ALAN CUMMING WILL STAR IN "FLORENT" ON SHOWTIME!

Yes, Variety says Showtime is developing a comedy project to star Alan Cumming, as my old pal, restaurateur Florent Morellet. Florent is set in the mid-1980s against the backdrop of the AIDS crisis. Making use of an old diner in the Meatpacking District, Restaurant Florent drew a broad range of clientele, from cops to club kids to activists. The 24-hour eatery helped revitalize the area and was meeting place for LGBT rights and AIDS activists. Morellet was open about his own HIV-positive status, even posting his T-cell counts on a board with the restaurant’s daily specials. 

Today I live around the corner from Florent and it’s in the shadow of the new Whitney museum. New restaurants have tried to open and succeed, but so far none has. Florent left when the rent was raised a stratospheric amount. I said to him once, since they closed, that space seems to be cursed. Florent responded;

“Well…”

Back in the day, this was where you went for dinner before clubs or for a bite after they had closed at 4-5 AM, as well as weekends for brunch. Everyone complains about what NYC has lost, and it HAS been a lot, but Florent is one of the few things I truly miss. It was always a scene –the good kind.

Cumming will serve as a producer and Morellet is on board to help guide the half-hour series. An earlier version of the project was in development last year at SundanceTV.

(via Variety)

TWIN PEAKS IS COMING BACK

The series Twin Peaks was truly groundbreaking and really a forerunner of the serialized cable dramas of today. It’s coming back with nine new episodes on Showtime. Creators David Lynch and Mark Frost quipped:

“The mysterious and special world of Twin Peaks is pulling us back. We’re very excited. May the forest be with you.”

Lynch is planning on directing all nine episodes to air in 2016, which would coincide with the 25th anniversary of the show’s demise after two seasons on ABC from 1990 to 1991. As part of the deal, Showtime will rerun episodes from the original series’ first two seasons leading up to the 2016 premiere. Btw, you can get TP now on Hulu Plus, if you want to brush up. It’s been DECADES. Frost says that the passage of 25 years will be an important element in the plot;

“For those followers of the show who felt bereft when the show ended where it did all those years ago are going to like where it goes from here. And we hope that a lot of people who haven’t been to Twin Peaks yet are going to be equally interested in where the story goes from where we left off.”

For those of you old enough to remember when it came out, it was an immediate hit with the midnight movie crowd who were familiar with Lynch’s films. Nothing like it had ever been on TV before. My pal, the late comedy writer, Michael O’Donoghue, was know for his oddball sense of humor and we used to watch the show at his West 16th Street brownstone together with his wife, Cheryl Hardwick quite often. One day he called to say come over next week to watch, “I have a surprise for you.” When I arrived, my surprise was one actually of its major characters, Grace Zabriskie, who was the eerily psychic mother of the doomed Laura Palmer, as my viewing buddy. (She also appeared in Lynch’s Wild at Heart — notably as the twin sister of a character played by Isabella Rossellini.) By the time the new series premieres, EVERYONE is a lot older… if you want to see how they’ve all aged (it’s Hollywood, everyone looks pretty good) check out this BuzzFeed then and now story.

(via Variety)