• The Desmond Law Firm Investigates Decline in Stock Price Team Communications Group, Inc
• "Hannibal" gobbles up $140 million worldwide
• Hannibal stays at number one in US
• Funding for biopic with Depp and Clooney falls through
• Jennifer Jason Leigh takes Road to Perdition
• Debra Messing to be Woody's girl
• Val Kilmer sizes up fairground chilller
• Vietnamese beauty falls for Greene's real Quiet American
• Billy Bob Thornton is too excited to sleep
• Derek Malcolm at the Berlin Film Festival
• CAILLOU Books Based on the Popular 'PBS KIDS' Televison Series Debut at New York Toy Fair, Four new Titles Will Delight Parents and Children Alike

The Desmond Law Firm Investigates Decline in Stock Price Team Communications Group, Inc

The Desmond Law Firm is investigating the events surrounding the decrease in Team Communications Group, Inc (the "Company'') (Nasdaq:TMTV) stock price. Previously, the Company reported that it expected to take a charge of approximately $21,000,000 against its result of operations for the year 2000. Additionally, the Company is examining whether certain of the Company's film library acquisition and distribution transactions during last year "lacked economic substance.''

If you purchased Team Communications Group, Inc between April 6, 2000 and February 13, 2001, and have information relevant to the investigation or wish to learn how to participate in any potential shareholder action, you may call the Desmond Law Firm, which will, without obligation or cost to you, attempt to answer your questions and concerns. You may contact the Desmond Law Firm at 2161 Palm Beach Lakes Blvd., Suite 204, West Palm Beach, Florida 33409, by calling toll free at 888/337-6663, by email at Info@SecuritiesAttorney.com or by visiting its website at http://www.SecuritiesAttorney.com. Additionally, the Desmond Law Firm is available to answer questions relating to any other securities-related matter involving investor losses.

The Desmond Law Firm primarily concentrates its practice in the area of securities litigations including broker arbitrations and Federal shareholder class actions and is currently representing clients in excess of one hundred such litigations throughout the United States. Florida Bar Disclosure: "The hiring of a lawyer is an important decision that should not be based solely upon advertisements. Before you decide, ask us to send you free written information about our qualifications and experience.''

"Hannibal" gobbles up $140 million worldwide

By Dean Goodman (Reuters) - The gruesome thriller "Hannibal'' ruled the box office in both North America and Italy for a second consecutive weekend, and opened at No. 1 in Britain, Australia, Germany, according to studio data issued on Monday.

By the beginning of business Tuesday, the worldwide total should stand at about $140 million, according to Metro-Goldwyn- Mayer Inc. (NYSE:MGM), which produced the film in a 50/50 venture with Universal Pictures, a unit of Vivendi Universal (NYSE:V) .

In a long-awaited follow-up to the 1991 hit "The Silence of the Lambs,'' Sir Anthony Hopkins reprises his role as the suave cannibal Dr. Hannibal Lecter. Julianne Moore, Gary Oldman and Italian actor Giancarlo Giannini co-star as his pursuers.

In the United States and Canada, "Hannibal'' pulled in an estimated $35.5 million during the four-day U.S. Presidents' Day holiday weekend. After 11 days, the film has grossed $109.4 million, and should end up in the $190 million-$200 million range, said Larry Gleason, president of distribution at MGM, which is handling North American distribution.

In Britain, "Hannibal'' opened last weekend with a three-day haul of $9.5 million, the No. 5 local debut of all time, according to Marc Schmuger, vice-chairman of Universal Pictures. As with all other territories, the film set a record for the equivalent of a restrictive R rating.

"Hannibal'' earned $6.3 million in its first three days in Germany, the No. 11 opening of all time, and $2.6 million in its first four days in Australia. In Italy, it has tallied $9.2 million after 10 days.

Schmuger said "Hannibal'' will be everywhere within four weeks in order to capitalize on the buzz and to prevent word leaking out about its stomach-churning final scenes.

OSCAR NOMINATIONS UNDERPIN TICKET SALES

Elsewhere in North America, three new releases entered the market place at Nos. 2, 3 and 4, while the announcement last Tuesday of the Oscar nominations underpinned ticket sales for several contenders.

The Chinese-language martial arts saga "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,'' which scored 10 nominations -- second only to 12 for "Gladiator'' -- slipped one place to No. 5 with a four-day sum of $11 million. With a 74-day total of $73.8 million, the film is well on its way to $100 million, said a spokesman for its distributor, Sony Pictures Classics.

With five nominations each, the drugs saga "Traffic'' (USA Films) rose one place to No. 6 with $7.5 million, while the sweet fable "Chocolat'' (Miramax) jumped two to No. 8 with $6.1 million. Their respective totals stand at $80.1 million and $34.5 million.

"Cast Away'' (Fox) which landed two nominations, fell four places to No. 9 with $5.8 million, taking its 60-day total to $217.3 million.

Sony Pictures Classics is a unit of Sony Corp. . USA Films is a unit of USA Networks Inc. (NasdaqNM:USAI). Miramax Films is a unit of Walt Disney Co. (NYSE:DIS). Twentieth Century Fox is a unit of Fox Entertainment Group Inc. (NYSE:FOX).

