National Post from Toronto, Ontario, Canada • 48

ARTS NATIONAL POST, MONDAY, NOVEMBER 30, JACKSON'S SON TO GET EDUCATION FIT FOR A PRINCE TRIBUTE, NOT REMAKE kw york Director Gus Van Sanf is tired of people saying his new film, Psycho, Is just another lame remake. "It's an anti-remake film," Van Sant says in Newsweek. "Wily do people take films that are really well done and change the dialogue and change the shots and call it the same movie?" His Psycho, to be released on Friday, is more tribute than remake, since he copied Hitchcock's classic shocker nearly shot for shot and used mostly the same dialogue. Van Sant's is in colour, however. ARTTHIEVES SURRENDER ROME Italian police said on Friday they had recovered a (US) oil painting by 18th-century Venetian painter CanalettO that was stolen last month.

The painting, Fonte ghetto della Farina (The Flour Wharf), was recovered near Rome on Thursday after the two thieves who had taken it from a private collection in Venice's Giustiniani Pajace turned themselves in. Two less-valuable paintings that had also been taken in the heist were also recovered. SLATER WAS MESSED UP kw YORK Actor Christian Slater says he was suicidal on the August, 1997, night he got drunk and higli on cocaine before a scuffle with police that led to his arrest. "After the fight, I tried to kill myself by jumping off the balcony," Slater said in the December issue of Rolling Stone magazine. "They pulled me back in.

Not thinking clearly not thinking at all having chemicals affecting my brain, I just wanted to end it." After his arrest, Slater entered a drug and alcohol rehabilitation centre. HELENA GETS DIRTY LONDON Helena Bonham Carter is set to star in Women Talking Dirty, the first film from Rocket Pictures, Elton John's production company. Bonham Carter will play Cora in the comic story of an unlikely friendship between two Scottish women who help each other through life's ups and downs. Shooting is set to begin next March in Edinburgh. The film will be directed by Coky Giedroyc, who made her debut with Stella Does Tricks.

It's based on a novel by Isla Dewar, who also wrote the screenplay. LONDON Michael Jackson wants his 21-month-old son, Prince, to attend one of England's most expensive private schools when the boy starts his education, the Sunday Telegraph reported. A member of the U.S. pop star's entourage sent to visit the private school of Stowe, west of London, and investigate enrolment returned with a satisfactory report, the weekly said. Many English private schools have long waiting lists, and parents often enroll their children several years before they reach school age.

Fees for Stowe, set in impressive neo-classical buildings, total around 15,000 pounds ($39,000) a year certainly no impediment for one of the wealthiest entertainers in the world. More and more show business personalities seem to be enrolling their children at English private schools; for instance, another U.S. pop star, Madonna, recently inquired about a place for her two-year-old daughter, Lourdes, at Cheltenham Ladies College in the west of England, the British press reported. Unlike the Venus, a sculpture with arms 1 fc HeWeY fctfm al HeIR BTiEPr BE ESEM EvJ eebem Lr ECEflECCsVBEM BJBssXIraaBJ BEl rittaBEEEMEEEiEEl jj' 'EfEflBBEEEEEEEEEE "1 JBWKj'm "'JIH mtmSSm- tfSrfflm bet in Ie hSsii 9 EwEsKeHT ''''Efli bHEw SSsss" "wbI Bromley began looking at ways to deactivate the guns that would meet federal regulations. They worked with officials from the Justice Department and, in the end, decided to use two methods: Either the guns would be squashed in a metal press leaving them flat on one side or melted at key points with a torch.

Either way, what's left will be "totally useless," says Bromley. "They can't ever be used again." The two artists started with a wax model and will soon begin building a full-size Styrofoam mock up. The next step is to get the guns. Wallis and Bromley have asked 44 countries from Algeria to Vietnam to send deactivated weapons for the project. In Brazil, local law students have already collected street guns to send.

