The Boston Globe from Boston, Massachusetts • 193

B5. THE BOSTON SUNDAY GLOBE AUGUST 30, 1992 C13D Section Movie V. jf Action! JAYCARR Tolkin to sit in director's chair played out: Michael Tolkin, who wrote "The Player," will direct "The New Age," his script about a fast-lane Hollywood couple who lose their jobs and open a Melrose Avenue bou tique so they can finance a divorce. Tolkin says he won't replay "The Player," though his male lead, a Hollywood agent, gets canned on page four. This time, Tolkin says, he's concentrating on if i Annabella Sclorra I- 1' marriage-ruining aspects of LA life.

Annabella Sciorra, the menaced wife in "The Hand That Rocks the Cradle" and menaced shrink in "Whispers in the Dark," will join Gary Oldman and Lena Olin in another erotic thriller, "Romeo Is Bleeding." Shell play the wife on whom cop Oldman cheats with gangster Olin. Ma-caulay Culkin's costar in "The Good Son" will be Elijah Wood, Hollywood's busiest 11-year-old. Joseph Ruben will direct Wood's shooting "Forever Young" with Mel Gibson in Maine, then moves to Mississippi next month for Disney's "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" remake. beyond roger: Michael Moore, acclaimed for his GM-bashing docupic, "Roger Me," will make his feature-directing debut with "Canadian Bacon," a political satire he wrote. Plans call for a '93 start in Niagara Falls.

Only last week we were regaling you with news By Betsy Sherman SPECIAL TO THE GLOBE AN GLOBE STAFF PHOTO JANET KNOTT teen-ager, she soaked up the foreign films shown at Yale and Brown. When she made the decision to make movies herself, the only woman director she'd ever heard of was French New Wave director Agnes Varda. "I'd only seen one of the two films that she'd made," Coolidge "But the mere fact of her existence was encouraging." Shf marlp snmp sVinrts at 111 ss j7C- 1 about Dana Harvey Vrf 1 teaming up with "Satur- PIASr 1 day Night Live" col This month, Martha Coolidge begins shooting her seventh feature film, the screen adaptation of Neil Simon's "Lost in Yonkers," starring Richard Dreyfuss, Mercedes Ruehl and Irene Worth. Michael Moore league Kevin Nealon for a "Hans and Franz" l- -J RISD, but left after three years for New York, where she took ex- tension courses in film technique. 1 A stint at Columbia was cut short Via 1QAQ tamnTiatiQtimic fiho "Yonkers," destined to be a high-profile release for Columbia Pictures, finds the 46-year-old Coolidge who has charmed audiences with movies such as "Valley Girl" and "Rambling Rose" movie, based on their pumped-up Austrian bodybuilder characters.

But that was then and this is now. The erstwhile Church Lady and "Wayne's World" costar also will team up with SNL alum Jon Lovitz for "Bulletproof Heart," an actionbuddy comedy. It's being produced by Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, the cinematic poets who gave us "Days of Thunder." In the wake of the Woody Allen-Mia Farrow fiasco, the Coolidge Corner Theater in Brookline will be showing "Manhattan" every evening through Thursday. worn KIJ MIX ASW UVIIIUIWUHUVIWi had a brush with the real world working in television production in Canada, and then returned to New York to study film at NYU. Coolidge's big projects as an independent filmmaker were deeply personal.

"David Off and On" was about her troubled brother. "Old-Fashioned Woman" was a portrait of her indomitable Yankee grandmother, set in her home in Reading, Mass. "Not a Pretty Picture" was a searing film, told in experimental narrative style, re-creating a date rape Coolidge had experienced while in high schooL "For independent filmmakers the few of us that were talking to each other it was a bleak situation," she says of that period, in the early 1970s. "We were all competing for the same grants, everyone made the same mistakes and, we didn't learn from each other." Dismayed over the lack of solidarity, Coolidge and two of her peers founded the COOLIDGE, Page B8 a long way from her roots as a film student in New England and an independent filmmaker in New York City. But she hasn't forgotten those roots.

