Reel World

— WOLFMAN PACK The Scream team is getting ready to howl again: Director Wes Craven will make screenwriter Kevin Williamson’s modern werewolf tale, Cursed, for Dimension. (Craven had been developing a remake of the Japanese horror flick Pulse, and Dimension head Bob Weinstein has promised that Pulse will be Craven’s next project after Cursed.) No werewolf victims have been cast yet, but makeup artist Rick Baker — who won one of his six Oscars for 1981’s An American Werewolf in London — is on board to do the effects. ”You can’t have a werewolf movie without the right look, so in a way Baker is an equal star to the actors,” says Weinstein, who has already picked his opening weekend for the film. ”It’s August, it’s wide, and nothing’s getting us off this date.” Bite on.

— EVIL DOER Academy Award-winning Traffic screenwriter Stephen Gaghan, who recently made his directorial debut with the supernatural thriller Abandon, is getting political, adapting former CIA agent Robert Baer’s memoir See No Evil. (George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh’s company, Section Eight, is producing for Warner Bros.) Gaghan, who has traveled through Beirut and Syria with Baer, found the most troubling atmosphere right here at home. ”I had five separate meetings in Washington over the course of a day,” says Gaghan, ”And in every one, there was a high-level policy maker talking about having a coup in a country, and not one of them is in the same country. I was just agog.” With a first draft due in December and production set to go in March, Gaghan is dreaming that a certain producer may take more than a behind-the-scenes interest in the film: ”George has kind of turned into the movie star,” he says. ”So you just cross your fingers and hope.”