Megan Mullally Wants To Talk

With Will & Grace entering its eighth and possibly last season, the cast is looking toward the future, and Megan Mullally already has hers staked out. When the Emmy-winning actress leaves the W&G set for the last time, she’ll walk right into her own talk show for NBC-Universal. The star is in final negotiations for a reported mid-seven-figure deal to host the syndicated daytime show, one in which her musical and comedic talents will be put to use. The show is scheduled to begin in 2006, even if W&G goes beyond eight seasons. Will the beloved actor’s turn as host go the way of Ellen DeGeneres or of Jane Pauley (whose much-hyped show never connected with viewers)? Viewers have a while to wait to find out. In the meantime, here’s hoping Mullally’s got some cool dance moves of her own.

Sex Degrees of Kevin Bacon

Interested in watching a sex scene between Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth? If so, then get ready for Where the Truth Lies, the latest film from acclaimed Canadian director Atom Egoyan, based on the novel by Rupert Holmes. Truth recently premiered at the Cannes Film Festival to good reviews and the usual straight-press controversy that accompanies any depiction of famous actors in bed together. Bacon and Firth star as ’50s-era celebrities in the Dean Martin/Jerry Lewis mold, whose careers are destroyed when a woman is found dead in their hotel bathroom after a menage a trois. The movie will probably run into an MPAA minefield no matter how explicit the sex is, given the group’s history of slapping NC-17 ratings on anything sexual. For Egoyan’s part, however, neither he nor his bold male leads seem that concerned about possible censorship.

Fried Green Lesbians on Broadway?

Can a lesbian love story, stripped of its queerness for the movies, find new, more authentic life on the Broadway stage? That’s the question surrounding the latest incarnation of Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle-Stop Cafe, Fannie Flagg’s Southern-fried novel that included a love affair between women. Broadway producer Jeffrey Finn (the man behind the James Earl Jones-starring revival of On Golden Pond) is planning to take Tomatoes to the stage. According to Finn, the play will hew more closely to the novel than the film, and Flagg herself will be involved in the adaptation. So maybe this time around, audiences won’t suffer through the narrative confusion of female characters who look and feel and act like lesbians, but somehow magically … aren’t. That’d be nicer than a plate of actual fried green tomatoes.