Powers Boothe will play Jessica Lange’s extramarital...

Powers Boothe will play Jessica Lange’s extramarital lover in Orion’s “Blue Sky,” a drama directed by Tony Richardson, that takes place on a southern Army base in the 1950s. The Bob Solo production, which also stars Tommy Lee Jones as Lange’s husband, gets under way this month in Alabama and Florida.

Pamela Reed will play Arnold Schwarzenegger’s partner in Universal’s ‘Kindergarten Cop.” Ivan Reitman directs this story of a hard-bitten cop who goes undercover as a kindergarten teacher to keep track of a drug kingpin’s wife and child. Filming gets under way in June in Oregon and L.A.

Rob Lowe, F. Murray Abraham and Juergen Prochnow play the men in Helena Rubenstein’s early life and Shelley Winters the Jewish shopkeeper who first employs her in “Helena,” a Cosfilm production shooting in Poland, New Zealand and Australia starting July 16. The film is based on Paul-Loup Sulitzer’s novel “Hannah,” a fictionalized account of her life, which was a best seller in France. Producer-director Georges-Alain Vuille is still looking for his leading actress.

James Edward Olmos will star in and Luis Valdez will direct “Bless Me, Ultima,” a film version of Rudolfo Anaya’s famous novel of New Mexico set in 1945, the era of the A-bomb. Moctesuma Esparza and Robert Katz will produce from a script written by Valdez and Vincent Gutierrez. Production gets under way in New Mexico this fall.

Meanwhile, Esparza/Katz Prods. has cast Australian pop singing star and actress Kylie Minogue in “Most Wanted,” a ‘30s gangster tale written by Dick Guttman. Sam Pillsbury will direct in North Carolina in the fall. Negotiations are under way for a U.S. distributor on both films.

Rod Steiger and Joanna Pacula join previously announced Timothy Bottoms and Pat Morita in Gold Leaf International’s thriller “The Ice Runner,” which films in Murmansk in the Soviet Union in late June. Jeffrey Sneller produces and James Fargo directs. Meanwhile, Fargo has bowed out of Eagle Films’ “Deadly Crossing,” a thriller about a giant snake in the Amazon, which will shoot in Florida in September. British director Peter Hunt takes over.

Barry Primus joins the cast of writer-director Irwin Winkler’s “Fear No Evil” (due for a title change), a drama about the Red scare era in Hollywood. Primus plays the agent for Robert De Niro who portrays a successful director who finds himself blacklisted. Ben Piazza has also been cast to play movie mogul Darryl F. Zanuck.

The Oscar-winning “My Left Foot” provides plenty of kick for any project to which its writer-director, Jim Sheridan, attaches his name. By agreeing to serve as “story consultant” on “Illegals”--a film written and to be directed by Nye Heron, his assistant on “My Left Foot”--the project raised enough money in the U.S. and Europe to begin production in mid-July in the Bronx. The Mike George Production tells of a romance between two illegal immigrants, an Irish lad and a Dominican woman.