Minnie Driver and Eddie Izzard in The Riches by Prashant Gupta/FX
NBC has greenlit a sixth season of The Biggest Loser, to premiere in the fall. The plan is to repeat the current cycle's concept of casting teams of two.... FX has announced a March 18 Season 2 premiere for The Riches, which this time around will serve up only seven episodes.... Shrek: The Musical brings the big green guy to Broadway Dec. 14, with previews starting Nov. 8. Shrek and Donkey have yet top be cast, while Sutton Foster (currently Young Frankenstein's Inga) is onboard as Fiona. My wallet already feels $500 lighter.... OK, this is fun.
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Shrek the Halls' "Gingy," voiced by Conrad Vernon
As entertaining as the big green guy and Donkey are, for this pop of twin 5-year-old boys, it's the ancillary fairy-tale critters who make the Shrek films full of adult-targeted chuckles. On the occasion of ABC's Shrek the Halls special premiering tonight at 8 pm/ET, TVGuide.com chatted with Conrad Vernon, the voice behind Gingy the Gingerbread Man, and the director of Shrek 2 and the much-anticipated Monsters vs. Aliens.
TVGuide.com: When I stopped to think about it, it dawned upon me that Christmastime cannot bode well for the Gingerbread Man.Conrad Vernon: [Laughs] No, it doesn’t. It doesn’t. I haven't seen the whole [ABC special] yet but I've definitely seen my part in it, and it's kind of horrifying — but that’s fine.
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Rosie O'Donnell by Gary Gershoff/WireImage.com
Rosie O'Donnell makes her first (consensual) television appearance since exiting The View on today's The Martha Stewart Show. Read into it what you will, but Ro will be dressed as Queen Elizabeth (sic?).... Charisma Carpenter's Big Shots debut currently is rescheduled for Nov. 29, with the Angel alumna playing (typecasting alert!) an "increasingly irresistible" woman.... ABC premieres the animated special Shrek the Halls Nov. 28 at 8 pm/ET. (My Jared and Jacob are getting into an advance screening!).... Speaking of me, the Mitovich Mega Minute vodcast premieres today on our homepage.
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Though it closed only three years ago, the New York Post says the Roundabout Theater Company is planning to revive their Tony-winning revival of Cabaret with the original creative team and star Alan Cumming intact.... Steven Culp (Desperate Housewives, ABC's upcoming Traveler) has a new gig, says Playbill.com, playing a pedophile in a West Coast take on the controversial drama Blackbird.... Jason Patric has exited Neil LaBute's soon-to-bow In a Dark Dark House due to "creative differences," and will be replaced by Frederick Weller.... Are you an ogre-achiever? Want to make an ass of yourself in front of NYC tourists? If you have what it takes to play the big guy or Donkey, the producers of the upcoming Shrek musical want to hear from you. Details at IWantToBeShrek.com. — Reporting by Raven Snook
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Although in recent years theatrical movies have been largely relegated to the Saturday-night death slots, NBC is hoping to help them make a comeback — and gambling big to do so — by scheduling three of them for lucrative Sunday berths during May sweeps. Besides a last airing of Shrek, the Peacock will run the broadcast premieres of Along Came Polly and National Treasure. Try to contain your excitement.Today's news was written by Ben Katner.
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Per the Hollywood Reporter, Chris Columbus is in talks to helm The Lightning Thief, a family fantasy based on the first novel in Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson and the Olympians series and concerning a boy who discovers he descends from a Greek god.... Eric Bana is a librarian who involuntarily juts to and fro in time and Rachel McAdams is the woman he falls in love with in The Time Traveler's Wife.... Writer-director Gideon Raff (The Killing Floor) is remaking 1980's Terror Train.... The soundtrack for Shrek the Third finds Eddie Murphy and Antonio Banderas dueting on Sly & the Family Stone's "Thank You" and Fergie covering Heart's "Barracuda." Also on the May 15 CD: Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song" and Paul McCartney's "Live and Let Die."
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DreamWorks Animation has put Shrek: The Musical on the fast track, the New York Post reports, with a workshop run-through scheduled for early 2007 and a Broadway debut targeted for 2008. The $15 million stage adaptation will feature characters and plot points from the first two Shrek films, and one guy — Suessical's Kevin Chamberlain and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee's Dan Fogler are front-runners — in a very sweaty foam costume.
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ABC is calling upon the big green guy to usher in a new holiday tradition, developing a half-hour animated special based on Shrek, and featuring the voices of Mike Myers, Cameron Diaz, Eddie Murphy and Antonio Banderas. The special will pick up where the forthcoming Shrek the Third feature leaves off, and is set to debut in December 2007.... Per Variety, FX has picked up It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia for a third, 15-episode season, to premiere next summer.... CBS has given a pilot order to an ensemble drama about a team of public defenders, from Law & Order/Numbers vet Barry Schindel.
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Cast of characters: Jude Law and Gwyneth Platrow in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (above); Shrek 2
Question: Can you explain what an animated film director does? What I really what to know is whether directors like Shrek 's Andrew Adamson have the same kind of impact on the way the movie turns out as, say, Clint Eastwood, who won the Best Director Oscar last year, had on Million Dollar Baby. Answer: An interesting question. Clearly the director of an animated film doesn't do one of the things we most associate with movie directors, which is working with actors. Though that said, the director of an animated film does work with the voice actors, and more and more the actors doing voice work on major animated films are the same performers who appear in major live-action films. The cast of
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