Alicia Silverstone is reuniting with her Clueless director Amy Heckerling on Vamps, which Lisa Wilson's GK Films affiliate Parlay Films is selling here.

Vamps tells the modern-day tale of two female vampires who live it up in New York until love enters the picture, when each has to make a choice that will jeopardise their immortality.

Silverstone will play one of the vampires opposite Krysten Ritter, who is making her first feature starring role and is about to wrap production on the comedy Killing Bonoopposite Ben Barnes.

Production is set to begin in April. Red Hour Films, Lucky Monkey Pictures partners Lauren Versel and Maria Teresa Arida, and Molly Hassell are producing.

Silverstone most recently appeared in Stormbreaker with Ewan McGregor and Mickey Rourke and is currently on Broadway opposite Laura Linney in the Donald Margulies play Time Stands Still.

Lisa Wilson's Parlay Films has acquired all international rights to the romantic comedyVamps, which will be written and directed by Amy Heckerling.

The film will be a modern-day tale of two young female vampires living the good life in New York until love enters the picture and each has to make a choice that will jeopardise their immortality.
Krysten Ritter is on board as one of the female leads with additional casting underway. This will make the first feature starring role for Ritter, who most recently appeared in Confessions Of A Shopaholic and will next be seen in DreamWorks' comedy She's Out Of My League.
Production is set to start in March 2010 with Red Hour Films, Lucky Monkey Pictures partner Lauren Versel and Molly Hassell producing.
Heckerling shot to fame with Fast Times At Ridgemont High but she also directed Clueless and the Look Who's Talking films.
Parlay Films is a GK Films affiliate and handles third party sales.

"[...] For example: Raymond De Felitta's CITY ISLAND, which won the Audience Award and is that extremely rare thing, a genuinely populist movie that doesn't condescend to either its characters or the audience. The same was true of De Felitta's TWO FAMILY HOUSE (00). Set on the blue-collar harbor island of the title (one of New York City's lesser-known treasures), it stars Andy Garcia, doing some of the best acting of his career as a corrections officer who's keeping two secrets from his wife and kids: he's been taking acting classes, and the gorgeous ex-con who's been paroled to his custody is his son. De Felitta champions the ebullient creativity of working-class people who aspire to something other than reality-TV stereotypes or middlebrow culture. In addition to Garcia, the winning cast includes Julianna Margulies, Emily Mortimer, Alan Arkin and marvelous Ezra Miller who nearly steals the movie as a teenager passionately devoted to plus-sized women. CITY ISLAND is heartfelt, funny, wonderfully crafted, and it swings."

[...] Docus and other foreign-lingo films will be dealt with in later columns. Meanwhile, here's a sampling of openers for the next six months that could be contenders in various categories:

July: Judd Apatow's "Funny People," with Adam Sandler (Universal); "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" (WB).

August: Sony's "Julie and Julia," with Meryl Streep; the Weinstein Co.'s Quentin Tarantino pic "Inglourious Basterds."

September: Miramax's Clive Owen starrer "The Boys Are Back."

October: Fox Searchlight's "Amelia" biopic with Hilary Swank; "New York, I Love You" (Vivendi); the Weinstein Co.'s long-delayed "The Road," starring Viggo Mortensen in the adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel; Calibra Pictures' "Iron Cross," Roy Scheider's last film (tentative date).

November: Sony's Roland Emmerich f/x extravaganza "2012."

December: Anchor Bay's "City Island," starring Andy Garcia (the date is tentative); Miramax's "Everybody's Fine," a Kirk Jones-helmed pic starring Robert De Niro; Universal's untitled Nancy Meyers comedy with Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin; and Warner Bros.' "Sherlock Holmes" from helmer Guy Ritchie.

Anchor Bay Films has acquired all rights for North America, the UK, Australia and New Zealand to Raymond De Felitta's City Island.
The family comedy recently won the audience prize at the 2009 Tribeca Film Festival.

The cast features Andy Garcia, Julianna Margulies, Steven Strait, Alan Arkin, Emily Mortimer, Ezra Miller and Dominik Garcia-Lorido.

Andy Garcia stars as a husband and dad dealing with a secret passion for acting and a visitor from his past who may disrupt his family life in the titular Bronx neighborhood.

We are thrilled to acquire such a crowd-pleasing comedy, said Anchor Bay Entertainment president Bill Clark. City Island features a fantastic ensemble cast, led by the talented Andy Garcia. Senior VP of acquisitions Kevin

Kasha added: Everyone has crazy family members, which may be why people connect so strongly with City Island. This film is guaranteed to entertain and we're proud to be including it in the Anchor Bay Films line-up.

