As if things weren’t going badly enough for the Hilton clan what with Barron’s drunken-driving woes, now it turns out that Paris Hilton’s new flick “The Hottie and the Nottie” may be the biggest box-office bomb of all time!

The movie took in just $9,000 dollars last weekend - an average of $81 per screen, according to Splashnews.com.

“And when you consider each theater probably showed the movie about five times a day, then woah there, horsey. We’re talking about a movie that put only two people in theater seats per showing,” said ActressArchives.com. “That’s super-bomb status, the likes of which haven’t been seen since 2004’s ‘National Lampoon’s Gold Diggers.”

The flick, in which Hilton plays a hottie who refuses to mate until her ugly friend does, was universally panned by critics including the Herald, which called it an “ugly duckling story that is more stomach-churning than playful.”

A film version of Star Wars: The Clone Wars will open in the US on 15 August, followed by a TV series in the autumn.

“I felt there were a lot more stories left to tell,” creator George Lucas said. “I was eager to start telling some of them through animation.”

The cartoon version takes place between events in the Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith films, and features familiar faces with new characters.

The half-hour, computer-animated series is an expansion of a 2003 series of three-minute shorts broadcast on TV and the web.

‘Breakthrough project’

The Clone Wars will feature such familiar protagonists as Anakin Skywalker, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Padme Amidala.

It is being produced by Lucas’s company LucasFilm, Warner Bros and Turner Broadcasting, which will screen the show on TNT and the Cartoon Network. Dan Fellman of Warner Bros described The Clone Wars as “a breakthrough project” that would “return Star Wars to the big screen in a completely new way”.

“We immediately felt that it would be a fantastic theatrical event.”

Release dates for the film outside the US will be announced soon, as will broadcast details for the TV series.

Roy Scheider, the jagged-nosed actor who brought complexity to tough-guy roles in such films as “The French Connection,” “Jaws” and “All That Jazz,” and was also known for political activism off the set, died Sunday afternoon at a hospital in Little Rock, Ark. He was believed to be 75, and had been battling a form of blood cancer for three years.

Scheider, who lived in Sag Harbor, N.Y., died at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences hospital, which specializes in the treatment of multiple myeloma, a form of cancer that affects blood cells. He died of complications from the disease, said Leslie Taylor, a university spokeswoman.

Taylor said Scheider had been receiving treatments at the hospital’s Myeloma Institute for Research and Therapy in recent years. On its website, the institute says that it has kept patients alive for six to seven years after diagnosis, about twice the national average.

In a career spanning four decades, Scheider appeared in more than 60 films, as well as in numerous roles on stage and television. But his most acclaimed roles came in a span of eight years in the 1970s, beginning with “The French Connection” in 1971.

He probably will be best remembered for his role as Martin Brody, the water-shy police chief in “Jaws” (1975) who uttered the immortal line: “You’re gonna need a bigger boat,” after seeing the size of the shark. He once lamented that the role “will be on my tombstone.”

His favorite role, he said, was playing choreographer Joe Gideon, a thinly disguised stand-in for Broadway choreographer Bob Fosse, in “All That Jazz” (1979) — a role for which the former boxer had to learn to dance. “That will always be my favorite film,” he told the San Jose Mercury News in 1999. “But I never worked harder in my life. I felt I had to prove myself to the dance company. I didn’t want to misrepresent them. . . . I was in relatively good shape. But at the end of the day, I’d return to the Holiday Inn with my Tiger Balm.”

That role earned Scheider some of his best reviews. Pauline Kael would later write in the New Yorker that Scheider “made you feel you were watching Fosse himself. It wasn’t an impersonation; it was as if Fosse had taken over his body, from the inside. That’s the only role in which Scheider had an exciting presence, and it wasn’t his; we seemed to be looking right through him to Fosse.”

And then-Times critic Charles Champlin wrote that Scheider “is a wonderment, a dancing dynamo whose portrayal of this life-splurging, death-obsessed man poses the Academy voters another mind-boggling decision.”

It was not a decision that came down in his favor — Scheider never won an Oscar. He was nominated as best actor for “All That Jazz,” but lost to Dustin Hoffman in “Kramer vs. Kramer.” His only other nomination was for best supporting actor in “The French Connection,” the movie that launched him as a star.

Scheider played Det. Eddie Russo, the abrasive, street-smart partner of “Popeye” Doyle, played by Gene Hackman. The two New York narcotics cops were on the trail of an international drug gang that has been shipping heroin from Marseille, France, to New York. In later years, Scheider delighted in telling the story of how he got the part by sheer luck while auditioning for a stage role in New York. The stage part called for an actor who was at least 6 feet tall.

