Film: Rushes

PAUL SCHRADER is collecting material for a putative Martin Scorsese film about "walkers" - the men who formally escort women to society functions when they don't have a date. Apparently Jerry Zipkin - whose was Nancy Reagan's favourite walker when Ronnie was otherwise chewing the carpet - is forming the basis of the main character. Kevin Spacey might take the role.

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IT LOOKS as if Leonardo DiCaprio's latest flick The Beach has been bumped back to a January or February 2000 release, sinking his chances of an Oscar nomination.

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DAVID MAMET, whose piece of ethical Victoriana, The Winslow Boy, is to premiere at the Edinburgh Film Festival, has signed Alec Baldwin, William H Macy and Sarah Jessica Parker to star in State and Maine. Written after Mamet finished scripting Wag the Dog, it is the story of what happens to a small town when a big movie comes to shoot. Other casting news: Sigourney Weaver is about to sign for the Bess Myerson biopic helmed by Bill Condon; Myserson is, so far, the only Jewish Miss America, whose political career ended in 1980 when she resigned as New York's commissioner of cultural affairs after allegations of influence peddling.

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THE LEGENDARY cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa - who worked on Kurosawa's Rashomon and Mizoguchi's Ugetsu - has died aged 91 in Kyoto. His hand- held camerawork in Ichikawa's Tokyo Olympiad in 1965 was revolutionary at the time, but it was for his exquisite composition and unobtrusive touch that he will be best remembered.

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THERE'S TALK of a Summer of Sam curse after one of the film's extras was charged with murder. Jared Errington, who appears in a punk band in the film by Spike Lee (above), is being held after his Brooklyn landlord was found dead with a knife in his back. In May, "wise guy" veteran actor James Pelliccio, who stars in the film with Ben Gazzara, died in a freak fall in his brother's Staten Island house.