REEL DEALS''Scrooged'' star Bill Murray may play another Grinchy guy who gets a dose of Christmas spirit from a child. He's in talks to star in ''Bad Santa,'' about a pair of con men who dress as St. Nick and an elf in order to rob malls, thieves who are ultimately shown the true meaning of Christmas by a little boy. and Ethan Coen are producing, and Terry Zwigoff (''Ghost World'') is directing....
Now that Macaulay Culkin is old enough to get into nightspots legally, he's planning a return to the screen in the role of Michael Alig, New York's most notorious ''club kid.'' The 21-year-old actor, who hasn't appeared on screen since ''Richie Rich'' in 1994, will star in ''Party Monster,'' a black comedy to be directed by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato (''The Eyes of Tammy Faye''), who made a documentary about Alig, also called ''Party Monster.'' Alig was a top figure in Manhattan nightlife during the 1990s, promoting parties, producing records, and publishing a magazine. He was also a drug addict who killed his dealer by injecting him with Drano and dumped the body in the East River. When he boasted of the murder, everyone thought it was a publicity stunt until the body washed up. The screenplay is adapted from ''Disco Bloodbath,'' an account by Alig colleague James St. James, who will be played in the movie by someone who knows from dangerous nightlife, ''Buffy'' vet Seth Green....
In his next project, Texas Rangers reliever John Rocker won't be flinging fastballs or bigoted epithets, but rather, lethal golf gear and landscaping tools. He plays the title role in the low-budget thriller ''The Greenskeeper,'' a teen slasher movie set on a golf course. ''He has a crazy persona, and the character needed a wild streak,'' producer Kevin Greene says of Rocker, whose as well-known for the racist and homophobic remarks that got him suspended for two weeks in 2000 as he is for his pitching. The film, whose tagline is, ''It's par for the corpse,'' premieres in May in Atlanta, but it's still looking for a nationwide distributor.
TUBE TALK ''E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial,'' the movie that pioneered product placement with its conspicuous use of Reese's Pieces, is the subject of some unprecedented product placement itself. On March 20, two days before the film's 20th anniversary re-release in theaters, ABC will air an episode of ''My Wife and Kids'' that weaves numerous references to ''E.T.'' into the script. The allusions (including a sequence where Parker McKenna Posey, who plays Damon Wayans' little girl, rides a flying bicycle across a moonlit sky) aren't an accident or an homage; they're plugs resulting from a deal Universal Pictures struck with ABC. As Universal vice chairman Marc Shmuger told the Hollywood Reporter, the studio has been looking for ways to buy advertising that viewers won't ignore or click past on Tivo. ''We're finding that our consumer is more and more choosing to fast-forward through the spot message in favor of the content that they've chosen to watch,'' he said. The way to get around that was to turn an entire sitcom episode into an infomercial. The studio picked ''My Wife'' for the brazenly commercial reason that ''it's family programming with an ethnic crossover, so it's doubly attractive to us.'' Can't wait to see how they work those ''Scorpion King'' plugs into ''The Practice.''
