Quick Cuts

Indie Town

Two unusual independent films recently wrapped shooting in Los Angeles. “Auggie Rose” is a noirish tale of a complacent man (Jeff Goldblum) who experiences a reawakening when he’s mistaken for the title character, an ex-con who dies in front of Goldblum after being shot in a liquor store robbery. Anne Heche plays the longtime pen pal who mistakes Goldblum for the dead man.

The film is the feature directing debut of Texas native Matthew Tabak, a Northwestern Law School graduate who abandoned corporate lawyering a decade ago. It is being produced by Matthew Rhodes and Dan Stone of Persistent Pictures.

Also just wrapped is “Dancing at the Blue Iguana,” a semi-improvisational film directed by Michael Radford (“Il Postino,” “B. Monkey”). Radford and his actors--Sandra Oh, Jennifer Tilly, Daryl Hannah and Elias Koteas--spent four months workshopping the drama, an unusually long amount of time for rehearsing a feature film (typically actors rehearse for two weeks before shooting begins).

One downside to the L.A. indie boom: Crew members of “Auggie Rose” report working for one-third to one-half less than their usual pay.

Buying This Movie

Lions Gate Films is negotiating CHECKING to acquire rights to “Steal This Movie,” the independent bio-pic about anti-Vietnam War activist Abbie Hoffman. Vincent D’Onofrio plays Hoffman, and Troy Garity, the son of Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda, co-stars as Hayden, who along with Hoffman was one of the Chicago Seven, arrested for disrupting the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The film is based in part on the book “To America With Love: Letters From the Underground” by Hoffman and his wife, Anita Hoffman, who is played in the film by Janeane Garofalo.

Love Is . . .

Surrealist author William S. Burroughs’ last journal entry, written the day before he died in 1997, reads: “Love? What is it? Most natural painkiller. What there is. LOVE.” It turns out the cryptic quote (which was printed on memorial cards and passed out at Burroughs’ Kansas funeral) may have been prescient. Courtney Love is playing the role of Burroughs’ doomed wife, Joan Vollmer Burroughs (the writer accidentally shot and killed her during a party at their home in Mexico City in 1951), in writer-director Gary Walkow’s upcoming indie film “Beat.” (Walkow previously wrote and directed the 1995 “Notes From the Underground.”) Kiefer Sutherland portrays Burroughs in the film, which debuts at the Sundance Film Festival later this month.