Wallis is now hoping that the IRA will send some of its weapons as a gesture of peace. "I'd love to see a symbolic hand-in of guns before Christmas," he says. In Canada, the artists plan to use guns and shells the Department of National Defence had planned to demolish and crime weapons collected by the RCMP. The first domestic shipments could arrive within the next two weeks. The sculpture will be constructed in panels so it can be disassembled for shipment to other cities around the world.

The project will also include computers so viewers can leave their own messages behind. A huge panel will be hung on the wall near the sculpture, listing the countries that contributed weapons and, in as many cases as possible, the histories and stories of the guns themselves. Vincent Varga, executive director of the Edmonton Art Gallery, says he was more than willing to support a local project with international potential. "I think art has always been political," he says. "In an age when you have to be absolutely graphic to capture peoples' attention, this is a way to do it." "We believe deeply in the whole process of peace," says Kendal.

But he has no illusions: "Everyone might say we're aggrandizing ourselves with this, but we are first and foremost artists. We know it's not going to change the world." The Edmonton Journal By Rick McCONNEI.I. Edmonton When Wallis Kendal speaks by telephone today to the Irish Republican Army, he will have one request: Send me 150 guns. Wallis Kendal is an artist and writer, and he will be asking Alex Maskey of Sinn Fein, the IRA's political arm, to contribute the raw materials for a work to be called The Gun Sculpture. The construction, made from decommissioned guns from around the world, will be built next year in an Edmonton studio by Kendal and sculptor Sandra Bromley.

Its first appearance is planned for January, 2000, at the Edmonton Art Gallery. The piece will then tour the world as a gesture of peace. The project has already received a $250,000 grant from the Millennium Bureau of Canada, a federal government program to help promote and fund projects for the year 2000. A studio has been rented near Kingsway Mall. A project director has been hired.

Some time next month, it is hoped, the first shipment of guns will arrive. The sculpture is the Millennium project of a local group called the "i human 2000 Peace Initiative." The plan is to deactivate 6,000 to 8,000 guns, land mines, and artillery shells around the world, ship them to Edmonton and turn them into art. When it's finished, the sculpture will be the size and shape of a prison cell. The $800,000 project is backed by a board of directors chaired by Mary LeMessurier, Alberta's former culture minister and former agent general in London. The whole thing began three years ago, after Bromley and Kendal met at an art exhibition.

He was bowled over by the power of her big, bold sculptures in wood. They decided to work on a project together. It was Wallis, Bromley recalls, who first said, 'Let's use real and I thought, 'Wow! That's so powerful. Let's get the guns from all over the The first, and by far the highest, hurdle, was to find a way to import guns into Canada, which has some of the strictest firearms regulations in the world. Wallis and Scott Speedman says the great thing about Canada is its quieter feci, its lack of the crazy star culture that dominates L.

A. When Felicity hunk gave up wearing tights Speedman recalls his days as a struggling actor it. Canada's got a quieter feel to it, a nicer feel." He spends most of his off-cam-era time on the set playing basketball with the techies on the lot. "You don't meet anyone in L. A.

That's the hard part. You call your friends and you have $700 phone bills. I never go to my trailer. It's too claustrophobic." The former jock says his athletic focus helps his new career. "Most kids don't have the right discipline for acting.

Everyone's really lazy. They work hard at the exact wrong things, you know? They work hard at getting an agent and getting noticed and meeting the right people." He adds that on camera, TV actors can't afford to wait for direction. "You've got to know how to direct yourself. With most television directors, the more they say the worse it gets. They like to think they know a lot, but mostly the more they talk the more they screw it up." He remembers the moment when he first became convinced that he had to act.

"I was taking an on-camera class and I remember watching a tape of one of my scenes it was from Something Wild, the scene where Ray Liotta freaks out. I actually broke the walls of the classroom, and it worked. It was the first time that I really stepped out. It was like, 'Wow, that was He'd prefer to be doing movies, but for now he likes TV acting well enough. He works so much that it occurs to him that he lives as much on-camera as he does off-camera.