Writer/director De Felitta added: I couldn't feel my movie was in better hands. Anchor Bay Films is boldly filling a sorely felt gap in indie film distribution and their passion and belief in City Island's future convinced me they were the right place for this movie.

The deal for City Island was negotiated by Clark, Kasha, and Richard Turner for Anchor Bay Films; and Andrew Ruf for Paradigm Motion Picture Finance Group, which packaged the project; Mark Halloran and Michael Roban for Lucky Monkey Pictures; Irwin Tenenbaum and Kenneth Weinrib.

The production is a joint venture between Garcia's CineSon; De Felitta's Medici Entertainment; Lauren Versel's and Maria Teresa Arida's Lucky Monkey; Zachary Matz's Filmsmith; and Gremi Film Productions.

Producers are Garcia, De Felitta, Versel, and Zachary Matz. Executive producers are Maria Teresa Arida, Lucia Seabra, Milutin G. Gatsby, Michael Roban, Greg Hajdarowicz.

London-based WestEnd Films is handling foreign sales.

Anchor Bay Films' other forthcoming titles include Spreadstarring Ashton Kutcher and Anne Heche and The Open Road starring Jeff Bridges and Justin Timberlake.

Anchor Bay Films is the international film distribution division of Anchor Bay Entertainment.  

New York, London and Buenos Aires-based Lucky Monkey Pictures has lined up comedy The Land Of Enchantment to be directed by Hamlet 2's Andy Fleming.

Lauren Versel and Maria Teresa Arida's company co-financed and produced Raymond De Felitta's Bronx-set family drama City Island, which gets its world premiere in Tribeca's Encounters programme on Sunday [April 26] and stars Andy Garcia, Alan Arkin, Julianna Margulies, Emily Mortimer and Steven Strait.

Lucky Island's The Last Summer Of The Boyita by Argentine writer-director Julia Solomonoff recently screened at the Buenos Aires Film Festival and was produced with Pedro Almodovar's El Deseo and LMP sister company Travesia Produciones.

The pipeline includes The Wedding Director written and to be directed by De Felitta, The Trespasser produced with Laura Bickford, Nadine Gordimer's The House Gun to be directed by Bruce Beresford, and Black Wedding to be directed by Alan Taylor.

Rounding out the slate are the comedy Dead Broke, Ruskin by Aleksandra Crapanzano, and El Lector produced by Lucky Monkey and Jane Startz and written by Flaminia Ocampo.

The first signs of danger to the family's precarious equilibrium arrive when jail guard Vince (Garcia) recognizes just-transferred inmate Tony Nardella (a hunky Steven Strait) as the son he sired and abandoned long before his marriage. Vince decides to parole Tony into his custody, and brings him home without telling his family of the connection.

Vince is already hiding another secret: He's enrolled in a Manhattan acting workshop, his transparent alibi of going to a poker game leading wife Joyce (a magnificently temperamental Julianna Margulies) to suspect infidelity. Meanwhile, Vince's daughter Vivian (Dominik Garcio-Lorido) is dancing in a strip joint to pay her college tuition, while his younger son Vinnie (Ezra Miller, in a pitch-perfect turn) harbors a sexual kink -- surfing the Internet in search of overweight women.

To outsider Tony, the only real secret is why the family members even bother concealing their problems and passions -- particularly since they literally cry out from the rooftop, where Vince puffs away at the cigarettes he supposedly gave up.

For Vince, unhappy in his prison job but convinced of his intellectual limitations, acting represents a dream vocation, fueled by his affection for Marlon Brando films. Almost touchingly clueless, he doesn't even realize the long, hilarious tirade against Method acting, delivered in high style by his embittered drama teacher (Alan Arkin), is leveled against idol Brando. Paired for a thesping exercise with Brit-accented Molly (Emily Mortimer), he confides his ambitions while she urges the reluctant Vince to try out for a Martin Scorsese film.

Vince's audition, complete with an incredibly bad, mouth-stretching Brando imitation, is a comic mini-masterpiece, revealing hitherto unplumbed dese-dem-and-dose depths in the usually urbane Garcia. His domestic scenes with a volatile, earthy Margulies (earlier paired with Garcia in "The Man From Elysian Fields") fairly sizzle with sexual frustration and blindsided affection.

For de Felitta, comedy is never cruel, and following one's personal bents, however unorthodox, is always empowering. And if the staging of the pic's hysterical, campily melodramatic dockside finale registers as overly schematic, with every skeleton in the closet systematically divulged, it may be because his characters cling so tenaciously to their humanity.

