1. Cate Blanchett is reportedly set to play Maid Marian in Ridley Scott’s Nottingham. Blanchett’s fellow Aussie Russell Crowe will play Robin Hood and/or the titular Sheriff. – Daily Telegraph, Variety
2. Vicky Cristina Barcelona, which earned Penelope Cruz an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress (she plays neither Vicky nor Cristina, but a third woman named Maria Elena), has nudged past Match Point (2005) to become Woody Allen’s top-grossing film since Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), at least before inflation is taken into account. – Box Office Mojo
3. David Nutter has signed on to direct the pilot for Eastwick, a proposed TV series based on John Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick. The novel has been dramatized a few times before, most famously as a 1987 film starring Cher, Michelle Pfeiffer, Susan Sarandon and Jack Nicholson as the Devil; it was also made into a TV-movie in 2002 and an unsold TV pilot in 1992. The new pilot may have better luck getting picked up; Nutter has directed 14 pilots before, and all of them led to ongoing series. – Variety
4. French director Rene Feret will direct Nannerl (Mozart’s Sister), a movie about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s elder sister, later this year. The film takes place between 1763 and 1766 and will depict Mara Anna Mozart – or Nannerl, as she was nicknamed – as “a gifted composer and violinist” who is “forced to abandon music by her father.” She also forms a “tentative friendship with the young prince who became Louis XVI.” – Variety
5. Milk screenwriter Dustin Lance Black is thinking of writing a script about recent Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin. The Visitor writer-director Tom McCarthy has also expressed interest in the subject, and says his script would focus on the teenaged boy who got Palin’s 17-year-old daughter pregnant: “This young man gets his girlfriend pregnant and ends up on the Republican platform at the National Convention. There’s a dark comedy there somewhere. He was like a deer in the headlights.” – WENN
