The Nobody’s Fool (1994) team of Paul Newman, director Robert Benton, and scripter Richard Russo reassembled for this L.A. detective drama, beginning with a Puerto Vallarta prologue showing private eye Harry Ross (Newman) accidentally shot by 17-year-old Mel Ames (Reese Witherspoon) during his efforts to get her to return home. Two years later, the broke and divorced Ross lives in a garage apartment on the estate of Mel’s parents, his movie-star friends Jack and Catherine Ames (Gene Hackman and Susan Sarandon). The cancer-ridden Jack is not unaware that Harry is attracted to Catherine. Delivering a package for Jack, Harry encounters elderly Lester Ivar (M. Emmet Walsh), who shoots at Harry and then dies. Harry’s curiosity is provoked when he discovers that Ivar was an investigator checking into the disappearance of Catherine’s first husband, written off 20 years earlier as an unsolved case, but now reactivated as Harry’s sleuth-work leads him on a trail of past crimes and cover-ups. The Ames residence is actually the former Cedric Gibbons-Delores Del Rio home, and a never-completed Frank Lloyd Wright house near Malibu served as the Ames’ ranchhouse.~ Bhob Stewart, All Movie Guide
Nicole Kidman is rumoured to be playing Dusty Springfield in an upcoming biopic.
Writer Michael Cunningham, whom Kidman worked with on ‘The Hours’ and will pen the biopic, has suggested that Kidman will play the English pop singer.
Discussing Springfield, Cunningham said, “She was a great artist who no one knew what to do with. She was coming into her full powers at the same time the Beatles were,” he said, adding that she suddenly found herself the purveyor of a dying torchy genre. “But she is clearly going into history with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.”
Cunningham said the film would include the lonely years in exile from the U.K. in Hollywood, the drinking and the drugging, and the tortured bisexual/lesbian feelings that wove through her checkered career, which ended when she died of cancer in 1999.
EXTRAS: Nicole Kidman is a witch… or at lease she’s played a witch twice. Once in Practical Magic and again in Bewitched.