Through the lens of cinematographer Vanja Cernjul, "City Island" does for the small off-urban district what de Felitta's "Two Family House" did for Staten Island, mapping it indelibly on the cinematic atlas. The locale often figured in earlier movies, but always subbing for someplace else.

Mickey Rourke, Andy Garcia and Julianna Margulies sent a sold-out crowd into a flurry of excitement as they showed up in the audience at the Tribeca Film Festival's world premiere of "City Island" Sunday night.

Rourke, sporting his black and white fedora and shades, set off cameras when he walked in just before the film started. Margulies -- who seemed to be escorting her parents -- turned heads in a cream-colored dress.

They both sat near Garcia and his family in the audience, halfway-up in the Borough of Manhattan Community College's cavernous auditorium and right amidst star-struck fans.

-Click here to see photos of Mickey Rourke, Andy Garcia, Julianna Margulies and other celebrities at the Tribeca Film Festival

Garcia and Margulies play a married couple with two kids who live on City Island in director Raymond De Felitta's family-friendly, modern-day screwball comedy.

Garcia's character, a correctional officer by day and aspiring actor by night, unexpectedly brings a convict (Steven Strait) home to serve out his parole. Which sets in a motion a series of romantic complications, accompanied by lots of family yelling amidst the pastel clapboard houses of the Bronx oasis.

The boisterous audience laughed throughout and burst into applause several times during the film, giving it a long standing ovation at the end.

The movie's a bit like "My Big Fat Greek Wedding," with its emphasis on a tight-knit family and the farces that can result when everyone's bumping up against each other in the same house -- yet nobody really knows each other.

Everyone in the ensemble cast is memorable, but Ezra Miller steals the film as the smart-alecky son who becomes obsessed with their amble neighbor.

The daughter is played by Garcia's real-life daughter, Dominik Garcia-Lorido. Which Garcia admitted afterwards made for a ticklish situation during the filming... since her character is a stripper.

As someone in the audience said, the movie is a great way to escape from the tough economic times. It's just a fun film where you'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll tell your friends about it afterwards (and you'll want to make immediate plans to go visit City Island).

Getty Images photo

Julianna Margulies, Emily Mortimer and Alan Arkin are joining Andy Garcia and Steven Strait in the indie family comedy "City Island."

Garcia will play Vince Rizzo, a Bronx prison official who realizes that an inmate (Strait) is his secret love child. His efforts to become his guardian lead to comic complications. Margulies will play Rizzo's wife, Arkin a teacher in his acting class and Mortimer a fellow student he befriends.

Garcia's daughter Dominik Garcia-Lorido will play his onscreen daughter. Eztra Miller also stars.

Wrter-director Raymond De Felitta's Medici Entertainment, Garcia's Cineson, Lucky Monkey Pictures' Lauren Versel and Zachary Matz will produce "City," which began shooting this week in the eponymous Bronx fishing neighborhood where the story is set.

Paradigm Motion Picture Finance Group packaged the project and reps domestic sales.

Most people associate balloon twisting with clowns, birthday parties,
poodles and fanciful hats for children. But as it turns out, there
are strong subcultures of balloon-twisters, and they do not always
get along. Balloons are not just for party hats and poodles, it turns
out. Above, Jesus, rendered in twisted latex.

A documentary now in limited release, "Twisted: A Balloonamentary"
examines the world of professional balloon twisters, who make
everything from life-size racing cars to their own wedding dresses.
It also exposes the rift - who knew? - between the "gospel twisters,"
who use their craft as a way to teach Bible lessons, and the "adult"
twisters, who use balloons for more prurient entertainment.

"I refused to see the movie" when it first played, said Ralph Dewey,
a prominent gospel twister from Deer Park, Tex. "There's just too
much unclean stuff in there." He and several other like-minded
twisters boycotted a screening of "Twisted" at a balloon convention
in Texas last year.

The scenes that might make Mr. Dewey squirm take place at a gay men's
party in Las Vegas, where balloons are fashioned into parts of the
male anatomy that are most logically suited for this purpose.

According to the twisters themselves, the two factions have long
co-existed, however uncomfortably, at conventions and other
gatherings, but the film is bringing simmering resentments to the
surface. The religious twisters say they are concerned that the film
and its racy moments could become the public face of their field, and
that parents might assume the film, which is unrated, is appropriate
for children.

Some of the gospel twisters have asked the filmmakers to produce an
alternate, family-friendly version, but they refuse. Sara Taksler,
one of the film's directors, said that many of the adult-themed
twisters have taken umbrage at the suggestion of censorship. "Plenty
of them find the gospel-themed balloons offensive," she said.