She engagingly discussed them, and her roller-coaster career in Hollywood, when she came to Boston to accept the first Image Award given by the group Women in Film Video-New England. Sitting at an outdoor cafe in Cambridge, Coolidge gives the listener a guided tour of a filmmaking obsession that began when she was a student at the Rhode Island School of Design in the 1960s and led to her place in the vanguard of a generation of American women directors. Friendly and candid, she speaks with a measured, Yankee self-confidence spiced with a roll-with-the-punches sense of humor. Coolidge grew up in an artistic-minded household in New Haven. Her architect parents had friends such as sculptor Alexander Calder and painter Josef Albers.

As a magoo to you: Superman, Batman, Dennis the Menace and now thanks to Steven Spielberg Mr. Magoo, the nearsighted car- Directing km been a roller-coaster carcerfor Martha Coolidge mmxmmmsm toon nero whose gruii 1 voice was supplied by it the late Jim Backus. Spielberg plans a mixture of live action and animation, a la "Roger Rabbit" Front-runners for the title role: Bob Hoskins, Danny De Vito, Walter Matthau. Two of the Wayans Steven Spielberg I Ik If ji I (Re)made in America Hollywood hoping to gain in the translation brothers Damon and Keenan Ivory got a go-ahead from Columbia for their spoof of su-perheroes, "Blankman." And Wesley Snipes is at work on a film about his favorite comic book hero: "Black Panther." Here's a switch a French remake of an American film. Gerard Depardieu will film a French-language remake of "Tomorrow" (1972), which starred Robert Duvall and was adapted from a William Faulkner story, about a handyman who falls in love with an abandoned pregnant woman in pre-World War I Mississippi.

Bridget Fonda (left) will star in The Specialist," a Warner Bros, remake of. By Lewis Beale SPECIAL TO THE GLOBE L.iirlr. 1 I ollywood is playing the remake game, gambling that foreign-language, art-house hits will translate into English-language, box-office successes. From "La Femme Ni-kita" to "Cinema Paradiso," studio executives are taking a hard look at Of course, Hollywood has always looked overseas for inspiration. Certified-great authors such as Victor Hugo and Leo Tolstoy and have long been Tinseltown favorites, and the industry has been borrowing stars, directors, screenwriters and plotlines from continental films since the silent era.

Not that Hollwood cannibalizes only foreign product. The list of remakes of American films is a long one, represented most recently by "Cape Fear" and the upcoming "Night and the City." As with Hollywood's borrowings in the foreign-exchange market, that list includes classics (the 1954 "A Star Is Born," "High and failures (the 1976 "A Star Is Born," "Against All But when it comes to remaking foreign movies, filmland has had to pick and choose with care, because a good storyline is no guarantee of crossover REMAKES, Page B7 the French film "La Femme Nikita," which starred Anne Parillaud (right) as a vicious punk trained by a government organization to be a professional killer. brattle tattle: The fall schedule at Cambridge's Brattle Theatre starts Labor Day Weekend with a Japanimated triple-bill. Other highlights include a Tuesday-night lineup of witch-hunt films ranging from "The Scarlet Letter" to "Thelma a Sunday-night Clint Eastwood retro; and copious weekend premieres, including the late Satyajit Ray's "The Visitor" and Sven Nykvist's "The Ox," plus "Blast 'Era," "The Professional," "Twin Bracelets," "The Hours and Times," "RSVP," "Echoes of a Somber Empire," and the European cut of "Brazil." Monday noirs get under way Sept 7 with a Marilyn Monroe double: "Niagara" and "Don't Bother to Knock." Thursdays belong to Werner Herzog, starting Dreams" arid Herzog Eats His Shoe." overseas triumphs, trying to decide whether their linguistic and cultural nuances can be converted into Americanese. "There is a frantic search for material in this business," says Tony Safford of Miramax Films, the distributor of "Cinema Paradiso" and other foreign-language hits.

"The major studios can afford to cast their net very wide they can look at plays, at books and, looking at a broad range of source material, they realize they can go to foifeign-language films as a potential remake.".