Spaced Out

Talk about location shoots. Among the pitches making the rounds at last month's Venice Film Festival was one from Russian director Yuri Kara, who reportedly was seeking stars for Space Flight Has a Price, a $30 million romantic thriller to be shot on board the Russian space station Mir. According to reports, the director's short list of stars included Emma Thompson and Willem Dafoe. But the situation looks grim for the out-of-this-world feature. Kara declined to return calls, but reps for Thompson and Dafoe say the actors have never heard of the director or his project. Adds NASA spokesman Brian Welch, ''You couldn't fly a space mission and do the experiments you needed to do if you had a film crew on board.'' Guess it was just Mir whimsy.