SG-1 Ends Run; Atlantis Back

SCI FI Channel confirmed that it will not renew its record-breaking original series Stargate SG-1 for another season, but will pick up its spinoff series Stargate Atlantis for a fourth year. SG-1 aired its 200th episode on Aug. 18, and the SF series is the longest-running SF show on American television.

SCI FI issued the following statement on Aug. 21: "SCI FI Channel is proud to be the network that brought Stargate SG-1 to its record-breaking 10th season. Ten seasons and 215 episodes is an astounding, Guinness World Record-setting accomplishment. Stargate is a worldwide phenomenon. Having achieved so much over the course of the past 10 years, SCI FI believes that the time is right to make this season their last on the channel. SCI FI is honored to have been part of the Stargate legacy for five years, and we look forward to continuing to explore the Stargate universe with our partners at MGM through a new season of Stargate Atlantis."

Stargate SG-1, developed for television by executive producers Brad Wright and Jonathan Glassner, is based on the 1994 feature film Stargate. SG-1, which originally starred Richard Dean Anderson, Michael Shanks, Amanda Tapping and Christopher Judge, began on Showtime, then moved to SCI FI after five seasons. The current cast includes Tapping, Shanks and Judge and newcomers Ben Browder, Claudia Black and Beau Bridges. It airs Fridays at 9 p.m. ET/PT.At 86, Bradbury Still Stargazing

Legendary SF author Ray Bradbury turned 86 on Aug. 22 and still has his eye on the stars, both celestial and earthbound, the Associated Press reported.

The author of such science fiction and fantasy classics as The Martian Chronicles and Something Wicked This Way Comes said that he believes that humans will return to the moon, then go to Mars and eventually to other worlds, the AP reported.

"Our future is wonderful," he told Patt Morrison in an interview on KPCC, a public radio station based in Pasadena, Calif.

Bradbury also said he is working on a screenplay for a new movie version of Chronicles that he hopes will start shooting within two years. A 1980 TV miniseries version starred the late Rock Hudson.

Bradbury also said he hopes shooting will start within 18 months on a new version of Fahrenheit 451, which was optioned years ago by Mel Gibson. Bradbury's novel about a futuristic fireman whose job is to burn books was made into a 1966 film directed by Francois Truffaut.Lucas: Indy IV Starts In 2007

George Lucas told Empire magazine that he, director Steven Spielberg and star Harrison Ford are aiming to shoot a proposed fourth Indiana Jones movie by mid-2007, with an eye to a 2008 release. But, he added, getting everyone back together may not be easy.

"Before, I was just working with Steven and Harrison," Lucas told the magazine. "Now everybody's a superstar, so it's a little bit more difficult than it was then."

As for the story? "We're basically going to do The Phantom Menace," Lucas said cryptically, referring to Star Wars: Episode I. "People's expectations are way higher than you can deliver. You could just get killed for the whole thing. ... We would do it for fun and just take the hit with the critics and the fans. ... But nobody wants to get into it unless they are really happy with it."

Lucas added: "The 'damned if you do, damned if you don't' situation has freed up an idea for a plot that was originally deemed too incendiary. I discovered a McGuffin. ... I told the guys about it, and they were a little dubious about it, but it's the best one we've ever found. ... Unfortunately, it was a little too 'connected' for the others. They were afraid of what the critics would think. They said, 'Can't we do it with a different McGuffin? Can't we do this?' and I said no. So we pottered around with that for a couple of years. And then Harrison really wanted to do it, and Steve said 'OK.' I said, 'We'll have to go back to that original McGuffin and take out the offending parts of it, and we'll still use that area of the supernatural to deal with it.'"Grunberg Talks Trek 11

Greg Grunberg—a longtime friend of writer/director J.J. Abrams, who has been hired to helm the proposed 11th Star Trek film—told SCI FI Wire that he and Abrams have joked about giving Grunberg a cameo role—and he also dropped a tantalizing hint about the film's possibly youthful characters.

"Yeah, we joked about that," Grunberg said in an interview on the set of his upcoming NBC SF series Heroes in Hollywood, Calif., on Aug. 23. "It's the old 'You're too old!' And i'm like, 'I'm too old? What does that mean?' And he won't tell me anything else. And I'm like, you know, 'Come on!'"

The cryptic comment could have something to do with rumors that Abrams' new take on Trek, which he's developing with his Mission: Impossible III screenwriters Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, would deal with the first meeting of a young James T. Kirk and Spock at Starfleet Academy or some other academy-set storyline. Or it could be a red herring. (Abrams and his fellow producers have maintained strict silence about the sequel film's premise or story.)

In any case, casting Grunberg in a role wouldn't be unprecedented: Grunberg has appeared as a cast member, supporting player or cameo performer in almost all of Abrams' TV series and films, going back to Felicity and including Alias, Lost and M:I III.

"He's going to find something for me," the genial Grunberg said. "We joked about that, with Bob and Alex and J.J. We were all out, and I said, 'Look, if you think I'm going to sit through eight hours of makeup for two lines, forget it.' And Bob goes, 'Oh, no, you will.' And I'm like, 'Yeah, well, I guess will.' But hopefully they'll give me something."

Like what, a Klingon? "I want to be a bad guy!" Grunberg said. "It would be great to have some great role. But people are coming out of the woodwork. Amazing actors are coming out from everywhere calling J.J. and saying, 'I want to be in this movie!' ... So, yeah, we'll see."

In the meantime, Grunberg is busy shooting his new show, Heroes, in which he plays an ordinary Los Angeles cop who discovers he can hear people's thoughts. Heroes is slated to premiere Sept. 25 and will air Mondays at 9 p.m. ET/PT. NBC is owned by NBC Universal, which also owns SCIFI.COM. —Patrick Lee, News EditorParamount Dumps Cruise

Paramount Pictures is ending its 14-year relationship with Tom Cruise's film production company because of the actor's offscreen behavior, the company's chairman said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. Paramount is the studio behind Cruise's Mission: Impossible III and War of the Worlds.