Ms. Taksler and her co-director, Naomi Greenfield, lived in the same
dorm in college, where they discovered that they both knew how to
twist balloons into animals. They raised part of the $60,000 they
used to make the film by auctioning off an executive producer credit
on eBay.

Ms. Taksler is an associate producer at "The Daily Show" on Comedy
Central, which helped her get the host, Jon Stewart, to narrate a
brief animated segment of the film. "Twisted" debuted in 2007 at the
South by Southwest festival in Austin and will run for a week at the
Pioneer Theater in Manhattan in June; it is playing in nine United
States cities this summer.

Ms. Taksler said that the controversy caught her and Ms. Greenfield
by surprise. "As a filmmaker, you want to be fair to the community,"
she said. "We wanted to show all sides of it."
She said there were more divisive controversies that didn't make the final cut.

"There is a whole debate over whether you should pump-inflate or use
your mouth," she said. "We decided to leave that out."

Harel, who sold Capitol to David Bergstein in 2006, has launched a new London-based film financing and sales boutique, WestEnd Films.

The company is run by co-managing directors Eve Schoukroun and Maya Amsellem, who previously worked as head of sales and head of business affairs at Capitol and its sister company ThinkFilms Intl.

Its first film is "City Island," written and directed by Raymond De Felitta. It stars Andy Garcia, who also produces through his company Cineson Entertainment.

The movie, which starts shooting in July, is a comedy-drama about a dysfunctional family whose habit of lying to each other gets them all into trouble. It's co-financed by Lucky Monkey Pictures and Cold Fusion Media.

They intend to handle six to eight films a year, mixing American and British projects with occasional foreign-language titles.

"The plan is to be a boutique company with a human face, and only to work on films that we believe in totally," said Schoukroun.

"We will focus on good material, talented directors, concept pictures and prestige productions," added Amsellem.

Harel founded Capitol in 1989 with Jane Barclay, and built it into one of world's leading sales companies, backing movies such as "Gosford Park." After selling the company to Bergstein two years ago, she focused on producing, making Avi Nesher's "The Secrets" in Israel through her own production company Notting Hill Films.

"I sold Capitol with the intention of just being a producer," Harel explained. "But when I made 'The Secrets,' I did not have a company to exploit the rights, which I found very difficult. So when Eve and Maya, who I always thought were fabulous, approached me with their idea for a new sales company, I agreed to back them and become the chairman."

Alexsandra Crapanzano, Shari Springer Berman, Joshua Marston, Lauren Versel, and Neil LaBute.

The Hollywood Reporter: How do you balance the strong passion you might have for a script you've written with knowing that you might have to do rewriters or edits when everyone has 'suggestions?'

Versel: A lot of the time, the people asking you to make changes don't really understand what that entails, and the script is a very delicate creature that's built block by block from an infastructure. A good writer can explain every single thing they've written and why they did it. Asking them to take that and change this to that -- it affects the whole thing, something you've thought about so much that a lot of the time, it ruins it.

In a mid-six-figure deal, Twentieth Century Fox has hired "Haven" helmer Frank E. Flowers to adapt and direct an English-language remake of Beto Brant's Brazilian thriller "The Trespasser."

Original pic, based on the novel by Marcal Aquino, won the Latin America Cinema Award at Sundance in 2002. It tells the story of two businessmen who hire a hitman to do away with their third partner, only to find themselves being blackmailed by their assassin and losing control of their prized company.

The new pic is being produced by Laura Bickford ("Traffic") and by Flowers' ex-Firm manager Aleen Keshishian (now at Brillstein Grey) and current Firm production head, Julie Yorn. Also producing are Lauren Versel and Peter Rawley, who had originally acquired the remake rights via their Lucky Monkey shingle.

Original Brazilian pic was produced by Renato Ciasca and Bianca Villar.

This time around, "The Trespasser" will be set in Miami's ritzy South Beach area. In an interview with Daily Variety, Flowers said he was intrigued "by the really interesting way Miami distributes wealth: Five blocks from a trendy, high-end neighborhood, you find what can only be called really shitty houses."

Flowers said he also selected Miami for its high concentration of successful, Cuban ex-pats -- a demographic unique to the area and one that serves the pic's high-stakes business storyline.

Fox's president Hutch Parker is overseeing its development with Fox senior VP of production Robbie Brenner.

Flower, who's repped by William Morris and Brillstein Grey, has his new film "Haven" unspooling for U.S. distribs later this month.