Gay-themed movie pitches making waves at Cannes

Crocodile Dundee's star turns gay, the Village People are stalked by a killer, and Brideshead is revisited. These and other bizarre plot lines are all being chewed over by deal makers at the Cannes film festival this year, according to industry journals. And nowhere is providing more offbeat scripts than Australia at Cannes 2003. Director Anthony Mir flew in to promote You Can't Stop the Murders about a serial killer who targets members of the disco group the Village People. "We wanted to put the fun back into homicide," he said of his black comedy. Paul Hogan, star of Crocodile Dundee, pretends to "turn gay" in Strange Bedfellows, with Michael Caton: the tale of two Australians in an outback town who pretend to be gay for tax reasons and then have to prove it. "It's the funniest script I have ever had sent to me," Hogan told Moving Pictures magazine. Warner Bros. is reported to have finalized a deal to produce an adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, the gay-inclusive Evelyn Waugh novel that was turned into a television classic starring Oscar winner Jeremy Irons. Leading British costume-drama writer Andrew Davies told Screen International that his adaptation moved away from the more foppish original. "I am much less enamored of all that Oxford snobbery than some people," he said.