Sumner Redstone, Viacom chairman, told the newspaper that Cruise's behavior was unacceptable to the company, according to the Wall Street Journal story e-mailed to reporters and reported on the Reuters news service.

"As much as we like him personally, we thought it was wrong to renew his deal," Redstone was quoted as saying in the Wall Street Journal. "His recent conduct has not been acceptable to Paramount."

Not so, Cruise's production partner Paula Wagner told Variety. Cruise and Wagner have raised a revolving fund of $100 million from two hedge funds and are striking out on their own, including setting their next project at another studio, the trade paper reported.

Wagner denounced comments made by Sumner Redstone about Cruise as "outrageous and disrespectful," she told Variety. Wagner said that CAA, Cruise's agency, terminated discussions with Paramount earlier in the week. After Cruise/Wagner made 14 films in 14 years (not all Paramount releases), the studio had declined to renew the original Cruise deal and offered a sharply reduced pact.Piper Who Spinoff Scuttled

The BBC reported that it has scrapped plans for a Doctor Who spinoff show that would have starred Billie Piper, who played Rose Tyler in the show's previous two seasons in the United Kingdom. (The second season of Doctor Who will air in the United States on SCI FI Channel, starting on Sept. 29.)

"It was actually commissioned by the controller of BBC One and budgeted," series creator Russell T Davies told Doctor Who magazine, according to a report on the BBC Web site. But Davies later decided that the show, Rose Tyler: Earth Defence, was "a spinoff too far" and called it off.

Piper, 23, left Doctor Who at the end of the second season, which wrapped in the United Kingdom earlier this year. She will be replaced by Freema Agyeman, 27, in the third season, which has just begun filming.

A separate spinoff series, Torchwood, stars John Barrowman as Captain Jack Harkness and is still going ahead. It will be shown on BBC Three this autumn.Renner Cast In 28 Weeks

Jeremy Renner (North Country) has been cast in a lead role in 28 Weeks Later, the Fox Atomic sequel to the zombie thriller 28 Days Later, Variety reported.

The sequel picks up the story six months after the end of the first movie, in which a virus spreads, leaving few survivors. Special Forces is working to restore order and helping repopulate London when a carrier of the virus unknowingly ignites a reinfection. Renner will play Sgt. Doyle, one of the heroes of the sequel.

Juan Carlos Fresnadillo is directing from a script by Rowan Joffe. Andrew MacDonald, Andrew Garland and Danny Boyle produce. Boyle directed the first installment.Transformers To Get Real

Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, writers of the upcoming Transformers movie, told fans that the movie will take a real-world approach to its depictions of the robots that can change from everyday objects such as cars into futuristic fighting machines. "In translating this thing to live action, ... all of these Transformers are being designed in the movie such that, when they transform, there's no cheating," Orci said in a a live video Q&A on Yahoo! on Aug. 18. He added: "It's very much what it would realistically look like if a Transformer was sitting right there as a car, and it turned into the character that you know."

As a consequence, some of the everyday incarnations of well-known characters may change for the movie: Bumblebee, for example, is now a Camaro instead of a Volkswagen. "All the vehicle decisions were made based on literally sitting and staring at the actual vehicles and seeing how they would actually transform and deciding based on what is going to be the coolest version of seeing this live," Orci said.

Transformers is the big-budget adaptation of the 1980s comic, toy and animated franchise and deals with the war between the benevolent Autobots and the nefarious Decepticons, which plays out on Earth in 2006.

Kurtzman and Orci are perhaps best known for writing several episodes of ABC's hit TV series Alias for creator J.J. Abrams and also for penning the script of Abrams' Mission: Impossible III. For Transformers, which is being directed by Michael Bay, the writers wanted to come up with a story that is based in reality. "[We said,] 'We really need to find a way to get people to understand that it's not just a cartoon,'" Kurtzman said. "This is a real movie where humans, actors, are going to be interacting with robots. ... We approached it from the point of view thinking, 'You know, when Steven Spielberg went to make Jurassic Park, nobody could imagine what it would be like to watch humans interacting with dinosaurs.' So the more people ask us, 'Well, [is it] a cartoon?' the more we thought, 'Wow, no one's ever seen anything like this before. We have this amazing opportunity to do something for the first time.' And that's kind of what shaped the way that we approached writing the characters, making our decisions and how we shaped the story." Transformers is currently in production with an eye to a July 4, 2007, release. —Patrick Lee, News EditorSuperman Routh Engaged

People magazine reported that Superman Returns star Brandon Routh and his actress girlfriend Courtney Ford are engaged, according to a report on Zap2it.com.

Routh, 26, first met Ford, 28, on the job, but not an acting job. The actor was working as a bartender at hip bowling alley Lucky Strike in Hollywood when Ford's brother had his wedding rehearsal dinner party there. Three years later, Routh proposed to Ford.

The couple plans to wed next fall and co-star in the short film Denial.USA Renews The 4400

As expected, USA Network has ordered a fourth season of 13 one-hour episodes of its SF drama series The 4400, the network announced on Aug. 22. The series, which garnered an Emmy nomination, will return to USA Network in summer 2007, with production scheduled to begin in Vancouver in early 2007.

The 4400 will air its third-season finale on Aug. 27. It airs Sundays at 9 p.m. ET/PT.

The 4400 was created by Scott Peters and Rene Echevarria. Ira Steven Behr, Scott Peters, Maira Suro and Perry Simon are executive producers. CBS Paramount Network Television produces the show, which stars Joel Gretsch and Jacqueline McKenzie.