“Every time I started reading, the director sitting out there in the dark in the theater would interrupt and ask me how tall I was,” Scheider recalled in a 2001 interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer. “I told him I was 5-foot-10, but he asked me to stand back-to-back with another actor. I lost it, and flung the script into the darkness. It so happened the casting director for ‘The French Connection’ was sitting in on the auditions and watching. He told me later he knew he had found Popeye’s partner.”

Scheider was reportedly born Nov. 10, 1932, in Orange, N.J., although in some interviews he indicated he was born in 1935. He grew up in the New Jersey suburbs outside New York City. He was, by his own account, a sickly, pudgy child, and spent a good deal of time bedridden. Among his greatest delights as a child, he once said, was going to the Saturday matinees at the movie theater in Irvington, N.J., eating popcorn and watching movies.

From the age of 8, he said, he worked weekends pumping gas at his father’s service station, a job he loathed. “It’s true that I had more pocket money than my friends, but I also had more responsibilities,” he said in a 1975 interview with The Times. “I was driving cars around that place when I was 11. But what I really wanted to do was go swimming with the other kids.”

His health improved in his late teens, and when he was about 17 he began boxing at the local YMCA. Under the tutelage of a retired welterweight, Scheider entered the Golden Gloves competition in Elizabeth, N.J. He won one fight and lost the next. In the process, he got his nose broken, creating the slightly off-kilter profile that lent him authenticity in his later tough-guy roles.

After a stint in the Air Force, Scheider began acting at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa., and by the time he graduated, he knew he wanted to be an actor. He spent the next seven or eight years doing classical theater.

His film debut was in Del Tenney’s “Curse of the Living Corpse” (1964). He won attention for his role in “Klute” in 1971, followed months later by “The French Connection.” Among other notable films, he appeared in “Marathon Man” (1976), “Sorcerer” (1977), “Jaws 2″ (1978), “Still of the Night” (1982), “2010″ (1984) and “The Russia House” (1990).

For decades, Scheider had been active politically, participating in protests against the Vietnam and Iraq wars and for environmental issues on Long Island. In 2003, he was among a group of protesters who laid down on a Long Island highway in a symbolic reference to the casualties of war.

In December 2004, while seeing a doctor for a routine examination, he was diagnosed with multiple myeloma. Ten months later, speaking about the experience on “The Today Show,” he said he considered himself lucky. “Every single day, it’s a miracle,” he said.

Scheider’s first marriage, which ended in divorce, was to film editor Cynthia Scheider. He is survived by his second wife, documentary filmmaker Brenda King, and three children, Maximillia Scheider, Molly Scheider and Christian Verrier Scheider.

mitchell.landsberg

 The day after North Shore-raised Vince Vaughn returned from entertaining the troops in Iraq, he began another risky road trip.
The 37-year-old comic actor had no experience in the raw world of live stand-up, but he ventured into the American heartland as the traveling impresario to four up-and-coming comedians, putting on a show in a new town every day for a month and making a movie about it.

It was a tricky proposition. Producer Vaughn believed the four comics were funny, but as any traveler knows about the open highway, fate can undo the best of plans.Mother Nature almost did. The one-two punch of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita of 2005 detoured their bus ride through the Deep South, but the diversion led them to a camp of evacuees living out of their RVs, a tragicomic encounter incorporated into the movie.

Vaughn’s vision for the film was ambitious, with some uncertainty: Create a film that mixes road trip, live bits before diverse audiences, documentary moments backstage and a crapshoot for an emotional arc (eventually provided by comic Sebastian Maniscalco, who was raised in Arlington Heights where his parents continue to live).

“Part of the thrill is that you don’t know exactly what it’s going to be,” Vaughn said.

The Vaughn standard

If audiences in the film are any indication, the foursome and their host deliver plenty in “Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show: 30 Days and 30 Nights — Hollywood to the Heartland,” which opens this weekend. The other funnymen are Ahmed Ahmed, John Caparulo and Bret Ernst. Also featured are Jon Favreau, Peter Billingsley and Keir O’Donnell.

The four jesters find humor in personal experience without being self-indulgent — the Vaughn standard.

“I wanted to give these guys a chance to be seen by people,” he said.

“It makes me respect them more that they had some humility — versus being like so, ‘Ah! This matters more than anything and it’s so profound that no one understands me.’ They would have stuff that’s extremely painful, and their point of view is that everyone understands me, and I’m not the only one, and there is something funny about it.”

For example, Ahmed’s story includes his coming of age as an Arab-American (his family left Egypt a month after his birth) in the post-9/11 era. He was even wrongly jailed in Las Vegas where an inmate thought he was a terrorist who could blast their way free.

