Broderick, Parker Sweet on 'Candy'(3/20/04)

Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker aren't afraid of "Strangers With Candy."

The couple have agreed to star in a feature film based on Comedy Central's short-lived satire of moralistic afterschool specials, their respective reps have confirmed.

Their attachment comes as a result of a friendship with Amy Sedaris, the co-creator and star of the cult series. Sedaris previously teamed with Parker on "Sex and the City," playing Carrie Bradshaw's editor.

There is no formal deal for Broderick and Parker, and it is still unclear what characters they will be playing. Filming is set to start in June in New York City. A director will be announced shortly.

The show starred Sedaris alongside fellow co-creators Paul Dinello and Stephen Colbert and aired for three seasons on Comedy Central beginning in 1999. Sedaris plays a frumpy and unattractive outcast who returned to high school after 30 years of hard living on the streets and in prison. However, the rough times don't end at school as, while trying to shed her immoral past, she's forced to mix and mingle with kids who are hipper, more beautiful and more popular than she is.

Lane, Broderick to Appear in 'Producers' Movie (1/7/04)

A film version of the hit Broadway musical will begin shooting early next year with Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick repeating their roles as the rapscallion producer Max Bialystock and his nebbish accomplice Leopold Bloom.

"Filming will start in January 2005, probably in New York," Simon Halls, a spokesman for the two actors, confirmed Wednesday from Los Angeles.

The stage musical was based on the 1968 movie by Mel Brooks starring Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder as two producers who set out to swindle investors by creating a musical flop.

Brooks wrote the original film, which became a Broadway success in 2001 and won 12 Tonys, the most ever. Lane and Broderick left the show after a year's run but returned Dec. 30 for a three-month engagement and box-office receipts zoomed.

Brooks will produce the film version and co-write the screenplay with Thomas Meehan who co-wrote the script for the Broadway musical with Brooks. Susan Stroman, who directed and choreographed the stage show, will direct the film.

This third version of the comedy that gave the world the song "Springtime for Hitler" could be out by Christmas 2005, Universal Pictures spokesman Michael Moses said.

Lane will have a busy 2004. He is committed to star in the Lincoln Center Theater revival of "The Frogs," a rarely seen Stephen Sondheim musical. The production, to be directed and choreographed by Stroman, will begin preview performances June 17 and open July 15. It will run through Oct. 3

"I suspect he (Lane) is going to bring 'Butley' into New York," Halls said, referring to a revival of the Simon Gray play the actor did last fall in Boston. "It is something that is being thought about.

"Nathan and Matthew have unmatched chemistry," Halls said. "So a lot of super-duo plays have been bandied about for them including `The Odd Couple' and 'La Cage aux folles' but at this point they are going to do `The Producers' until April, then go off to do their own thing and then come back and do the movie."

The Underrated Actor Interview

Matthew Broderick is almost the only wee-known film star of his generation who works consistantly on Broadway. What's more, he doesn't just do theater in order to play Hamlet or Kowalski: He also appears in off-beat revivals (last year's Night Must Fall) and new works, such as Elaine May's Taller Than A Dwarf, directed by Alan Arkin, which opens on Broadway this month.

Hollywood tends to typecast Broderick as the lovable kid (Ferris Bueller's Day Off, 1986) or the sweet-natured, if flawed, adult (Election, 1999). The theater, less dependant than movies on an actor looking the part rather than interpreting it, allows this 38-year old performer his delightfully wide range. Broderick takes full advantage of his stage opportunities to surprise us with his gifts. For example, before his Tony-winning Broadway turn in How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, who knew that he had a terrific musical-comedy singing voice?

In May's new play, Broderick forms half of an "average contemporary couple" (as average as they can be, that is, living in New York city), who are grappling with definitions of success. His partner is played by Parker Posey, in her Broadway debut. On this occasion, Broderick sat down with Kenneth Lonergan, writer and director of You Can Count On Me, which shared this year's Grand Jury prize at at the Sundance Film Festival Lonergan, who's new drama The Waverly Gallery is playing Off Broadway, is a former classmate of Broderick's at the Walden School in New York. They talked about their various hats (Broderick directed the film Infinity; Lonergan acts in You Can Count on Me) and their shared love of Jackie Gleason.

KENNETH LONERGAN: Does Elaine May seem to be pretty happy with you so far?

MATTHEW: You got me. She looks happy. I hear her chuckle sometimes, which is reassuring. In my experience, when these plays get closer to opening, everything can change.

