The Column Without a Name!
October 25, 1998

"It haunts your dreams, the bastard son of a thousand journalists.  With long knives for fingers, it stalks co-eds at random and takes them to its boiler room home.  No matter how times the column is killed, it will always be back in the sequel..."

Shot of boiler room--POV shot--you turn a corner only to face--a natty sweater, a rumpled hat and THE COLUMN WITH NO NAME!!!!

The reward for naming this column could be a whole herd of unsold Bram Stoker's Dracula key chains, perfect for making ridiculous chain mail armor for Halloween.  Seriously folks, we are looking for a new name for this column. Please submit your suggestions to Deadpool directly. If we pick your title, you'll be rewarded. With what?!? Well... we're not quite sure yet...

Chris & Chris Together???

An interesting scoop was sent our way: "After Chris Rock finishes his comedy Spin Doctor---about a manic spin doctor (Rock) for the NBA who rehabilitate a Dennis Rodman-esque player before the player is kicked off the team---Rock will be doing a romantic comedy, and wants Chris Tucker to co-star with him." [Scoop sent in by 'spik'd'.]

This might not be for a while. Rock has signed to co-star in Neil Labute's Nurse Betty (with Morgan Freeman and Renee Zellweger) and after that he'll have time to do Warner' Spin Doctor. He's also been rumored to do a romantic comedy for quite sometime. Still, a proposed Rock/Tucker team-up sure does sound like something we all want to see.

The Ten Most Promising Exciting Actors/Actresses Under 25

I've been thinking about this one for a while. Forget the ones you know about already: Tucker, Love-Hewitt, Gellar, Diaz, Paltrow, Leo and Claire. You won't find them on this list.  Here is what I think is the next big wave of actors:

1. Natalie Portman
Age: 17
Gifted Performances: Beautiful Girls, The Professional, Heat
In The Pipeline: Star Wars:The Phantom Menace
Comments: Lucas didn't pick her for nothing. If someone becomes a superstar from this film it's her. As far as acting skills goes she can out-match anybody of her generation. A very long career lies ahead of her.

2. Tobey Maguire
Age: 23
Gifted Performances: Pleasantville, The Ice Storm
In The Pipeline: Ride With The Devil, The Cider House Rules
Comments: Some good early performances indicated this friend of Leo could be headed for stardom. One of the signs of his rising star was when Miramax gave him the lead to the highly anticipated The Cider House Rules.

3. Jeremy Davies
Age: 24
Gifted Performance: Saving Private Ryan
In The Pipeline: The Billion Dollar Hotel, Ravenous, The Florentine
Comments: If next April his name doesn't follow the phrase "And the awards goes to..." it will be a real shame.

4. Katie Holmes
Age: 19
Gifted Performance: The Ice Storm
In The Pipeline: Go, Killing Mrs. Tingle
Comments:The next Sandra Bullock. Watch and see.

5. Giovanni Ribisi
Age: 22
Gifted Performances: Saving Private Ryan, Friends
In The Pipeline: The Mod Squad
Comments: He's the next Ed Norton... His dim-witted character on Friends was hilarious. He gave  a wonderful performance in SPR. The Mod Squad should put him on the map.

6. Sarah Polley
Age: 19
Gifted Performance: The Sweet Hereafter
In The Pipeline: Existenz, Go
Comments: She's been acting since the age of 5. After doing Canadian television (The Road to Avonlea ring a bell with anyone out there?), the insane Atom Egoyan cast her in Exotica and The Sweet Hereafter. She now moved from being a Canadian indie star to a rising young actress in Hollywood in only two years.

7. Christina Ricci
Age: 18
Gifted Performance: The Opposite of Sex
In The Pipeline: 200 Cigarettes, Sleepy Hollow
Comments:Okay we all remember her as Wednesday Addams, but The Opposite of Sex opened our eyes to her incredible talent. With roles in 200 Cigarettes and in Tim Burton' Sleepy Hollow we hope she'll make us forget she did movies like Gold Diggers: The Secret of Bear Mountain.

8. Angelina Jolie
Age: 23
Gifted Performance: HBO's Wallace
In The Pipeline: Dancing About Architecture, Pushing Tin, The Bone Collector
Comments: Jon Voight's daughter is both beautiful and talented. Okay performances in Hackers and Playing God have shown snippets of her talent. She's bound to explode on-screen soon.

9. Reese Witherspoon
Age: 22
Gifted Performance: Pleasantville
In The Pipeline: Cruel Intentions, Election
Comments: A wonderful performance in Pleasantville and some nice roles ahead of her should help establish herself as one of the premiere female actress of her generation. 10. Omar Epps
Age:23
Gifted Performances: Higher Learning, ER
In The Pipeline: The Wood
Comments: He's been known due to his ER run and his Scream 2 cameo. My money is on Epps to emerge as the next great african-american leading man.