USA Network is owned by NBC Universal, which also owns SCIFI.COM.4400's Behr Expects Renewal

Ira Steven Behr, executive producer of USA Network's SF series The 4400, told SCI FI Wire that he's confident the show will return for a fourth season, though he hasn't yet heard. "I would say that there is a very good chance that we will come back, and hopefully we will hear sooner than we heard last season, which was not until the end of September, [when] we did get the thumbs up," Behr said in a conference-call interview last week. "We're all hoping that it will be sooner than that."

The 4400 deals with the 4,400 abductess returned from the future to save the world and the government agents (Joel Gretsch, Jacqueline McKenzie) who work with them. Behr said the current third season will wrap up with a cliffhanger, as did last season's finale, which will set up next season's arc. "It's a little tough [to describe] without giving too much away," Behr said. "I think we will still be focusing on the main characters [next season], and that, I think, is very healthy and important for ... the longevity of the series and also the quality of the series. But, I think, because there will be some major chess moves made, I think we will be able to tell some interesting character-based [stories] with people we have not met yet, because there's going to be such an upheaval that we're going to want to hear and meet new people. So it'll be a little of both."

Behr added: "Even though we do still have a bunch of cliffhangers—because it worked so well last season, we did that again—I still think in an odd way if the show had to end, we end on a really interesting note this season, and, certainly, it would leave much room for thought and Internet chatter into what would have happened if the show hadn't been canceled. But I'm not really ... that concerned about that." The 4400 airs Sundays at 9 p.m. ET/PT. The season finale airs on Aug. 27. USA Networks is owned by NBC Universal, which also owns SCIFI.COM. —Patrick Lee, News EditorWoW Crusade Test Underway

World of Warcraft's first expansion, The Burning Crusade, has entered a secret "friends and family alpha test" for relatives and associates of developer Blizzard's employees, the GameSpot Web site reported.

Before the prospective testers can play the expansion, they must read an end-user license agreement, helpfully posted online, the site reported.

While the agreement is posted on the game's official Web site on a page accessible to anyone with the URL, it contains a clause strictly forbidding participants to even acknowledge the program's existence.

But a Blizzard representative confirmed for GameSpot that Burning Crusade is currently undergoing internal testing at the company.

The Burning Crusade is slated for release later this year and will feature two new playable races, an extended level cap, flying mounts and more, the site reported.Dzur Is A Savory Meal

New York Times best-selling author Steven Brust, whose novel Dzur is August's SCI FI Essential title, told SCI FI Wire that the protagonist, the occasional assassin Vlad Taltos, started as a character in a fantasy role-playing game. "When I started writing him, the voice came quite easily and naturally," Brust said in an interview. "My second novel, To Reign In Hell, was pretty exhausting to write, so I returned to Vlad more or less just to relax. It was only while I was writing a third one that I realized—or, I suppose, admitted to myself—that I was writing a series."

In Dzur, Vlad returns to Adrilankha after years on the run, Brust said. "In spite of having a price on his head, [he] sits down to a good meal at his favorite restaurant," he said. "And he does get the meal. I guess the idea for this one came because I thought it would be fun to structure a book around a meal and have the experience of eating play off the events and themes of the book in fun ways."

Since food is important in Dzur, Brust said he had to get some culinary advice from a friend. "[I got] Jason Jones, who is a chef at Hugo's Cellar at the Four Queens here in Las Vegas, to help me with the details of the food," he said. "Like Vlad, I eat better than I cook."

Dzur is the 10th Vlad Taltos novel. Brust said he keeps writing about the character because he just plain likes him. "He's fun to hang around with," he said. "Once or twice I thought I was done with him, but then he keeps showing up saying, 'Hey, guess what I've been doing lately?'"

Brust cites Roger Zelazny as his primary influence, but expressed a deep admiration for Alexandre Dumas and Mark Twain as well. "For [the Vlad Taltos] books, the voice comes from [Maltese Falcon author] Dashiell Hammett, the world from Fritz Leiber, the tropes from Michael Moorcock, and the general aesthetic—i.e., what's cool—from Zelazny. In short, I didn't invent anything." —John Joseph AdamsMargulies Finds Lost Room

Julianna Margulies, who co-stars with Peter Krause in SCI FI Channel's upcoming limited series The Lost Room, told SCI FI Wire that she had expected to take the summer off, but couldn't resist an offer to co-star with the former Six Feet Under star. Margulies (Ghost Ship, The Mists of Avalon) plays a woman who reaches out to a detective (Krause) following the murder of her brother, who she says was killed in order to obtain a key that opens a door to a room full of inexplicable power. Elle Fanning co-stars as Krause's daughter, who ends up lost in the mysterious room

"I'm doing that right now," Margulies said of The Lost Room while promoting her latest movie, Snakes on a Plane. "Well, actually, I'm right here [in New York City] right now. They took me out to come and meet [the media]. But it's with Peter Krause, and I'm so excited about it. It's like The Twilight Zone meets The Fugitive. It's done very film noir. The costume designer has all these sketches, and he's like, 'I want you like Kathleen Turner in Body Heat.' But it's ... a little bit of [The Chronicles of Narnia:] The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Also, because it's about this lost room, ... anyway, it's a real page turner. It was [supposed to be] my first summer off in a while, and I was excited to have a summer vacation, but now it's gone."

Asked to provide more detail about her character, Jennifer, Margulies said: "I play this woman who tries to help him out, and we end up having a thing. Well, you know, once you've done [The] Sopranos, now I'm just taking my clothes off, smoking crack," she added with tongue in cheek.

Unlike her current movie, in which she stars with Samuel L. Jackson as a flight attendant battling an airborne invasion of serpents, Margulies said The Lost Room has no slithering reptiles. "No snakes," she said. "No snakes. Thank God." The Lost Room, which is shooting now in Albuquerque, N.M., premieres in December. —Ian SpellingRoot Roots For Idiocracy

Stephen Root, who co-stars in the upcoming SF comedy Idiocracy, told SCI FI Wire he hopes his first major movie collaboration with writer/director Mike Judge since the cult favorite Office Space finds an audience. "It doesn't seem like it will ever get released," Root (The Path to 9/11) said in an interview, referring to the film's oft-moved release date. "I hope it will. The last time I talked to them it was going to be September, but I still haven't seen any ads for it or previews. It's really a funny film, and it's got some of the same people from Office Space, along with Luke Wilson and Dax Shepard and a whole bunch of really funny people."

