Berg in non-Hancock cap

Peter Berg had a couple of scraps with the MPAA's ratings board to win a PG-13 rating for Hancock --the Will Smith super(anti-)hero blockbuster.

"They hate sexual intercourse," says the director. "They hate sex, and they hate the word f---. It’s really that simple."

There's also the issue of "general intensity," a catch-all category that had Berg trimming seconds from the movie's final hospital room scene. An opening sequence in which Smith's Hancock tries to kill himself was also excised -- "just very dark," says Berg. "And there’s a lovemaking scene with Hancock and a groupie which I thought was pretty hilarious. That will be on the DVD."

Berg, who went from acting (The Last Seduction, TV's Chicago Hope) to directing (Very Bad Things, a bachelor party nightmare black comedy, was his first), has a bunch of things in the works. Right up there is a new version of Frank Herbert's sci-fi classic, Dune. The same desert planet epic was adapted for the screen back in the Eighties. David Lynch directed, and Kyle MacLachlan, Virginia Madsen ad a giant sandworm starred.

"We’re looking for writers right now," Berg reports. "That’s probably a couple of years off in the distance, but, yeah, I definitely want to do my interpretation."

And what about the Lynch Dune?

"I thought it was intresting, and I think it left the door open for some interpretation. My experience with Dune, reading the book in highschool, is [it's] kind of a more muscular adventure tale than I think has been realized onscreen. Something a little rougher and a little more muscular. And I think our worm’s going to be a little bit more ferocious."

Berg is also doing a new TV series with Ron Moore, the creator of Battlestar Galactica, called Virtuality, that starts shooting next month.

"And then I think I might do a movie called Lone Survivor, a kind of Black Hawk Down-style film about a gunfight that the Navy Seals get into in Afghanistan."

Expanding Black

Defying the filmmaking rule that you don't talk about upcoming projects until you're actually on set and the cameras are rolling, Steve Conrad-- writer and director of the new John C. Reilly/Seann William Scott workplace comedy, The Promotion -- laid out the plot details of his probably-going-to-happen next pic, with Jack Black committed to star. It's called The Expanding Mailman. Here goes:

"Essentially, The Expanding Mailman is about a graduate student of astrophysics at MIT and while he’s on lunch break he’s staring at a sunflower.... Something about the geometry of the sunflower face allows him to glimpse the mathematical expression that explains the origins of the universe. So he’s discovered, essentially, why we’re here, in math, and he’s so overcome by it that he bursts into this very famous professor’s lecture hall, and interupts the lecture.

"And in his enthusiasm to share this revelation he grabs the professor very roughly and starts screaming this theory — just out of sheer glee. But the professor thinks he’s being assaulted and calls campus security and they sedate the student, and he wakes up the next morning in a straitjacket having barely retained this very long theory in his head, and escapes into the town to try to find a pen so he can write it down.

"He gets kicked out of school and he is having a credit withheld, and so he becomes a mailman, and the story starts 15 years later where he’s been a mailman for 15 years and he’s haunted by having at one point understood Everything and now he just can’t remember. And then the real movie starts… a big, crazy adventure."

Conrad, whose script credits include The Weatherman and The Pursuit of Happyness, will direct. He hopes.

"People tell you not to talk about them until they’re real. But they’re never real, so you have to just pretend that you’re making it. Next thing you know, someone shows up with a camera."

Rastaman vibration

Never mind the big news that Martin Scorsese will be making the authorized Bob Marley documentary slated for a February 6, 2010 release -- which would have been the reggae superstar's 65th birthday. Scorsese, whose Rolling Stones concert doc, Shine a Light, came out a couple of months ago, and who has committed to making a George Harrison doc, too, bowed out of doing the Bob doc because of scheduling conflicts. (Scorsese is in the throes of Shutter Island, from a Dennis Lehane novel, with Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben Kingsley, Emily Mortimer and Michelle Williams, right now.)

Anyway, no Marty, no cry. Jonathan Demme has been nabbed to replace Scorsese on the Marley bio, and in many ways he's better suited for the project. Demme has a history of music pics, from the groundbreaking Talking Heads title, Stop Making Sense, to the Robyn Hitchcock concert pic Storefront Hitchcock to catching Neil Young in Heart of Gold. Demme, who is editing a new Neil Young concert film right now, has also shown fine musical tastes in the soundtracks to his fiction features.

"I am thrilled and humbled by this extraordinary opportunity to participate in fashioning a motion picture that can serve as a worthy vessel for the spiritual and musical brilliance of Bob Marley," Demme said in a statement. 

Downey tests his metal

Caught on the phone in Paris the week before Iron Man exploded on screens with a worldwide opening weekend take of $200 million-plus, Robert Downey Jr. was already talking about sequels, about the kick he got playing the playboy industrialist superhero in the titanium flying suit.

"It's really weird, it’s very strange how engaging it is, and Jon [Favreau, the director] and I find ourselves sitting around dreaming up storylines for making a couple more of these," Downey says. (And this is before Marvel Entertainment announced that there would, indeed, be an Iron Man sequel.) "And you see the pitfalls, too, you see what historically happens: Usually, the first one’s the best one, the second one goes `bigger,' and the third one falls apart.

"So, that, to me, would be the real Zen of it -- it would be to actually make three movies that stood up on their own."