Ricky Gervais

Three Ricky Gervais factoids from this week

The Office is going to be made into a film – but only the German version into a German film

Last week he wrote to the British Prime Minister asking him to replace the bearskin hats of the famous Buckingham Palace Guards Regiments with luxuriant faux fur (Stella McCartney and Vivienne Westwood may get involved)

Gervais was hosting a series of press junkets for his new movie, Ghost Town, at the Roosevelt Hotel in Los Angeles, but left in a hurry when sudden temperature drops and ghostly women glimpsed in mirrors left him unwilling to hang around

Kiss and Tell - from a bathchair

Their average age is 76. Now they're spilling the beans. And not from their plastic soup-bowls, either.

Seven veteran actors are publishing their autobiographies over the next few months.

Hot on the heels of Sean Connery’s Being a Scot comes Roger Moore’s My Word is my Bond. Amongst his recollections include violent spats with Grace Jones on the set of View to a Kill.

Robert Wagner is also set to launch forth before Christmas. He recalls his romance with actress Barbara Stanwyck and writes that dating Elizabeth Taylor 'was like sticking an eggbeater in your brain'.

Tony Curtis preferred the more chemical form of eggbeater. He discusses how he turned to cocaine as a sex-enhancement aid in the 1980’s.

Youngest of the crew is George Hamilton, 69, who, in Don't Mind If I Do, tells how he witnessed a suicide attempt by Judy Garland

Nicolas Cage Eats a Cockroach - no, really

One of the things I do is an occasional column for the Independent newspaper here in the UK. It looks at famous movie scenes and tells the variously hair-raising/amusing/ creepy stories behind them. The collected scenes will become a book round about this time next year, published by AC Black, a subsidiary of Bloomsbury Books, who publish the Harry Potters.

Sometimes the pieces get cut down to fill the space. It's a national newspaper. These things happen.

Here's one that was published last Friday, and since I went to some trouble to track down the director of this particular movie, I thought I'd reproduce it here in it's entirety.

Vampire’s Kiss (1989)


What’s the true story behind the early Nic Cage film where he actually eats a live cockroach? Filmmaker Robert Bierman tells me not to bother with all the Internet rumours. Still, it would be good to know.

How many takes did Cage do for the scene? Where did the actual live cockroaches come from? And which famous movie director and comedian refused to believe the scene was real in any way?

These days Bierman is better known for his work on UK television – most recently working at the helm of Waking the Dead. But back in 1989 he was in New York making a feature film about a publishing executive who believes he’s turning into a vampire. On this particular scene, Cage, now increasingly demented, sees a cockroach on the hob of his kitchen cooker, pops it in his mouth, antennae wriggling, and crunches it up.

‘In the script it had been written that he should eat a raw egg,’ Bierman recalls. ‘But a day or so before filming I’d seen a Japanese film Tampopo do the same thing. So I discussed it with Nic, and he said ‘I really want to do my room 101’ which happens to be cockroaches’.

Filming in an apartment block opposite the Gramercy Park Hotel, the props manager went down to the basement and came back with a number of bugs. ‘We had a bug beauty competition,’ says Bierman. ‘And we selected two’. There were two takes. ‘He ate it, chewed it, and after the shot spat what was left out and took a shot of 100% vodka’. Bierman asked him to do it again. ‘In fact the second take wasn’t so good, and the cockroach didn’t move enough, and Nic flicked it with his finger to try and get some life into it’.

Cage later told a journalist ‘I couldn’t really taste it, but psychologically it was murder – I couldn’t eat anything for three days. I had difficulty sleeping. Every muscle in my body didn’t want to do it, but I did it anyway’.

In those days, a year before making Wild at Heart, Cage was fearless in his commitment to acting. ‘He also ate a pigeon later on,’ says Bierman. ‘So I had to drug them so he could catch them. Filming in the late 80’s, there really were no health and safety issues. There was another scene where a bat flies around the room, and Nic had to be stopped from sending his assistant off to Central Park and catching a real one’.

Bierman was careful to shoot the scene in one unbroken shot to make it clear no trickery was involved. Even so, he later received a phone call from Mel Brooks asking him for the address of his ‘brilliant’ props man who had so expertly faked the scene. Bierman had to assure him that Cage had, in fact, eaten a real, live bug from the basement.

Mean Dads

Lindsay Lohan's war of words with her father shows no signs of dying down anytime soon.

Now Michael Lohan claims he’s negotiating to do a one-hour TV special revealing intimate texts and phone calls between himself and his daughter.

As if Lohan’s family weren’t already trashy enough, now her uncle Paul Sullivan has been sentenced to one year and one day in federal prison for defrauding the U.S. government of terrorist relief funds. He claimed his car company lost business after terrorist attacks on New York's World Trade Center on September 11th 2001.

Sullivan reportedly broke down in tears in the courtroom when the Long Island, New York judge delivered his sentencing.

Awww - Brad Pitt saves Boy

Brad Pitt was just in Venice for the Film Festival.

He was a year late – picking up a gong for Best Actor for his Jesse James (he couldn’t make it in 2007 but won anyhow). Plus he was in town to promote his new Coen Brothers film.

Now he’s a hero too. Brad saved a boy from falling into one of Venice’s notorious (and not very sanitary) network of canals. Pitt grabbed the boy who tripped while he attempted get an autograph from the Hollywood heartthrob.

As the youngster almost fell into the canal, Brad extended his arm and pulled him to safety.

Not only good-looking, a good father, a fan of modern architecture, and not a bad actor – but a moppet-saving superhero too.

You can find out about his new film Burn After Reading here.

John Lennon : The Women

In the UK, visual artist Sam Taylor-Wood is best known for her art installations, though she took a short film to Cannes this year. It now seems she’s signed up to direct a John Lennon biopic Nowhere Boy to be filmed in Liverpool.

The script from Control screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh (who just won a BAFTA for most promising newcomer) will focus on the Beatle’s relationship with the women in his early life, especially his Aunt Mimi, who some sources are claiming will be played by Titanic Star Kate Winslet.

The key casting will be Lennon himself. Now here’s a thing – Sam Riley has already played Ian Curtis and Mark E Smith, Ian Curtis in Control, Smith in 24 Hours Party People. Can he make it a triple musical icon whammy?

Coco Bio

Face of Chanel No 5 Audrey Tautou will star in a biopic of Coco Chanel which will start filming in Paris on September 15th.

It’s called Coco Avant Chanel.

Current Chanel director Karl Lagerfeld will supervise the re-creation of costumes and accessories, which is adapted from a biography of the grande dame of French couture.

It was written by Anne Fontaine and Camille Fontaine with Oscar-winning script consultant Christopher Hampton, best known for his work on Dangerous Liasons, another film with dresses, big dresses and big wigs.

Less likely there will be the same amount of decadent sexual romping, but you just never know