But Speedman says he likes that feeling. "When you're really doing it and you're really alive," he says, "it's the best." He says it's a good life, although "no matter how much you try, L. A. takes a little piece of you away." Speedman's fans can look forward to the young actor appearing on stage in a Toronto production of David Mamet's classic play American Buffalo when the television series goes on summer break. National Post member of the Canadian National swim team in 1988 and 1992 and was on his way to the Olympics until his shoulder gave out and ended his competitive career.

His acting career was launched at 19 when his girlfriend dared him to go to CityTV's Speaker's Corner and tape a pitch for the part of Robin in Batman Forever. He didn't get the part, but he did get an agent, which led to TV and movie roles in Toronto. "It was fun for a while, but then I started looking at what I was doing and it wasn't so much fun anymore," he says. "I was always playing the bad boyfriend or the guy that beat up his girlfriend. They put you in a little category which is hard to escape." So Speedman enrolled in classes at the University of Toronto and started working at the Norman Jewison Film Centre.

He landed parts in two Canadian features, Can I Get a Witness and the recently released Kitchen Party. "I got to do some good stuff," says Speedman, "but then I came back and made more crappy TV movies, and it was kind of upsetting. Kitchen Party was such a high, and then it was back to the crap. So I took off to New York." Wearing jeans and a thin leather jacket, Speedman is skinny and muscular, with a head of dirty-blond hair that sweeps up from his forehead like whipped cream. A few days of stubble only adds to his intense, camera-friendly good looks.

Talking to him you realize he hasn't adopted the press-friendly glow of Team WB, and he really doesn't love the trappings of his L. A. life. "I honestly think I have a better perspective than American actors on what the L. A.

game is about," said the actor, who recently turned down an invitation to visit the Playboy mansion. "See, I'm kind of coming down there looking at it from the outside. I can see it for what it is pretty clearly. Everything is so hyped there. The great thing about Canada is the lack of star culture.

Like, you do a film here and that's I Deirdre Dolan on TV lowed her lust, high-school crush Ben, to an unnamed university in New York, but when she arrived, her lust was cruelly denied: Ben, a gorgeous dope with a tortured soul, can't even remember her name, falls into the sack with her new best friend, and generally finds her stalker presence annoying. Sexual gridlock firmly in place, another cynical series takes off. Six months ago, when WB, the upstart American network that created Felicity, tracked down Speedman to audition for the role of sensitive, sexy Ben, the 23-year-old was in the middle of an acting funk and didn't want to be found. He had just bailed on a fancy Manhattan acting school, the kind that requires ballet the tights on at 9 A.M. just really wasn't my thing I and was sleeping on his mom's Bayview Avenue couch.

"I was kind of freaked out and hanging out," he explains. WB's casting department sent him the script anyway, and what he read impressed him. "Most scripts I only read the first 15 pages," he says. "You can tell pretty quickly. I get so bored with all these action movies that they say are going be different.

They're ail the same crap. But I knew this was good." He auditioned on videotape in Toronto and shipped the tape to the show's producers. They called two days later and by the following Monday he was at work on the Culver City, set. Raised in Willowdale, Speedman attended Earl Haig Secondary School and spent a lot of time swimming. He was a Toronto actor Scott Speed-man, star of the hyper-articulate teen drama Felicity, has the proper humility about his new life.

While the rest of the cast is south of the border, sleeping off turkey hangovers, "Speedy" sits in the back of a Movenpick restaurant on Bay Street, sucking down bottled water and agreeably working the publicity machine during the show's five-day hiatus for American Thanksgiving. "They take the holiday very, very seriously," he says, shrugging his shoulders. "In the States, everything is bigger." Speedman plays the elusive hunk Ben Covington, source of the existential dilemma acted out each week by Felicity Porter (Ker-ri Russell). Felicity is in New York as an exile from Palo Alto, having rejected her parents' wish for her to attend Stanford and become a doctor. Instead, she EDWARD PARSONS THK KDMONTON JOURNAL Kendal says he'd love to see a hand-in of IRA guns before Christmas..