THE CANNES FILE : The Salkinds Rediscover Columbus

First, there was “Superman--The Movie.” Then “Supergirl--The Movie.” And then “Santa Claus--The Movie.”

Now, get ready for . . . “Christopher Columbus--The Movie.”

If all goes well, say epic producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind, Chris and his crew will be coming to a theater near you on Oct. 12, 1992--the quincentennial of the discovery of America.

“It was the biggest event in the last 1,000 years,” said the elder Salkind, Alexander, as his hired fleet of vintage planes hauled banners over Cannes announcing his new picture. “It is going to be a very big movie.”

The Salkinds, who have been absent from the Cannes Film Festival since bannering the sky with word of “Santa Claus--The Movie” five years ago, say they were approached by the Spanish government about doing a Columbus movie and have been promised use of the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria full-scale replicas currently under construction.

Ilya, who has headed up the Salkinds’ production of the “Superboy” syndicated TV series, said “Christopher Columbus--The Movie” will go into production in 1991 with a major director, major stars and a budget of more than $35 million.

“A good parallel would be ‘Lawrence of Arabia’: It’s going to be historically accurate but it won’t be a history lesson,” Ilya said.

The Salkinds say the Spanish government is providing them with source material that potential rivals won’t have, including Columbus’ on-board diary. (Columbus was the subject of a six-hour miniseries on CBS in 1985.)

“Columbus had a rival on the voyage, a cousin, and there were a lot of dramatic confrontations between them,” the elder Salkind said. “They stopped at an island where there were beautiful girls and boys and it was fantastic. The next island, they met cannibals.”

A director for the project will be announced in the next two weeks, they said, then a script will be commissioned. They said most of the film will take place at sea and there will be several major characters on the ships besides Columbus.

But no love interest? “I don’t know,” Ilya said. “We’ll have to wait until the research and the script are finished.”

The 42nd Cannes Film Festival ends tonight with announcement of the winners and a gala screening of Columbia’s “Old Gringo.” The festival opened May 9 with Columbia’s restored version of “Lawrence of Arabia.”

Columbia had two other films in the formal program. Chinese-American director Wayne Wang’s “Eat a Bowl of Tea” screened in the Directors Fortnight; Yugoslavian director Emir Kusturica’s “Time of the Gypsies” is in the main competition and one of the favorites for the Gold Palm. The Wang and Kusturica films are legacies of the David Puttnam administration at Columbia.

Two American films--Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing” and Steven Soderbergh’s “sex, lies and videotape” seem certain to win some awards tonight, but most observers think the jury will give the Gold Palm to either Denys Arcand’s “Jesus of Montreal,” a French-language entry from Canada, or Japanese director Shohei Imamura’s “Black Rain.”

The overall quality of the competition was up this year, by most accounts. Festival director Gilles Jacob promised more varied fare this year than he delivered. He also delivered a lot of English-language films--11 of the 22 pictures in competition for the Gold Palm are in English.

In fact, if there was an overriding trend, it was the recognition of English as the emerging universal film language in a shrinking global market.

West German director Percy Adlon’s “Rosalie Goes Shopping,” was set in the United States and shot in English. “Francisco,” which stars Mickey Rourke as St. Francis of Assisi, was made by Italian director Liliana Cavani in English. Polish director Jerzy Skowlimowski’s “Torrents of Spring,” which stars Timothy Hutton and Nastassja Kinski, is in English, as is “Reunion,” a story set in Nazi Germany, financed by producers in France, England and West Germany and directed by American Jerry Schatzberg.

During the festival, actor Klaus Maria Brandauer showed the press 10 minutes of “Seven Minutes,” a film based on a 1938 assassination attempt on Hitler’s life that he is directing and starring in. It’s in English.

“When you have a chance to have an international language like English which is understood everywhere, or almost everywhere, why not do it?,” Brandauer said. “I have no problems with that . . . except that I’m not very good speaker of English.”

One of the happy surprises of this year’s festival was American film maker Charles Lane’s “Sidewalk Stories,” a 97-minute silent film with intended echoes of Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp.

Lane, a 36-year-old actor-writer-director from New York, came up with the idea for “Sidewalk Stories” when he ran into a homeless person after watching a Sugar Ray Leonard boxing match last November.

The encounter, he said, reminded him of how deaf we are to the pleas of the homeless. A few days later he conceived the story about a street artist who adopts an abandoned child and tries to keep her safe while he searches for her mother.

Lane shot the film in two weeks in February, showed a rough cut to Cannes officials March 15, and basked in a standing ovation that greeted its world premiere here Thursday.

“I was floored by the reaction,” said Lane, who hasn’t made a film since his award-winning 1976 silent about the in-plain-view murder of Kitty Genovese. “I didn’t know what to expect when I got here and I was scared to death. Now, I feel great.”