You've heard about how Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman, both two-time Oscar winners, met as classmates at Pasadena Playhouse, where they supposedly were voted least likely to succeed. And that Hoffman bunked at Hackman's apartment in New York when they were still starving actors 40-odd years ago. And that Hackman persuaded Hoffman to move out by helping him find lodging with yet another hungry unknown, Robert Duvall. And that Hackman and Hoffman never worked together on-screen until they filmed the recent "Runaway Jury," which gave them only one scene together. If "Runaway Jury" left you wanting meatier screen time for the two acting titans, you may get it in "Bit Players," and a bonus, too. They, along with Duvall, will have major roles in "Bit Players," which is to have a screenplay by Scott Rosenberg, who did a rewrite on "Runaway Jury," and Michael Lewis. Hackman, Hoffman and Duvall will play a team of men who go after a Wall Street crook who robbed the residents of a small town in the West of their savings. Before they appear together in "Bit Players," Hoffman and Duvall will complete their first film together, "The Lost City," directed by their co-star, Andy Garcia. Duvall has worked with Hackman twice. Duvall did a cameo in "The Conversation," which starred Hackman, and both had big roles in "Geronimo: An American Legend." 'Take Me Out' winding down Richard Greenberg's Tony Award-winning play, "Take Me Out," which was the only non-musical show on Broadway in late summer, will close Jan. 4 after 27 previews and 356 performances. The show concerns a top major league baseball player who announces he's gay and a geeky gay accountant who develops a belated passion for baseball. Closing on Jan. 18 will be the musical "Urinetown" after 25 previews and 965 performances. "Urinetown" might have continued a bit longer, but it's playing in the Henry Miller Theatre, which is to be demolished. Although plays used to jump freely and somewhat cheaply from theater to theater within the Broadway area, the cost of moving a show today is so great that it could eat up any profit that might be made by a show that is hovering near its weekly breakeven point. "Urinetown" already turned a profit, but it's winding down. Thornton's double header Billy Bob Thornton, who generally does three or four pictures a year, never seems over-exposed to the public -- save maybe during his tabloid marriage to Angelina Jolie -- because so many of them fail to reach a wide audience. When the movies are as strong as "The Man Who Wasn't There," "Monster's Ball" and "A Simple Plan," more's the pity. Thornton has two of the top 10 hits now, though, in "Love Actually," playing a cameo as a U.S. president who seems to be part Bill Clinton and part George W. Bush, and as the title character in the R-rated, exceptionally crude "Bad Santa." The latter could turn out to be the best-attended movie in which he's first-billed. Which goes to show you never know. Taking on 'Friedmans' In the Oscar category for best documentary feature, 12 movies will vie for five slots on the nominations slate. Different rules govern eligibility and quantity in the documentary, shorts and foreign language film categories. "Capturing the Friedmans," the only one to play here so far, will be up against "The Agronomist," "My Architect," "Heir to an Execution," "Inheritance: A Fisherman's Story," "My Flesh and Blood," "The Fog of War," "Balseros," "Lost Boys of Sudan," "Bus 174," "The Weather Underground" and "Charlie: The Life and Art of Charlie Chaplin." The point again, please• When modern multiplexes began boasting that they'd play two or more prints of the newest movies, part of their point was that the picture would be starting again every half hour or so in one auditorium or another. And that tends to be true when four or five prints of something like "The Matrix Revolutions" are showing during the first couple of weeks. But when only two prints of a film are at a multiplex, and their starting times are half an hour or less apart, the value of a staggered schedule is for the most part canceled out. If you have two prints, doesn't it make more sense ito start one every hour or so than to do noon and 12:15, then 2 and 2:15, 4 and 4:15 and so on• It's true that by starting both prints within a short space of time, the second one can scoop up spillover from the first, as well as picking up a few latecomers. But the audience would be distributed more evenly over the course of each day if the starting times weren't so clustered in the first place. No? Oh, no, not more I hear more and more people grousing about having to sit through 15 to 25 minutes of trailers before the feature film. And sometimes commercials, too. Movies used to begin at the advertised time. Only those who arrived early -- their choice -- sat through the extra stuff, which up through the 1950s included a newsreel and up through the 1960s included a seven-minute cartoon. We're unlikely to lose the trailers, even though they give away too much of the plot in sequence. Film companies make deals with each other to attach trailers to the fronts of each other's movies. The only thing you can almost always be sure of is that the final trailer -- and therefore the one seen by the most people -- is from the same distributor that released the feature attraction. From five to three The Oscar category for best animated feature film of 2003 will have three nominees instead of five, the number for 2002 full-length cartoons. The quantity is determined by the number of eligible contenders. Because there are fewer than 16 cartoon features eligible for the current year, only the 11 that played theatrical engagements in Los Angeles during the calendar year qualify. The nine so far are "Brother Bear," "Finding Nemo," "The Jungle Book 2," "Looney Tunes: Back in Action," "Millennium Actress," "Piglet's Big Movie," "Pokemon Heroes," "Rugrats Go Wild" and "The Triplets of Belleville." The other two, "Tokyo Godfathers" and "Jester Till" (Till Eulenspiegel), were to begin their L.A. eligibility runs Friday .

---

Copyright ©2025— Trib Total Media, LLC (TribLIVE.com)

---