelings and idiosyncrasies. It's an hour-long political drama about a soldier captured in Iraq. Danes will play a hard-charging CIA officer. Aw, little Angie Chase is all grown up, outta Pittsburgh, and working for the CIA. Not really what I ever envisioned for her, but what can you do. I guess I thought she'd maybe spend a few listless post-college years working at her dad's restaurant, being the warm-smiling hostess, looking elegant and charming but humble in long skirts, sipping a single glass of red wine from a big balloon glass every night, all the regular patrons telling Graham how "lovely" and "poised" his daughter's become, and then one day she'd run off to Argentina with one of the line cooks and there they'd raise big, happy brown babies and that would be a life. Or maybe that's just what I hoped I'd be doing right now. Hard to tell sometimes where Angela Chase ends and I begin. [Deadline]
What feels like four score and seven years ago, director Steven Spielberg and writer Tony Kushner set out to make a movie called Lincoln (which Kushner has said is maybe the best thing he's ever written), about our 16th president, proud Republican Abraham Lincoln. Snags and snafus happened, intended star Liam Neeson dropped out, and the project seemed doomed. But now! A ray of light emerges from the war-torn shores of Antietam Creek! Daniel Day-Lewis has climbed up to the podium and accepted the nomination. Which is a good fit, seeing as the actor knows his way around a stovepipe hat. The screenplay is based on a book by presidential obsessive Doris Kearns Goodwin, so it ought to be nothing if not thorough. [Variety]
Somebody call Gringotts! Warner Bros. is about to make a huuuge deposit. They've already raked in $24M from midnight showings alone. Sure that's slightly under the record-breaking midnight haul brought in my Twilight: Eclipse (ugh), but it's still quite a hefty sum. You know, while we're on the topic, I've gotta say, one of the (few) happy things about the Potter franchise ending next July? Entertainment writers will no longer be able to say that a Potter movie "conjured up" x-amount of dollars. That'll be nice, when that day comes. Nearly everything else about the series ending is a tragedy. Worse than when _______ dies. (Don't take my word for it!) [THR]
Strange. Real Housewives of Beverly Hills victim Kelsey Grammer is teaming up with Gus van Sant of all people to create a show for Starz of all networks, in which Grammer will play the mayor of Chicago. This isn't to be some snob-nosey comedy. No, this here is a drama series, a first for ol' Frasier. The show is called Boss and takes some thematic and narrative elements from the obscure play King Lear. So it's almost like if Frasier made a TV show, all serious and political and Shakespearean and, naturally, starring himself. Hopefully the opening credits song will be a slow, mournful take on "Tossed Salads and Scrambled Eggs." [Deadline]
Well heyyyyyyyy Miss Thang! The cover of national monster Katy Perry's "Teenage Dream", the one Darren Criss and a bunch'a other ladyboys warbled on The Glee Show, has nit noombero uno on the Billboards music charts. See, Peter LaBarbera! America does like a boy singing to another boy about tight jeans and things. Well, heh, I don't really need to tell you that, though, do I, Petey? You know alllll about that. But anyway. The Glee songs have done ridiculously well in musicland, placing more songs on the Billboard charts than anyone but Elvis (I guess it helps that they produce a few every week) and selling some 6.5M in record across three compilation albums. (Plus a Christmas album, just released, and an upcoming fourth compilation.) Man, that must be a headache paying all the individual original songwriters their royalties, huh? I do not envy the accounts payable department at Fox. I do, however, envy someone who has a cute young gentleman sing lovingly to them about tight jeans. Won't someone do that for me, please? Just once? Not you, LaBarbera. [THR]
Man, Leonardo DiCaprio is just borne back ceaselessly into the past so much these days, huh? First there was news of his Great Gatsby starring role. Then we heard about him playing J. Edgar Hoover in a Clint Eastwood biopic about the freaky-deaky FBI guy. And now we learn that he's going to star in a Kennedy assassination conspiracy movie, about the possible Mafia connection. His oeuvre is basically becoming a regular history class. And while all of it's interesting, clearly the most interesting chapter of DiCaprio's World History is the Rimbaud years. Most interesting by far. [Variety]
I didn't want to talk about this yesterday because it just hurt my feelings too much, but now I think I'm ready. Nimble theater actor Josh Hamilton will star in a Broadway production of the Neil LaBute play Fat Pig. That is not the hurtful part. The hurtful part is that so will Dane Cook. Yes, the Dane Cook. On the Broadway stage, saying lines. And not just any lines! But Neil LaBute lines about how, gasp, fat chicks are people too. So this will end well for no one. [Playbill]