Root, who voiced Captain Chode on the SCI FI original animated series Tripping the Rift, described the plot of Idiocracy: "It's set 500 years in the future. A regular guy gets frozen and wakes up 500 years in the future, and the future is so dumbed down that a normal guy is a genius. And he's a normal guy."

Root added: "It's a really, really funny concept. It's about the dumbing down of America, which I think is happening much quicker than I think in 500 years. I'm playing a judge ... that Luke is taken in front of. Dax Shepard plays the lawyer. It's a mockery of justice, I guess that's what we'll say. I'm in the future, the dumbed-down future, and I have a tremendously good Wolverine haircut that you'll enjoy." Idiocracy is tentatively set for a limited release on Sept. 1. —Ian SpellingIce's Wedge Turns A Leaf

Ice Age director Chris Wedge will helm 20th Century Fox Animation's next computer-animated film, based on William Joyce's illustrated children's book The Leaf Men and the Brave Good Bugs, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Wedge is attached to direct, with New York-based Blue Sky Studios producing. Joyce and Jim V. Hart are adapting the screenplay and expanding the book's original premise for the screen.

Described as an epic adventure centering on ancient elfin magic, the book follows a troop of brave bugs who march off to save a garden, where they encounter an evil spider queen and must summon the mythical Leaf Men to save the day.

Joyce and Hart are executive producing. Joyce, who illustrated the book, also is taking on production-design duties.

Wedge most recently directed Fox's Robots, which Joyce production designed based on his story.

Wedge's first film for Fox, Ice Age, was nominated for an Oscar in 2003 and earned about $400 million worldwide at the box office. Wedge also won an Oscar in 1999 for his short film Bunny.Rogue Options Lost Squad

Rogue Pictures has bought film rights to Lost Squad, Chris Kirby's comic-book series about an Allied unit in World War II that fought against Hitler's occult agents and other supernatural threats, Variety reported. Adrian Askarieh and Daniel Alter will produce.

Devil's Due Publishing began the series, which is illustrated by Alan Robinson, last fall and has published five issues. Devil's Due publisher Josh Blaylock is co-producing Lost Squad.

The project is the second Askarieh and Alter have in development at Rogue, the genre arm of Universal-based Focus Features. Rogue, Focus and Universal are all owned by NBC Universal, which also owns SCIFI.COM.Conviser Foresees Echelon

Josh Conviser, screenwriter and an executive consultant on the HBO series Rome, told SCI FI Wire that his first novel, Echelon, grew out of his frustration with the Hollywood shuffle. "I also saw that my screenplays were just the beginning of a long process: blueprints from which others could build. I wanted something that was my own from beginning to end: a creation that would live or die based on its quality and nothing else," Conviser said in an interview. "[So] I locked myself away and began to work [on a novel]. Six months later I emerged with a first draft of Echelon."

Echelon revolves around the National Security Agency's real-life eavesdropping network, which is codenamed ECHELON, Conviser said. "Today, ECHELON catches billions of communications per day, but is not incredibly good at finding the needles of real intelligence in that haystack of chatter," he said. "My novel, Echelon, then, begins with the conceit that the service gains the ability to not just analyze, but manipulate the flow of data passing through it. Thus, ECHELON becomes the siphon through which all information runs. In an age where information is the one true commodity, ECHELON's power is unsurpassed. For a time, that power is used to quell the threats and chaos that threaten us today. But such power eventually corrupts those wielding it, a fact that spins ECHELON, and the world, out of control."

Conviser said that when the NSA's domestic eavesdropping program recently came to light, he had just turned in the final edit of Echelon. "So the story didn't take me by surprise," he said. "But the use of [ECHELON by] the NSA to spy on Americans did, I think, push us one step closer to the world I create in Echelon. That said, I understand, and can't wholly condemn such actions. To avert a terrorist threat, I think we're all willing to compromise some measure of privacy. The promise of safety is hard to refuse. But where do you draw the line? In the name of security, should the government be able to tap our calls, check our Web history and read our e-mails? How much surveillance will keep us safe, and at what price? Balancing safety with freedom is a tricky proposition, one that may well define the our future as a nation."

Conviser added: "Right now, we're behind the eight ball. Real threats abound, and the world is a chaotic place. In response, our intelligence community, and systems like ECHELON, are casting a wider and wider net, while not having the capability to effectively analyze their catch. Because of this, the full effect of this large scale surveillance has yet to strike. But it will—and it will soon. In the near future, computers will be capable of analyzing the mass of data systems like ECHELON pull down. Then, the fact that we allowed institutions like the NSA to cast such a wide net will have serious ramifications. Systems like ECHELON will become the spigot through which the worldwide flow of information will pass. That may create a safer world. It may also create Big Brother." —John Joseph AdamsBettany Mulls Fraser's Inkheart

New Line Cinema has tapped Paul Bettany (The Da Vinci Code) to star opposite Brendan Fraser in its family fantasy Inkheart, to be directed by Iain Softley, Variety reported.

Inkheart, which spent 19 weeks on the New York Times Children's Chapter best-seller list, revolves around a girl whose father has the power to bring characters from books to life by reading aloud.

When a villainous ruler and his band of rogues from a children's fable kidnap the man, his daughter and her friends, both real and imaginary, must rescue him.

Bettany is in talks to portray Dustfinger, a fire-eating performer. Fraser's playing the father. Auditions for the part of the girl, Meggie, start Sept. 9 in England.

