GOOD MORNING, daaahhhlings, and happy birthday, Julia Roberts. The actress, in Maryland for the filming of Lakeshore/Paramount's "The Runaway Bride," turns 31 today. (Only 31!)
Is this woman livin' it or what? Her boyfriend is Benjamin Bratt of "Law & Order." She's making a movie here with the hunky Richard Gere - and getting paid more than $17 million to do it, one of the few actresses to command that kind of dough. (USA Today says the $17 million salary for "Bride" makes Roberts the highest-paid actress of all time.) Somewhere I hear Ella singing, "I got the world on a string I"
This Just In has learned - from Daily Variety, dearies, which learned it from the New York Daily News - that Bratt took Roberts away from Baltimore Saturday night for a "quiet birthday dinner" near Annapolis. Instead, they ended up on a studio-chartered yacht with 60 people, including Gere, Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins, and "Bride" cast members Joan Cusack and Hector Elizondo, and Ellen Sauerbrey. (Just kidding about Sauerbrey!)
In "Bride," Roberts plays a woman who keeps leaving men at the altar, and she becomes quite the celebrity in the process, the stuff of T-shirt legend. For a scene shot in Baltimore County last week, director Garry Marshall needed people selling hot dogs and hawking "Runaway Bride" T-shirts. And he needed T-shirts fast.
He got them on quick notice, too. East Coast Sportswear & More's Dan McClury says he had 20 shirts printed and on location at Waugh United Methodist Church, Long Green Road, within three hours. One of them read: "Will She or Won't She?"
Meanwhile, production continues at a fierce pace on "Liberty Heights," Barry Levinson's fourth hometown portrait, this one set in 1954 and focusing on growing up in Baltimore's ethnically segregated neighborhoods.
While most scenes have been shot in Baltimore - they turned a stretch of Redwood Street into a strip of Block nightclubs - the director and his crews head for Frederick next month for the staging of a big James Brown-style concert scene at the Weinberg Center for the Arts. They're looking for 500 extras.
Look us in the eye, Parris
Regarding this business of Maryland's so-called Sunny Day Fund and companies that benefit from it giving contributions to the Glendening-Townsend re-election campaign: Is Ellen Sauerbrey saying that, if elected, she would not take campaign contributions from companies getting Sunny Day money? If that's what she's saying, we should get it in writing.
