Thursday, April 9, 1998 9:32 AM

Leonardo Closes in on Pretty Horses

Here we go again. Hollywood's favorite guessing game these days is: "What film will Leonardo DiCaprio do next?" Will he star with Sean Penn and Jack Nicholson in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying? What about that Martin Luther King, Jr., conspiracy project? Well, there finally seems to be a front-runner in the race: Daily Variety's Michael Fleming reports that the Titanic heartthrob is very close to settling on the Billy Bob Thornton-directed adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's award-winning novel, All the Pretty Horses. Entertainment analysts recently predicted that DiCaprio could land as much as $25 million for his next role, but sources tell the trade that the actor is likely to receive around $15 million for Horses, which will have to adjust its relatively modest budget if Leo comes onboard.

The film, a coming-of-age drama set in 1949, centers on a sixteen-year-old Texan named John Grady Cole who travels to Mexico with a friend and falls in love with the daughter of a wealthy land owner there. The father is unhappy with the cowboy and has him tossed into a Mexican prison. Eventually, Cole finds justice and returns to Texas, but not without a lot of pain and heartache. Can you just hear those thirteen-year-old hearts beating faster? No word on a start date, but Mike Nichols, who was once attached to direct the Columbia pic, will produce.

-- Dan Draghici (ddraghic@sprint.ca), April 09, 1998

Answers

Leo is out, Matt Damon is in.

-- Dan Draghici (ddraghic@sprint.ca), April 15, 1998.

What do you think about the way this has been portrayed in the entertainment shows of Damon stealing the role from DiCaprio? With all the teenage girls going crazy over him and the entertainment shows forever talking about him, I'm sure he wants to just go to a very obscure place for a long time. Which I don't blaim him for. But it makes me sorta sad that I won't be able to see him in another movie for along time. But my feeling is that Damon needs this movie more than DiCaprio for the simple reason that not very people know who he is even after winning the Oscar. A recent People Magazine poll showed that people thought that Damon and Afflack where part of Mona Lewinsky's defense team.

-- Shaunna (Shaunna@visualmetrics.com), April 16, 1998.