Playwright David Lindsay-Abaire penned the adaptation of German author Cornelia Funke's fantasy novel, the first of a trilogy. Inkspell was published last fall, and Inkdawn will be out next year.Fraser Has An Inkheart

Brendan Fraser has signed a deal to star in Inkheart, New Line Cinema's adaptation of Cornelia Funke's best-selling children's novel, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Iain Softley is directing.

The book centers on a girl whose father, a bookbinder, has the power to bring characters from books to life by reading aloud. When a villainous ruler and his band of rogues from a children's fable kidnap the man, his daughter and her friends, both real and imaginary, must set things right.

Fraser (The Mummy) will play the father, Mortimer "Mo" Folchart, who also is known as Silvertongue.

Playwright David Lindsay-Abaire wrote the adaptation. Mark Ordesky is overseeing for the studio. A fall start is being eyed.Grunberg Starts Late In Heroes

Greg Grunberg, one of the stars of NBC's upcoming superhero drama Heroes, told SCI FI Wire that he doesn't mind being cut out of the show's pilot. "You know, I'm OK with it," Grunberg said in an interview between takes on the set of the show in Hollywood, Calif., on Aug. 23. "I was not in the pilot of Alias or Felicity. And then as soon as I was in the pilot of Lost, I got killed in five minutes. So I'm fine with that."

In Heroes, Grunberg plays Matt Parkman, a Los Angeles beat cop who finds he can hear other people's thoughts, one of several ordinary people around the world who discover that they have extraordinary super powers. Scenes of Grunberg were shot for the pilot, which was originally conceived as a two-hour movie, but those scenes were cut when the show's premiere episode was reduced to one hour. Grunberg's character instead will debut in the show's second episode.

"You know what, after seeing the pilot, if it's not going to be a two-hour pilot, they spend really ... a perfect amount of time with each character, establishing who they are," Grunberg said. He added: "They tried one version where they peppered me in, and it's just not the same. ... To get invested, you know, you've got to spend some time. So I'm happy with it. And I love what they've done with my character. And I work with Clea Du Vall. She plays this like FBI agent. ... And now, Lisa. .... [gestures to co-star Lisa Lackey, who plays Matt's wife and who's sitting next to Grunberg getting her makeup touched up. She smiles broadly.] I mean, come on! It's just great. It's just so awesome!"

So how does Grunberg's character get introduced? "In the second episode," he said. "He's just a beat cop who is hearing voices. And he's outside a house. And he hears these voices. And he knows it's coming from inside the house. And the house, it's a crime scene. And there're are plenty of cops walking around. No beat cops inside. Just detectives and FBI agents. And he hears something. And they're just dusting. And it .... it's a really gruesome scene. The husband and wife have been killed in a really terrible way. ... The bodies are frozen. But I hear a little girl crying. And there's a little room under the stairs that no one knows about. And you open it up, and she's in there. And she's been hiding. So they immediately suspect me. Because there's no way that I would know. ... It's great. It's really great. And Clea just lays into me."

Gruberg added: "What's cool about my character is, I know that I have this potential . I know that I can be detective or an FBI agent. But I've been held back. Because I'm dyslexic. I haven't been able to pass the test. I don't want to tell my superiors about it. And I've been fighting with my wife, because she says, 'Why can't we be happy? I'm happy.' And I say, 'No, ... I'm not going to retire a beat cop. I'm not going out that way. I need to do more.' But I haven't been able to get the opportunity. So now, because I do that, it gives me the ability. What's interesting is, they've given this character the one ability that a cop would need. ... It's just so smart what they're doing." Heroes is slated to premiere Sept. 25 and will air Mondays at 9 p.m. ET/PT. NBC is owned by NBC Universal, which also owns SCIFI.COM. —Patrick Lee, News EditorRomero Raises Dead In Diary

George A. Romero will write and direct George Romero's Diary of the Dead, a new zombie movie that his Romero-Grunwald Productions will produce with Artfire Films, Variety reported.

The storyline revolves around a group of film students who encounter real zombies when making a horror film in the woods.

Voltage Pictures has picked up worldwide sales rights to the film, which Artfire is fully financing. Production is slated to begin Oct. 11 in Toronto.

Romero, Peter Grunwald, Sam Englebardt and Artfire president and chief executive officer Artur Spigel will produce. Dan Fireman and John Harrison are executive-producing, while Ara Katz will co-produce.

Romero's last zombie movie was Land of the Dead, which he wrote and directed.Behr Inks The Tattooist

Jason Behr (The Grudge) has signed to star in the supernatural thriller film The Tattooist, Variety reported. Commercial helmer Peter Burger is making his feature debut from a script by Matthew Grainger and Jonathan King. Shooting starts next month in and around Auckland, New Zealand.

Behr plays a tattoo artist who becomes fascinated by the Samoan tatau tradition, but his desire to learn the ancient skill brings him into conflict with the island's mystics, and a deadly spirit is released as a result.

The New Zealand Film Commission, Mediacorp Raintree Productions and Eyeworks Touchdown Productions are partnering on the film. Robin Scholes is producing with Daniel Yun.

Behr (TV's Roswell) will soon appear in the werewolf movie Skinwalkers and the dramatic thriller Senseless.Living Dead Girl Rises

Blue Star Pictures and Mandalay Pictures have optioned T.S. Faull's original screenplay Living Dead Girl, about a dead woman who rises from the grave as a zombie to track down her killer and save his latest victim, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Eric Tessier is attached to direct.

In the film, the dead girl is aided on her journey by a handsome funeral director who has a thing for dead girls and helps her stave off decomposition.

Blue Star and Mandalay are producing. Rhiannon Meier is overseeing development for Blue Star. Jason Shuman and William Sherak are attached to produce.Braugher Joins Four 2

Andre Braugher, who was slated for a guest-star turn on NBC's ER this season, instead will head for the big screen in Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, TV Guide Online reported.

The Blackfilm Web site reported that Braugher (Homicide: Life on the Street) will play a general in the sequel superhero movie.

