FRENCH WHINE Charles Gassot, a producer of France's Oscar-nominated film The Taste of Others, is threatening to skip the awards ceremony (quelle horreur!) because he feels that U.S. theater owners have given the cold shoulder to the romantic comedy, which opened Feb. 9 on just two screens and has grossed a meager $245,000. (It's made more than $40 million in Europe.) Of course, limited U.S. releases for foreign-language films are standard practice, but Alexis Quinlin, president of Offline Releasing (one of Taste's distributors), blames his film's lack of expansion, even in the wake of its Oscar nomination, on Sony Pictures Classics' Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which he believes is crowding out Taste. ''Tiger is one big joke for me,'' says Quinlin. Despite being in Chinese, ''It's not a real foreign movie. It's [cofinanced by] American money. The foreign movie in America doesn't have a real place.'' As for Taste, ''It's like you go to box and there's Mike Tyson.'' No wonder Gassot is throwing in the towel.
LA VIVA LOCA Warner Bros. is developing a remake of the 1964 Elvis Presley-Ann-Margret classic, Viva Las Vegas, with another hip hip-swiveler in mind: Ricky Martin. Producer Lisa Tornell says the screenwriter, Jason Schafer (trick) is ''starting from scratch, [focusing on] a Puerto Rican singer who comes to Las Vegas to make it big,'' adding that, ideally, she'd love J. Lo to get down with the project, too. Meanwhile, Martin has also been mentioned for a role in Dirty Dancing 2, which Artisan and Miramax are con-tinuing to develop; producer Lawrence Bender (The Mexican) has recently joined the project.
(Rebecca Ascher-Walsh can be reached at reel_world@ew.com)
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