Casting NewsActor Jack Black will co-star with...

Casting News

Actor Jack Black will co-star with Mike Myers in the Universal comedy “Dieter” (pronounced DEE-ter), which is based on one of Myers’ recurring “Saturday Night Live” characters, a too-hip, Euro talk-show host. Black, who also fronts the rap group Tenacious D, last played a pudgy, scene-stealing record store clerk in “High Fidelity.” . . . Jonny Lee Miller, best known in the U.S. as Sick Boy from “Trainspotting” (and as Angelina Jolie’s first husband), has joined the cast of Dimension Films’ “Wes Craven Presents: Dracula 2000,” which will also star Christopher Plummer and Jennifer Esposito.

Poultry Parody

“Escape or Die Frying.” “She’s Poultry in Motion.” “A Few Good Hen.” These are a few of the tag lines for the upcoming DreamWorks family film “Chicken Run.” But the latest advertising trick is a theatrical trailer that spoofs the Revolutionary War drama “The Patriot.” What could these two films possibly have in common? Well, besides both being hotly anticipated summer movies, they both feature Mel Gibson. Mel is the lead in “The Patriot” and is the voice of Rocky the Rooster in “Chicken Run.”

Sayles-Less

Bad news for fans of writer-director John Sayles. The retrospective “John Sayles: Indie Pioneer,” which had been planned to run at the Nuart in West Los Angeles on June 23-28, has been canceled. Instead, the Nuart will run late shows of the marijuana documentary “Grass” for an additional six days and will open Lars von Trier’s “The Idiots” on June 23.