Forest Whitaker has been tapped to assume Braugher's role on the NBC medical drama. Jordan's Condition Good, But Mixed

Best-selling fantasy author Robert Jordan (The Wheel of Time) is back home in Charleston, S.C., after a visit to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., where he was treated for a rare blood disorder, "with mostly good, but certainly mixed results," Jordan's official blog reported.

Jordan, whose real name is Jim Rigney, has been undergoing treatment for a condition known as amyloidosis since April. Amyloidosis is a rare blood disease, affecting only eight people out of a million each year, which causes an abnormal protein buildup in various organs that can permanently damage them. Jordan's condition was first reported in a March 23rd letter to Locus Magazine.

Though amyloidosis is a serious and potentially fatal disease, Jordan said in his Locus letter that he has "30 more years' worth of books to write," and added that he doesn't intend to "let this thing get in [his] way."

Jordan, who is perhaps best known for the Wheel of Time series, said on his blog that if "worse comes to worst," he will finish A Memory of Light, the final book in the main sequence of The Wheel of Time, so that the main story arc, at the very least, will be completed. Jordan added that A Memory of Light isn't intended to be the last Wheel of Time novel; he has plans to write two short prequel novels and possibly three "outrigger" novels set in the Wheel of Time universe. Jordan also has plans to write two Infinity of Heaven trilogies, a series set in "quite another universe." —John Joseph AdamsHellstrom Reborn In Satan

SF/fantasy author Alexander Irvine (The Narrows) told SCI FI Wire that when Marvel Comics expressed an interest in hiring him to write for them, several different characters were batted around before they collectively settled on Daimon Hellstrom. Irvine scripted a Hellstrom miniseries, Son of Satan, which is due to be published in October.

"For my story, Marvel decided they wanted to partially reboot the character—in other words, get a fresh look at who he is and why he does what he does," Irvine said in an interview. "I've borrowed elements from the existing continuity, but my series isn't a direct continuation of anything that's come before. It's a noirish story of demonic possession in post-Katrina New Orleans, and Daimon comes to the city because, in this vision of the character, he's a kind of itinerant seeker, trying to understand what he's been put on Earth to do."

Irvine added: "What he discovers when he gets to New Orleans is that his father is at war with a couple of other divinities, trying to control the resurrection of Osiris. Also, like most noir stories, Son of Satan is a tale of a fundamentally decent guy at war with his own darker impulses and with the forces of corruption and evil in the world."

The character of Daimon Hellstrom has been around for a while in the Marvel Universe, Irvine said. "He is the child of a mortal woman and a demon who may or may not have been the actual Satan, but was definitely acting on Satan's orders," he said. "In the character's history, he has often been at war with his father, and he's also been a part of Avengers and Doctor Strange storylines."

In preparation for writing the script, Irvine said that he did a little reading to refresh his memories of Egyptian mythology and Judeo-Christian demonology. "In a prose piece, I would have done all kinds of reading about New Orleans, too, but in this case all of that fell to [penciler] Russ [Braun], since he was the one who had to create a faithful visual representation of the New Orleans locales," he said.

Irvine greatly enjoyed working with Braun, but at the beginning of the process, he wasn't sure how much art direction to give in the script, he said. "I didn't know how collaborative the process was supposed to be, and I didn't want to step on anyone's toes," he said. "As it turned out, Russ and [Marvel editor] Axel [Alonso] have been very rigorous in pointing out when something I've written isn't clear so we can put our heads together and figure out how to get it looking right."

Meanwhile, Irvine continues to work on prose projects. A short story collection, Pictures From an Expedition, was just published by Night Shade Books. Due out soon is a Batman novel, Batman Inferno. And Irvine is working on a new original novel, a near-future noir called Buyout, which he said should be published sometime in 2007. —John Joseph AdamsDead Isn't Resident Redux

Capcom's just-released video game Dead Rising is a zombie "kill 'em all" game set in a shopping mall, but producer Yutaka Haruki told SCI FI Wire that it was conceived as an entirely different type of game from Capcom's similarly themed Resident Evil franchise.

"Our aim with this game is to create a new genre of games with zombies that aren't horror games," Haruki said in an interview. "I think we succeeded in our goal of creating a game with an unprecedented level of freedom not seen in any other game. There is a story running through the game, but there is so much more to it that makes it so much fun."

Dead Rising follows Frank West, an overzealous photojournalist who gets helicoptered into the mall area and has 72 hours to figure out why the mall is crawling with the undead. The real challenge is to stay alive.

Players will have more weapons than they know what to do with: red-hot frying pans, lawnmowers, potted plants, lead pipes, hedgeclippers, baseball bats. "No one has counted out each item, but there are well over 2,000 unique items by our estimates," Haruki said. "I don't even think there's a person on the development team who knows about every single thing in the game."

One hour of game time equals roughly five minutes in real time, meaning that West's 72 hours works out to between six and eight hours of gameplay, including cut scenes. The game has role-playing elements: When a player survives for 72 hours, there are multiple endings based on how the game was played. "There is also a story after the first 72 hours, so that's something to look forward to," Haruki added. "And when you complete the story after the 72 hours, then the Infinity Mode is unlocked for play. This mode lets you see how many days you can survive in the mall. This mode is also ranked, so it will be interesting to see how long people can survive."

Dead Rising is available now exclusively for the Xbox 360. A demo of Dead Rising can be downloaded at Xbox Live Marketplace. —Casey LynchPark Guys Raise Monsters

South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone will make Giant Monsters Attack Japan!, a film scripted by J.F. Lawton (Under Siege) that will combine live-action with the rubber suit techniques made popular in Asian imports such as Godzilla, Variety reported.

The sendup is one of two films that Parker and Stone's Important Pictures will make for Paramount Pictures.

Parker will direct and Stone will produce, and both will work with the writer. Sean Daniel and Nickelodeon will also be producers on Giant Monsters.