KL: People get more tense and nervous.

MB: They stop pussyfooting around.

KL: They say, "Be funnier".

MB: That's when you're finally ready to open, when people are shouting, "What are you doing? You're killing the show!"

KL: "You're ruining my play." You said to me you like working with Alan Arkin because his ideas are very good on account of him being such a good actor. Can you elaborate on that?

MB: The ideas he has for a scene or for a charcter come from a person I find real and funny and interesting to watch. When he's telling me what to do, he's using the same interpretive skills that he would use if he were playing the part.

KL: What kinds of things do you generally like to get from your directors--and what do you find less helpful?

MB: I can't say that there's one style I like and one I don't. It seems to matter a lot who's doing it. I've worked with very surfacey directors, or English-style types in the old-fashioned sense, presentational, who tell you exactly how to move, and if it's a person who is talented, that's fine. But at the same time I definately like to have some room to discover things. I do try to give directors the benefit of the doubt. I think when I was younger I had a little more attitude. Particularly in film, you have to realize that the director is going to have the last say on everything anyway.

KL: I know a lot of ators who have said the same thing to me, that eventually they realize that the director's the one with the overall view.

MB: When I used to audition, when you got the part, generally that meant the director liked what you were bringing. When you're a little more successful you find yourself having lunch or dinner and then picking a costume with the director and then coming on a set and starting.

KL: And you've never had any in-depth discussion about what you see.

MB:No, so very often they look at you with a blank expression and say, "Is that it?" Hopefully, you just have a good chemistry. It's a little like a blind date, in a way. Are we gonna have a good conversation? Are we gonna wprk well together? And then, if you're not working well together, you just try to be professional.

The Real Roar Behind The Lion King

Grown-Up Simba: Matthew Broderick

D.A.: How did you manage to fit The Lion King recordings into your busy schedule?

Matthew: I recorded in North Carolina where I was working on another project, and in New York and L.A. Sometimes I did it over the phone. They have some new way of recording by telephone through a satellite.

D.A.: How did you learn to roar?

Matthew: I don't think I ever growled or roared. They used a real lion recording for that. I did have to make wierd sounds of joy like laughing that I had trouble with. It's very hard to laugh when you aren't really laughing.

D.A.:How did you keep busy in the studio when you weren't recording?

Matthew: We played foozeball [table soccer] between recordings, which was fun.

D.A.: Are you excited about seeing The Lion King?

Matthew: I'm looking forward to seeing it. And if it doesn't come out soon, I think my niece will have to be hospitalized.

A Day Off With Matthew Broderick

(ABSTRACT)Matthew Broderick's life has been marked by an overlapping pattern of grief and joy. The youngest of three children, he was happy while growing up in New York's Greenwich Village. A year after he graduated from high school, however, his first film was canceled. He then gained considerable praise for his remarkable performance in Torch Song Trilogy, in which he played the adopted homosexual son of a transvestite. After Neil Simon saw the play, he asked Broderick to star in a Broadway production of Brighton Beach Memoirs and in the movie Max Dugan Returns. The day after rehearsals began for Brighton Beach Memoirs, his father, actor James Broderick, died of cancer. Since then, he has appeared in WarGames, Biloxi Blues, and Ferris Bueller's Day Off. After making the movie Biloxi Blues, Broderick broke his leg in a car accident that killed two women in Ireland. Although he enjoys his fame in some ways, he knows that work is not all that matters in life. --By Elizabeth Kaye

Coping With The "Cute" Factor

Michael J. and Matthew B. try to grow up onscreen

Hard for an actor to cop an Oscar--or earn a sheaf of rave reviews--when an audience's first and lasting response is "Ooooh, isn't he cute?" His face is a posh prison, his smile a winsome rictus. Because everyone wants to mother him, or date him, or have him for a baby-sitter, nobody will let him grow up. He must remain harmless, asexual, a teendream Dorian Gray doll or risk losing the devotion of his milions of chaperones.

A few years ago, America's favorite man-child was Matthew Broderick, star of WarGames in Hollywood and Brighton Beach Memoirs on Broadway. Today Michael J. Fox holds the peach-fuzz prize. His first big movie, Back to the Future, was the box office champ of 1985; his sit-com, Family Ties, is now the second most viewed show in Nielson history. These two attractive actors have confronted the "cute" factor in different ways. Broderick goes off-Broadway between film gigs and appears eager to tackle adult roles that will challenge him and his fans. Fox, though, seems to enjoy being a boy. His new movie hit, The Secret of My Success, finds him still comfortable in his old haberdashery: straitjacket and elfin grin.

