Bone up on your defensive driving, Canada. Paris Hilton is heading North.
Hollywood's most photogenic jailbird, Hilton has signed on for Repo! The Genetic Opera, a musical thriller directed by horror filmmaker Darren Lynn Bousman.
Bousman filmed all four Saw films in Toronto (the just-wrapped Saw IV opens in October). And he is following suit for his rock opera, which will be set in the year 2056.
In the film, Hilton plays the daughter of a villainous transplant-organ magnate (Paul Sorvino), who holds the lives of a post-apocalyptic world in his hands.
Hilton apparently sings in the movie, which is scheduled to begin shooting Sept. 10 -- during the Toronto International Film Festival.
Hilton, who previously acted in the horror film House of Wax, may need to bolster her income. Reports this week had her being cut out of her 80-year-old grandfather Barron Hilton's will, to the tune of as much as $60 million.
DAMON TO PLAY NESS? If Seven and Zodiac director David Fincher gets his wish, Matt Damon's next identity will be Eliot Ness.
Producer Don Murphy tells Sun Media that Fincher wants Damon to star in the grisly, fact-based thriller Torso. The film, based on a graphic novel, will explore how Ness, after bringing down Al Capone, saw his political ambitions crumble when he failed to catch a brutal serial killer who littered Cleveland with dismembered corpses.
Fincher's determination to cast Damon could prove a hurdle, though. The director is still wrapping The Curious Case of Benjamin Button with Brad Pitt.
And Damon, whose The Bourne Ultimatum opened Friday, is committed to film Imperial Life in the Emerald City and The Informant before next June, when the actors and writers guilds are expected to strike.
REDUCE, REUSE, RECYCLE: An apocalyptic future where crooked businessmen trade in transplanted organs and repo-men repossess them? It's an idea so nice they're filming it twice.
At about the same time that Paris Hilton sings about the future in Repo! The Genetic Opera, Jude Law and Forest Whitaker also will be in Toronto filming Universal Pictures' thriller The Repossession Mambo.
Law and Whitaker play organ "repo-men," who foreclose on people who can't pay for their organs -- that is until one of them ends up in arrears himself.
DOWN THE TUBE? No one has benefited more from YouTube and the viral video craze than Saturday Night Live's Andy Samberg.
Yet at the same time, the fact anyone can shoot his or her own digital skits and post them online represents a threat to Hollywood studios and performers such as Samberg.
"It's opening things up and making it a buyer's market, but at the same time the bigger companies don't know how to respond because it's a lot of free content. That is a scary prospect for them. There is a lot of money to be lost."
For now, though, Samberg believes "people aren't buying long-form entertainment (online). The best thing you can get and send to your friends in the office is a four-minute clip they can watch, laugh about and get back to work. I don't have a lot of attention span for something on a tiny screen that's crappy quality."