Parker and Stone are aiming for a 2007 production start, timed to a hiatus from South Park, which this week launched its 10th season on Comedy Central.Polish Brothers Fly With Time

Filmmaking brothers Michael and Mark Polish have sold two projects to Warner Brothers, which they will write, direct and produce, including the SF drama How Time Flies, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

How Time Flies is a cause-and-effect look at a world where time travel becomes accessible to the common man and how fragile reality can become.

Michael will direct the movies, while both he and Mark will write and produce. Lynn Harris is overseeing the projects for the studio.

The identical twin brothers are in post-production on their drama The Astronaut Farmer, which stars Billy Bob Thornton and Bruce Willis.Triangle Wins F/X Emmy

SCI FI Channel's original miniseries The Triangle took home the Emmy for outstanding special visual effects for a miniseries, movie or special at the 58th Annual Creative Arts Emmy Awards ceremony on Aug. 19 at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles.

The award went to visual effects supervisor Marc Weigert and his team for the first part of the miniseries, which aired last December.

The team included Volker Engel, visual effects supervisor; Ingo Putze, lead visual effects compositor; Robin Graham, visual effects compositing technical director; Todd Sheridan Perry, senior CG technical director; Conrad Murrey, lead CG animator; Sam Khorshid, CG animator; Paul Graff, visual effects compositor; and Ben Grossman, visual effects compositor.Seeker Finds Lost Place

Nebula-nominated SF writer Jack McDevitt, whose novel Seeker just won the 2006 Southeastern Science Fiction Achievement Award for best novel, told SCI FI Wire that the book was in part inspired by his childhood fascination with Atlantis. "When I was 12, Amazing began publishing [Richard S. Shaver's] 'I Remember Lemuria,'" McDevitt said in an interview. "Later I discovered there were other lost places. So it was probably inevitable that eventually I'd take the subject on."

Seeker follows the far-future adventures of antiquities dealer Alex Benedict, McDevitt said. "One of the legends of his age is that, in ancient times, a group of colonists escaped a theocratic America and headed out in two starships to found a free colony 'so far from here that even God won't be able to find us,'" McDevitt said. "The ships and the colony disappeared and were never heard from again. In Alex's time, the story has become legend. No one knows how much, if any, of it is true. The colony was to be called Margolia, and it is the Atlantis of Alex's time. Over the centuries books have been written about it; expeditions have gone to look for it; it is the subject of the far-future equivalent of cinema. Then one day, a cup, apparently from [one of the lost ships], falls into his hands. And Alex, aided by his very competent assistant Chase Kolpath, begins a search for the truth."

The character of Alex Benedict was inspired by a famous literary detective, McDevitt said. "And, no, it's not Sherlock Holmes. It's [G.K.] Chesterton's Father Brown, whose mysteries were not so much a matter of figuring out who the killer was as how a given inexplicable event could have happened," he said. "[For instance,] why did a general, always known for a cautious approach to battle, recklessly charge a hill and lose most of his command?"

The Southeastern Science Fiction Achievement Awards are designed to honor accomplishment in science fiction, fantasy or horror by individuals born or living in the Southern United States. It is administered by the online SF magazine, scifidimensions. McDevitt, a Georgia resident, was also presented with an award for lifetime achievement.

Next up for McDevitt, in November, is Odyssey, the latest in his Academy series of novels (Chindi, Omega, et al.). Also due in the fall is Outbound, a collection of stories and nonfiction from ISFiC Press, in conjunction with WindyCon, which will honor McDevitt as its guest of honor this year. —John Joseph AdamsOpen Season Looks Back

Roger Allers, director of the upcoming movie Open Season, and co-director Anthony Stacchi told SCI FI Wire that the 3-D computer-animated film hearkens back to an older style of 2-D cartoons. "All of us loved the old Looney Tunes stuff, the stuff that was really zippy and way out there and animation that has a snap to it," Stacchi (Curious George) said in an interview at Sony Pictures Animation's Culver City, Calif., studios last week. "One of the things that a lot of CG animation didn't have in previous years is it felt a little stiff, and [this] was an opportunity to get some of that sort of whipcrack animation in there. They came up with all sorts of tools to help stretch the characters and actually change the silhouettes of the characters to really get [it]."

Open Season features the voice of Martin Lawrence as a domesticated bear named Boog and the voice of Ashton Kutcher as a rascally wild mule deer named Elliot, who rally their woodland companions to rise up against hunters. The zany characters' movements are inspired in part by such classic animators as Tex Avery. "And that's a hard enough challenge to do with a rigid character, say, a character from The Incredibles, but they're wearing a suit," Allers (The Lion King) said. "To do it with animals with fur—meaning if you stretch that arm out, the fur has to stretch—he can't suddenly have blank spots in his fur. It was a huge technical problem."

Stacchi added: "So all the geniuses and tech shamans over at [Sony Pictures] Imageworks, they just took it on as a challenge, and they figured out a way for us to do it and create, like Roger said, really great tools that the animators could use to get those strong poses." Open Season, which was also co-directed by Jill Culton, opens Sept. 29. —Patrick Lee, News EditorMore Horror Guests Named

Showtime's Masters of Horror anthology series has firmed up the list of guest stars for the upcoming second season, including Jason Priestley, Elliott Gould and Christopher Lloyd, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

The series also has added helmers Peter Medak, Rob Schmidt, Norio Tsuruta, Brad Anderson, Ernest Dickerson and Todd Holland, who will each direct an episode.

Priestley and Gould star in the episode "The Screwfly Solution," about a deadly virus that transforms men into psychotic killers. Joe Dante is directing from a script by Sam Hamm.

Lloyd co-stars in the episode "Valerie on the Stairs," which centers on an aspiring novelist (Tyron Leitso) who is visited by a muse-like ethereal creature with dark powers. Masters of Horror creator Mick Garris is directing the episode, based on a story by Clive Barker.

