Entertainment News 901

Nicolas Cage talks about his decision to re-hash the '7os cult horror classic The Wicker Man. He says, "It occurred to me that not a lot of people know about [the original]. There's only a core base of cult followers who love the movie dearly in England. Many people here in the United States aren't aware of it. It's not so famous a film that everyone's going to just say, 'Well, I've already seen that.' Wicker Man, I felt, needed to be reintroduced to people." In other words, he needed a new pool on his winter house. The Wicker Man, also starring Leelee Sobieski, Ellen Burstyn and Kate Beahan, opens today.

Great White's former tour manager Daniel Biechele has filed a motion to have his four-year jail term reduced. Biechele pled guilty to 100 counts of involuntary manslaughter in February for his role in the Station fire in 2003 in West Warwick, Rhode Island.

Mel Gibson has gotten at least one film offer -- in a movie that would begin with Mel walking out of the Malibu bar he left before his drunk-driving arrest in July, getting into a car with a bottle of whiskey, speeding away yelling obscenities about Jews, and finally getting pulled over by a cop who shoots him in the head during his anti-Semitic tirade, spraying a bloody Star of David onto his windshield. It's the opening scene of the script for a sequel to The Hebrew Hammer, the 2003 spoof starring Adam Goldberg. Writer-director John Kesselman tells T-M-Z, "I think if Mel wants to truly extend an olive branch to the Jewish community as a whole, his on-screen death would go a long way in accomplishing that goal."