Flowers in the Attic , the V. C. Andrews novel you read under the covers with a flashlight and against your own best interests, is getting a fresh start in January. The Dollanganger family is returning to the small screen in a Lifetime reboot of the 1987 film. And where the original film glossed over the relationship between Cathy and her brother, THAT scene is included in this version. Watch the trailer now and see for yourself. Flowers In the Attic Trailer Flowers in the Attic is the story of four children who are locked away in their grandmother’s attic while their mother schmoozes her way back into her father’s good graces in the hopes of inheriting his money when he dies. While trapped, the two oldest children develop romantic feelings for one another–and act on them–while trying to keep the youngest two alive. Starring Heather Graham as the mother who basically sells out her own children for the chance to be rich again and Academy Award winner Ellen Burstyn as the evil, rule-making, child-abusing grandmother, this adaptation boasts a stellar cast. Mason Dye and Kiernan Shipka, yes, Sally from Mad Men , are set to play incestuous siblings Chris and Cathy Dollanganger. What do you think? Will you be watching Flowers in the Attic when it airs in January?
Ridley and Tony Scott know a thing or two about indelible movie scenes. So it’s not surprising that the filmmakers behind, respectively the chest burster scene in Alien and the “Bela Lugosi Is Dead”-accompanied blood-drinking scene at the opening of The Hunger would rely on an iconic single image to connect their A&E Network reboot of “Coma” to Michael Crichton’s original 1978 movie adaptation of Robin Cook’s novel about organ harvesting. With a nod to the late Joe Strummer, I like to refer to the image as Coma Girl, and if you troll the Internet or pay attention to mass transit bus advertisements, you’ve probably seen her: an apparently naked woman dangling in the supine position from a series of wires beneath the web address: “Comaconspiracy.com”. A photographic version of that graphic — which smartly manages to be both creepy and titillating in an S&M kinda way (back then, The Story of O was almost as popular as Fifty Shades of Grey is today) — was used in a movie poster for the ’78 film, and Guy Slattery, Executive Vice President of Marketing for A&E tells me that Coma Girl was intentionally used to connect the new production, which is a two-part miniseries, to the Crichton movie. “The original was so impactful and such an iconic image,” Slattery says. “The question was how could we update it and make it more of the moment.” To those ends, Slattery says his department went the graffiti route for the viral teaser campaign that involved “legal tagging” in New York and Los Angeles, and online clips in which, for instance, “hacktvists” post the graphic of Coma Girl on the Times Square Jumbotron to draw attention to mysterious goings on at the foreboding looking Jefferson Institute. Slattery explains that a subsequent campaign will feature actual “visualizations” of the hanging coma victims. “There are some very cool technological innovations that are used” in the A&E series, such as a silvery skin like “suit and feeding tubes” that are used to keep the coma victims alive. “I think fans are going to be blown away,” says Slattery of the series which will air over two nights, Sept. 3 and 4, and stars Lauren Ambrose, Steven Pasquale, Geena Davis, James Woods, Ellen Burstyn and Richard Dreyfuss. The marketing executive says the Scott brothers’ Coma will be a “modern telling” of Cook’s story. “It’s about corporations overstepping the bounds and putting profits before morality.” Cook’s story was ahead of it’s time in the late ’70s, and now more relevant than ever thanks to advances in medicine since then. Slattery also hinted that the A&E production may also reference another memorable scene in Crichton’s movie–in which an ill-fated janitor is murdered by electrocution and freaky blue sparks shoot from one of his eyeballs. “Without revealing too much, there is a creepy scene involving an eye socket,” he says. Follow Frank DiGiacomo on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Madonna reedited her new film W.E. after its mostly disastrous premiere at the Venice Film Festival a few months ago, and now it’s in new trailer, her watercolored royalty tale looks sleeker, sexier, and — phew — just as ridiculous. In terms of Madonna paramours, W.E. just made the admirable jump from Vanilla Ice to Dennis Rodman. Now there is something colorful and electric about its freakish antics.
Variety reports that Scarlett Johansson will soon join the ranks of actresses-turned-directors with Summer Crossing , Truman Capote’s first novella, about a 17-year-old Manhattan socialite who breaks away from her family and has an affair with a working class parking lot attendant in the summer of 1945. The Avengers star had discussed her directorial debut previously this fall, but with backers and The Deer Hunter producer Barry Spikings it seems the project is actually happening. Yes, but will it measure up to Jen Aniston and Demi Moore ‘s cancer dramas ? Gauntlet dropped, ScarJo. [ Variety ]
It wasn’t quite a complete reunion for Peter Bogdanovich and the cast of his 1971 breakthrough The Last Picture Show last night at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; there was no Jeff Bridges or Ellen Burstyn in sight, but plenty of the other main players including Cybill Shepherd, Timothy Bottoms, Cloris Leachman (who gives a funny anecdote about an underwear-related scene), and Eileen Brennan joined Bogdanovich to recount stories from behind the scenes of the adapted Larry McMurtry novel. Yeah, it’d have been nice for The Dude to stop by, but you’ll find yourself transfixed by Brennan very soon anyway. Mrs. Peacock in the flesh, yo. Video (featuring moderator Luke Wilson) after the jump.
The long-gestating live-action adaptation of the popular manga and anime tale Akira has been resuscitated at Warner Bros. months after Albert Hughes dropped out of the director’s chair . Is this good news for diehard fans of Katsuhiro Otomo’s cyberpunk saga? What if the front runner to play Kaneda is Tron: Legacy ‘s Garrett Hedlund ?
Among the great mysteries of the spy-movie world — along with the question of how Blofeld keeps his suits from being covered with cat hair — is this: Why aren’t the Johnny English movies better?
We’ve been vocal about our obsession with Ellen Barkin , who is currently taking Twitter by storm with her vulgar 140-character rants, observations, and loving shout-outs. Now, Movieline premieres the new poster from her upcoming film Another Happy Day , in which she plays the exasperated matriarch in a truly dysfunctional family with ex-husband Thomas Haden Church, kids Ezra Miller and Daniel Yelsky, daughter Kate Bosworth, and a step family that includes Demi Moore, Ellen Burstyn, and George Kennedy. Damn!
An interview with Martin Landau really shouldn’t be called that — more than just a simple Q&A, it’s as though you’re sitting in on an Actor’s Studio session taught by the 82-year-old actor. Though my talk with Landau this week was pegged to the release of Lovely, Still , a new indie film where he finds late-in-life romance with Ellen Burstyn, it took no time before he began discussing the very nature of acting itself using some of his most famous roles as examples — including his Oscar-winning turn as Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood and his characters in Alfred Hitchcock’s North By Northwest and Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors . In fact, when it comes to actors, it turns out that Hitchcock and Allen have more in common than you might expect.
