9/11 MOVIES
Flight 93
APRIL
World Trade Center
AUGUST
Is America ready for big-screen dramatizations of September 11? We'll find out in 2006 — the fifth anniversary of the attacks — with Hollywood's first 9/11 features, sure to be among the year's most controversial: Flight 93, a real-time drama from Paul Greengrass (The Bourne Supremacy) about the hijacked United Airlines jet that crashed into a field in Pennsylvania; and Oliver Stone's World Trade Center, with Nicolas Cage and Michael Peña (Crash) starring as Port Authority officers trapped beneath the Ground Zero rubble.
WE'RE PSYCHED FOR
Shortbus
FALL
It features live sex, but it's not porn: ''The sex is a metaphor,'' says
writer-director John Cameron Mitchell (Hedwig and the Angry Inch). Set
in a ''multi-sexual New York...characters converge...to find love,
beauty, and connection. Some people will be scared of it.''
Untitled Beatles Project
FALL
Biopics be damned! This Beatles musical isn't about the Fab Four.
Director Julie Taymor (Broadway's Lion King) extrapolates a tale of '60s
upheaval with Beatles tunes (Bono sings ''I Am the Walrus''). ''We only
have a half hour of dialogue,'' she says. ''You get the narrative through
the music.''
Dreamgirls
DECEMBER
''I don't think there are many great unmade musicals,'' says director Bill
Condon, who scripted one: Chicago. Now he's betting on this sequined
girl-group drama. Eddie Murphy, Jamie Foxx, and Beyoncé headline, and
American Idol alum Jennifer Hudson belts ''And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going.''
The Hoax
SPRING
In 1972, Clifford Irving was sent to prison for perpetrating one of the
biggest publishing scams ever: He penned and sold a fake biography of
Howard Hughes. Kind of a darker role for the man we still think
of — fondly — as the Pretty Woman guy. But Richard Gere, in the Lasse
Hallström-directed film, thinks of Irving as pretty suave — in that
con-man sorta way. ''When you see him in Orson Welles' documentary F for Fake [in which the real Irving appeared], he's perfectly charming.''