Fox is Brantley Foster, come to conquer the business world. His Uncle (Richard Jordan) runs a vulnerable conglomerate; his inamorata (Helen Slater) is the boss' minor squeeze; the older woman who beds Brantley is the boss' wife (Margaret Whitton). And now that we have the farce machinery purring, let's kick it into high gear. Naaah, why bother? Director Herbert Ross and Writers Jim Cash , Jack Epps Jr. and A J Carothers know this picture exists only as a mobile Michael J. Fox poster, suitable for display on the bedroom walls of twelve-year -olds named Cindy. Secret earned nearly $7.8 milltion its first weekend, so the Fox conglomerate is thriving anyway. Now if Fox could only make movies worthy of his charm.

Broderick had a smarter idea for expanding his career horizens: get in a good movie. Project X is the best thriller about monkeys since the original King Kong and a touching parable about parenting to boot. In a Wisconsin research lab, Teri MacDonald ( Helen Hunt) is teaching sign language to her prize pupil, a chimpanzee hamed Virgil (beautifully played--no kidding --by a chimp named Willie). After two years, Virgil is shipped to an Air Force base in Florida for a top-secret experiment shepherded by Jimmy Garrett (Broderick), a bright, goof-off airman who develops the same parental bond for Virgil that Teri had. Soon, Teri, the Mary Beth Whitehead of primate reseach, is off to Florida to steal back her chimp-child. The ensuing custody battle will involve Jimmy, the Air Force brass and a balky nuclear reactor.

Cannily commercial, Project X has almost too much old gold going for it: strands of The Miracle Worker, Fail Safe, The Elephant Man, Top Gun and the collected works of Steven Spielberg. Like E.T., this is the story of a childlike alien and his lonely human friend who must protect the creature, like a wise father with a brilliant, batterred child, and then set it free. But Writers Stanley Weiser and Lawrence Lasker (WarGames) resist nearly every temptation to truckle, and Director Jonathan Kaplan (Heart Like a Wheel) finds each scene's emotional core while surrounding it with meticulous technique. But the film is Broderick's. A great listener, he can make a colloquy with a chimp seem like the meeting of true souls. This time, he has gone beyond cute, to acute. --By Richard Corliss

Oh, to be young and hot in Hollywood, yet instead of acting up the leader of the pack is buttoned-down

The best thing to be in Hollywood these days is one of the boys. In 1983 the new kids in town staged an unexpected coup that threatened the longstanding Redford/Beatty/Reynolds regime. It was a good year for such charter members of the brat pack as Sean Penn and Tom Cruise, but none in that crowd can claim the double whammy of mild-mannered New Yorker Matthew Broderick, just 21. His performance as America's cutest computer nerd made the summer smash WarGames eminently palatable (if not quite plausible). And playing Neil Simon's teenage alter ego in the stage comedy Brighton Beach Memoirs -- his Broadway debut -- brought him a Tony award. With only a few credits Broderick has already fashioned a distinctive persona: His characters are shotgun marriages of street smarts and innocence, mischief and morality.

Like his colleagues, Matthew is fulfilling his teenage fantasies while barely out of his teens. For his upcoming film role as an impish thief in the medieval adventure Ladyhawke, he was paid a reported $750,000 and chauffeured around Italy for four months. But success spoilage hasn't set in. "I'm not gonna go crazy and buy five Rolls-Royces," says Matthew. He still lives in his mom's Greenwich Village apartment and dates UCLA coed Valerie O'Brien, who was an extra on WarGames. He's the son of the late actor James(Family)Broderick, who died of cancer the day after Matthew began rehearsing for Brighton Beach. That loss colors the young actor's perspective. Of his newly acquired fortune, he says, "The nice thing about the money is knowing that if anybody in my family gets sick, I can take care of them."

Finished with Ladyhawke, Broderick returns next month to Brighton Beach. For him the stage has been the thing ever since he appeared in a high school production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. "It was the first thing I felt sorta confident at," he recalls. "I felt -- I don't know -- I impressed myself." Whether in a school play or Hollywood movie, Matthew has the same concern. "I don't want to embarrass myself in front of other people," he says. "I worry about that endlessly." Judging from his work, worrying is just one of the things Broderick does well.