Medak is directing "The Washingtonians." Written by Richard Chizmar and Jonathan Schaech, the episode, based on a short story by Bentley Little, is a horrific tale of patriotism, revisionist history and cannibalism.

Schmidt is directing "Right to Die," written by John Esposito, which is a ghostly take on the right-to-life debate.

Tsuruta is directing "Dream Cruise," a Japanese ghost story.

Holland is directing "We All Scream for Ice Cream," which centers on a guy who must face his childhood fears in order to save his family as local children are mystically being turned against their parents. Lee Tergesen and William Forsythe star in the episode, which writer David J. Schow adapted from John Farris' short story.

Anderson is directing "Sounds Like," a psychological thriller based on Mike O'Driscoll's short story, about a man with extraordinary hearing who takes violent action to silence the horrific cacophony in his head. Chris Bauer and Laura Margolis star.

Dickerson is directing "The V Word," about the dire consequences of two teenage boys' decision to break into a mortuary. Michael Ironside stars in the episode, written by Garris. Masters of Horror's second season premieres Oct. 27.NBC To Travel In Time

NBC has picked up an as-yet-untitled time-travel-themed drama from Emmy winner Kevin Falls (The West Wing) for a pilot, Variety reported.

The story revolves around a man who travels back in time to correct wrongs, with a romantic storyline as well.

The studio behind the project is 20th Century Fox TV, where Falls has an overall deal.

NBC is owned by NBC Universal, which also owns SCIFI.COM.Vellum Is Cubist Fantasy

Fantasy author Hal Duncan, whose debut novel Vellum was just nominated for a World Fantasy Award, told SCI FI Wire that he thinks of the book as a sort of "cubist fantasy." "The story [is] fragmented and told from all different angles, [with] Sumerian myth interweaving with 20th-century history, modernism mixing with cyberpunk," Duncan said in an interview. "It's set against a backdrop of angelic war, but focuses on the human stories of a few draft dodgers and deserters who want nothing to do with this war. At the heart of it there's The Book of All Hours, the tome in which reality itself is inscribed."

Much of the book is based on real events in recent history, Duncan said. "[Such as] the murder of Matthew Shepard, [World War I], the Red Clydesiders, the International Brigades, which I feel quite deeply about, being gay and Scottish," he said. "And some sections are based very closely on ancient texts: the Sumerian story of Inanna and Dumuzi and Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound in particular. There was a lot of research involved, because I wanted to be as true to these real-life stories and the source texts as possible, to deal with them respectfully rather than exploit them."

Duncan's influences come from many different sources, he said. "Everything from the anonymous Sumerian scribes who wrote down the myths I drew on, through Aeschylus and Virgil, right up to pulp writers like H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Rice Burroughs, modernists like James Joyce and Edward Whittemore and SF/F writers like Michael Moorcock and William Gibson," he said. "Samuel R. Delany and William Burroughs—the list could go on forever. The artifact, The Book of All Hours, is part Lovecraft's Necronomicon, part Borges' Book of Sand, part Whittemore's 'original Bible.' The Vellum is a sort of systematized Moorcockian multiverse."

Duncan added: "The most profound influence though, in terms of changing my whole outlook on how stories fit together, was Guy Davenport, whose pataphysical approach—isolating moments and creating the story out of the juxtapositions of those moments, rather than crafting a linear narrative—blew me away when I read his collection, Eclogues. His story in that, 'Idyll,' is probably the single most important story to read if you want to understand where I'm coming from."

Vellum is the first of a diptych titled The Book of All Hours, which will be completed with the sequel, Ink, due out early next year in both the United States and United Kingdom, Duncan said. "There should [also] be a novella, 'Scorched Earth,' coming out from MonkeyBrain Books later in 2007," he said. "[It] won't be part of the series but will take place in the Vellum universe, in the thick of the war, which remains largely in the background in Vellum and Ink." —John Joseph AdamsBRIEFLY NOTED

Fred Willard, Fred Savage, Paul Rodriguez and John O'Hurley are among the actors set to provide the voices for Holidaze: The Christmas That Almost Didn't Happen, a new stop-motion animation holiday special that is being shopped to major broadcast and cable networks by Madison Road Entertainment, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Titan magazines brought its U.K.-based Star Trek magazine to the United States starting on Aug. 22 to commemorate the franchise's 40th anniversary; the first issue features an article on "40 Reasons We Love Star Trek."

Access Hollywood has posted behind-the-scenes video from the upcoming SF movie Transformers, which director Michael Bay is currently shooting in downtown Los Angeles.

The television industry will pay tribute to late producer Aaron Spelling, creator of Charmed, Fantasy Island and other hit series who died in June, during the Aug. 27 live broadcast of the 58th annual Primetime Emmy Awards, the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences said.

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Web site has posted the short list of nominees for the British Fantasy Society's awards, which will be handed out at Fantasycon in Nottingham on the final weekend in September.

The Harry Potter Fan Zone Web site reported that British comic actress Jessica Stevenson (Shaun of the Dead, Spaced) will play Mafalda Hopkirk in the upcoming fifth film, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, which is currently in production.

Orion will be the name of the new vehicle that NASA hopes will take astronauts back to the moon, a name that was inadvertently leaked by U.S. astronaut Jeff Williams, floating 220 miles above Earth at the international space station, a week before the official announcement, the Associated Press reported.

The Weinstein Co.'s epic SF creature feature Outlander will start principal photography on Oct. 9 for 10 weeks in Canada, Production Weekly reported; the movie stars Karl Urban in an adventure about a man from another galaxy who crash-lands on Earth at the time of the Vikings, bringing with him an alien predator.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, took eighth place in the weekend box-office rankings with $5 million, lifting its domestic total to $401 million, the Associated Press reported; the hit's worldwide gross is now $923.8 million, placing it in sixth place on the list of top-grossing movies of all time.