Raised in Buffalo Grove and Lake Forest and now a resident of North Michigan Avenue, Vaughn contends his latest work is as provocative as was his “Dodgeball” (few thought the grade-school game was worthy of a full-blown feature), “Wedding Crashers” (one of the first R-rated blockbuster comedies in years), and “The Break-Up” (a romance in which the boy and girl don’t end up together).

“Every one of them, including ‘Wild West’ in its own way, are all kind of pioneering and different than what was existing prior to it,” Vaughn said.

The latest movie, he said, is a revival of “a traveling comedy variety show.”

Not that the actor is reinventing himself, though he likens his master-of-ceremonies role to a modern-day Buffalo Bill bringing an itinerant show to provinces bypassed by the big acts of New York and Los Angeles.

“I wish I had a master plan, but I don’t,” he said. “The arts are meant to be childlike. They’re a place of imagination. Whatever seems interesting or fun to me, I try to go and work hard at and do my best.”

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the 6-foot-5 performer has visited Afghanistan once and Iraq twice, including Baghdad, Abu Ghraib and Fallujah, to show American soldiers his then-new flicks “Wedding Crashers” and “Dodgeball.”

“A lot of them already had the movies on bootleg DVDs,” Vaughn said. “The troops … start asking me to sign their DVD copies. … I’m like, what’s going on?

“They sell these down at the black-market huts and you can buy them. This is crazy. What they are, someone in America films them on a video camera, and so there’s someone’s head in the way, so they’re not even good copies.”

The last stop in “Wild West” is the Vic Theatre in the North Side’s Lakeview neighborhood, just a few miles from Vaughn’s condo.

At home in Midwest

It’s a fitting ending because Vaughn calls the Midwest home.

While growing up in the north suburbs, he used to drive to Chicago for acting classes and even boxed at Portage Park – “just to stay in shape, just to learn, just for fun, nothing serious. I never fought in any tournaments,” he said. Today, he still has an Illinois driver’s license and likes to participate in Chicago Public Schools‘ Principal for a Day, where the “kids blew me away,” he said.

“The other big thing for me is to have a sense of humor about yourself. I think that is a Midwestern quality too — to be able to not take yourself seriously,” Vaughn said. “That has always served me well in life.”

As Vaughn riffed on those values, he was sitting in an office of his production company, where his older sister Victoria is one of the executive producers on “Wild West.” An energetic talker, Vaughn was staring in the direction of a framed poster for “The Break-Up” featuring the studio photo of Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston in bed, estranged.

But he didn’t want to talk about the co-star, his former girlfriend. “I thought this was the Tribune, not Star magazine,” he cracked.

Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins.’ Comedy about a TV star who heads South for a rowdy family reunion. With Martin Lawrence, Mike Epps, Mo’Nique. Director: Malcolm D. Lee (1:54). PG-13: Crude and sexual humor, language, drug references. At area theaters.

Having gotten all the sweetness out of his system with the 2005 sleeper “Roll Bounce,” Malcolm D. Lee caters to a wider audience in his raucous reunion comedy “Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins.” He’ll probably find the success he’s looking for. Spiking sentimental family values with crude hilarity isn’t the recipe for an award winner, but it will feed crowds hungry for a good time.

Martin Lawrence is Roscoe, a Jerry Springer-style talk-show host with the seemingly perfect L.A. life: fame, fortune and a gorgeous fiancée named Bianca (Joy Bryant).

A recent winner of “Survivor,” Bianca sees life as one big competition - which is fine, since Roscoe does, too. This attitude brings him success, but it doesn’t leave much time for family. Still, at the urging of his son Jamaal (Damani Roberts), he reluctantly agrees to attend a 50th anniversary celebration for his parents (James Earl Jones and Margaret Avery) back home.

Of course, things don’t go quite as planned once Roscoe arrives in rural Georgia. Though he’s hoping for a hero’s welcome, nobody much cares that he’s a big star. In fact, everyone seems far more impressed by Clyde (Cedric the Entertainer), Roscoe’s car-dealer cousin and longtime nemesis. Making matters worse, Clyde is now dating Lucinda (Nicole Ari Parker), Roscoe’s childhood crush. As his brother (Michael Clarke Duncan), sister (Mo’Nique) and cousin Reggie (Mike Epps) point out, Roscoe needs to decide where his home really is.

In case that sounds a little too sugary, keep in mind that Lawrence’s co-stars are more than ready to provide salty humor while creating a loose, almost improvised feel.

Although Lee relies on too many lame gross-out jokes, this cast does know how to have fun - which may come as welcome relief to audiences desperate for laughs during a cold month at the movies.