06.26.08: Actors Prepare To Strike, Parker Climbing 'The Ivy Chronicles'

Lots of saber-rattling between the producers and actors over the last few weeks, which I’ve been following but not reporting on because, well, frankly, it’s all been a little bit dull. But it’s about to get interesting because D-Day is imminent: Monday’s the deadline for ratifying a new deal between the Screen Actors Guild (in a movie, they’d be the good guys – even their multi-millionaire A-lister members, who only make up a tiny sliver of the 120,000-strong membership) and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (the cigar-chomping, roost-ruling bad guys – not that we’re prone to stereotyping). If it doesn’t happen by Monday, the Screen Actors Guild will order its members to down tools and we’ll be back where we were a few months ago when the writers went on strike. The New York Times has a feature about how Hollywood’s girding itself for the chill winds to come.

Taking Solace
I was one of a privileged few to be shown 10 minutes of footage last night from the upcoming Bond thrillride Quantum Of Solace, presented in person by director Marc Forster. Unfortunately, I also had to sign one of those under-pain-of-death embargos beforehand so can’t reveal specific details for now, but suffice to say that the action stuff is easily going to match – if not surpass – Casino Royale’s bar-pushing sequences.

Casting Call: Cross, Swinton, SJP
* Now that Sex And The City has harpooned the global box-office whale, Sarah Jessica Parker has her pick of post-Sex romp-coms. Looks like she’ll be opting for The Ivy Chronicles, a single-mother tale about an Upper East Side princess who loses her job and husband and has to start over in reduced circumstances. So, it’s like the opposite of SATC. Do you see what she’s done there?

* Desperate housewife Marcia Cross will star in Peck, playing the smothering mother of Adam Arkin’s high-school. But she doesn’t want to be typecast, you understand…

* Tilda Swinton is joining Nicolas Cage and Pierce Brosnan in Roman Polanski’s political thriller The Ghost. The ethereal, Oscar-winning Swinton will play a political wife stuck in a collapsing marriage with Brosnan’s former prime minister who falls for the ghostwriter scribbling his memoirs (that would be Nicky Cage)…