Rumors:Truth and Lies

Here at Coming Attractions we get close to 300 e-mails a day. How much of those are truths? How much of those are fiction? How much crap did we hear before a movie came out?

Here's a look back at 3 blockbuster movies from this past summer and all the truth and lies we were sent beforehand. How did the track record of CA turn out?

Armageddon

On May 4th 1997, one year and two months before the movie came out an anonymous scooper spoiled the entire movie. This was the scoop that earned us a little bit of infamy among Disney employees...

"The second meteor is a planet killer 'the size of Texas', and the plan du juor is to send a group of crack oil drillers specialized in deep drilling in super-secret space shuttles to the asteroid, land on its surface, drill 1000 feet to its core and insert a nuclear device, thus splitting the asteroid in half and making it miss earth.

Tag line of the movie right there...

"The head driller insists his roughnecks come with him, so the whole first half of the script is the wackiness that insues while NASA tries to train a bunch of beer guzzling, cigarette smoking roughnecks as astronauts (in two weeks, no less). Also has a wacky cosmonaut in the Mir Station (where the shuttles stop to refuel, and subsequently accidentaly blow up the space station, ensuring that our fun Russian friend is along for the rest of the ride) and lots and lots of deus ex machina.

Check, check, check...yup, all of those were in the movie.

"After many, many troubles, they dig the hole, insert the bomb, but the remote detonator gets busted, and the head driller has to stay on the rock to blow it. He does, the world is saved, yadda yadda yadda."

Check...there's the ending too.

After reviewing all the scoops we posted, none of them seem to have not come true. Looks like a victory for CA.

Saving Private Ryan

One of the weirdest scoops we ever got concerning this one:

"Well, my buddy's wife is working on the set of Saving Private Ryan somewhere in Florida...she's one of the makeup artists. Anyway, looks like Florida's beaches are dubbing for Normandy."

Florida??? Truly hilarious... As we all know the beach sequence were shot in Ireland. Other then this all of the other scoops we posted were true.

Blade

On May 26th 1998, a scooper wrote this: "Blade has one unbelievable action scene that takes place in a train station."

As we all know the sequence took place in a train tunnel, a fact that the director of Blade pointed out to us soon afterward (and which the original scooper later corrected). Other then this scoop, we were sent no lies.

In the end not that many scoops posted are lies. Some scoops that seem unbelievable or weird might actually be the truth. To quote a well-known television character, the truth is out there...

Star Wars News

Some disturbing news from a good friend: "I was talking to a person that I know from another Theatre chain. He gave me some not so promising Star Wars news.This guy books films. He was speaking to someone at Fox that saw the rough cut of The Phantom Menace and the Fox rep says that this a toy show bigger than Return of the Jedi. He also said the footage was messed up. and Lucas wasn't happy. Explanation for the reshoots.

He also said that the release date is in question because Lucas is very far behind in post production because of the reshoots and may not make the May release date. That is also why we didn't see a trailer in the summer. If he can't reach the release date the industry will be in a major panic. People are starting to make out their release schedules for next year could leave a major hole. Everyone moved release schedules and production start time to stay away from it. If you read the description of the trailer on Dark Horizons effects were not finished. The tagline would be 'Coming To Your Galaxy Next Summer'. Lucas wants this to be great. Maybe it will be ready for the Forth of July." [Scoop sent in by 'Movies']

Good Morning Mr Reader,

Your mission should you choose to accept it: I still need reviews of the fall movies' trailers. Send your reviews to the DeadPool email address below for a future 'Trailers of The Winter' column. Which trailers?   Psycho, You've Got Mail, Stepmom, Patch Adams and Star Trek: Insurrection.
 

Stay Tuned...

That's All Folks...

Jean-François Allaire (aka 'Deadpool')
deadpool@colba.net
Contributing Content Writer
Coming Attractions


Jean-François Allaire is an aspiring young writer at the age of 19. Writer by night, stalker by day, you'll find him roaming the streets of Montreal in search for info on local film productions. J-F is one of our major contributing writers to Coming Attractions. Always pushing to do more, he will now do this column on a regular basis. He wants everyone to know that if you work behind the scenes on a film production and you're just another name in the credits (or no credit given), and you feel that nobody cares, well guess again... Feel free to send him your funny, strange, and heart-warming set stories. Hell... he may even interview you!

Previous issues of Deadpool's column are also available.

 



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