Actor Ed Harris' feature directing debut "Pollock,'' which scored two Oscar nominations for actor (Harris) and supporting actress (Marcia Gay Harden), opened on 14 screens in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago with $315,888. Including sales from a brief Oscar-qualifying run in December, the Sony Classics biopic about painter Jackson Pollock has drawn up $405,968.

"Quills'' (Fox Searchlight), which yielded an Oscar nod for Australian actor Geoffrey Rush's portrayal of the Marquis de Sade, grossed $318,000 from 201 theaters, taking its total to $6.2 million.

Of the three new entries, the Chris Rock life-after-death comedy "Down to Earth'' (Paramount) was the best performer, opening at No. 2 with $20.1 million, the second-best Presidents' Day opener behind 1998's "The Wedding Singer'' ($21.9 million).

The children's cartoon "Recess: School's Out'' (Walt Disney Pictures), based on the "Recess'' TV series, bowed at No. 3 with $13.1 million. "Sweet November'' (Warner Bros.), a tragic romance starring Keanu Reeves and Charlize Theron, debuted at No. 4 with $11.7 million.

Fox Searchlight is also a unit of Fox Entertainment. Warner Bros. is a unit of AOL Time Warner Inc. (NYSE:AOL). Walt Disney Pictures is also a Walt Disney Co. unit.

Hannibal stays at number one in US

Hannibal reigned supreme at the US box office for the second weekend running, pulling in a hefty $30m in the three day period from Friday to Sunday. Its closest competitors were miles behind: the Heaven Can Wait remake Down to Earth, starring comic Chris Rock, debuted in second place with $17.5m  and the kids romp Recess: School's Out came in third with $10.8 , just ahead of the Keanu Reeves weepie Sweet November on $10.5m . Boosted by its Oscar nominations and a wider release Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon soared up to fifth place on the chart. Nothing, though, came close to disturbing Ridley Scott's polished horror-thriller, which has eased passed the $100m mark after only ten days on general release.

Funding for biopic with Depp and Clooney falls through

Funding for a new film starring Johnny Depp and George Clooney has fallen through at the eleventh hour, leaving the project in limbo. Based on the autobiography of Gong Show host Chuck Barris, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind was to have starred Depp as a TV compere who doubles as a CIA operative and Clooney as the organisation's recruiting agent. But backers Renaissance Films have failed to come up with the required budget of $35m (£24.15m). The film, which was to have been directed by Bryan (X-Men) Singer, was due to have started filming next month, immediately after Clooney completed work on Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's Eleven.

Jennifer Jason Leigh takes Road to Perdition

 Jennifer Jason Leigh is the latest star name to sign on for The Road to Perdition, the next film from American beauty director Sam Mendes. The film showcases Tom Hanks as a Prohibition-era assassin who embarks on a mission of vengeance when his family are murdered. The bad news for Jennifer is that she is down to play the role of Hanks's wife: expect a few lines of dialogue around the breakfast table and then a grisly death scene about twenty minutes into the picture. The Road to Perdition also stars Jude Law (as a rival assassin) and Tom Sizemore (as Al Capone) and will boast a cameo appearance from Paul Newman.

Debra Messing to be Woody's girl

Rising star Debra Messing is to join an ensemble cast that includes Helen Hunt, Charlize Theron and Dan Aykroyd in the new Woody Allen picture The Curse of the Jade Scorpion. Messing, who will play the role of Allen's girlfriend, also had a small part in the film-maker's unloved 1998 satire Celebrity.

Val Kilmer sizes up fairground chilller

Desperately seeking a hit to reverse his fortunes, troubled actor Val Kilmer is in negotiations to star in The Princess of Paradise Park opposite Jim Caviezel, star of Frequency and The Thin Red Line. Kilmer and Caviezel will play brothers who inherit a delapidated carousel from their grandfather which is haunted by the ghost of their dead sister.

Vietnamese beauty falls for Greene's real Quiet American

David Brunnstrom in Ho Chi Minh CitySunday (Reuters)

The centre of old Saigon stepped back nearly 50 years yesterday as filming started of an Australian adaptation of Graham Greene's eerie prophecy of the US debacle in Indochina, "The Quiet American".

Directed by Phillip Noyce, whose credits include Patriot Games and The Saint, the film is set in early 1950s Vietnam, a country wracked by war as the curtain comes down on French colonial rule.

It tells the story of a doomed love triangle involving a jaded British war correspondent, Fowler, played by Sir Michael Caine, an idealistic American agent, Pyle, played by Brendan Fraser, and a young Vietnamese girl, Phuong, played by local newcomer Hai Yen.

Fraser's character, Alden Pyle, is The Quiet American of the title, a man in the words of Greene's 1955 novel 'determined... to do good, not to any individual person but to a country, a continent, a world' - with disastrous results.

The makers say they are aiming for a far more faithful adaptation of Greene's work than a 1950s Hollywood version, which turned the plot on its head to make Pyle an anti-communist hero.

Scriptwriter Christopher Hampton, an Academy Award winner with Dangerous Liaisons, said he hoped Greene, with whom he worked on an adaptation of his later novel The Honorary Consul - which also starred Caine - would have been somewhat happier with this version of The Quiet American .

But he said the author, who died in 1991, was a notoriously difficult man to please. 'I think he would be slightly happier,' Hampton said. 'But he was not disposed to be terribly happy with any of the adaptations of his books. When I did The Honorary Consul while he was still alive, I tried to be very faithful with that as well, but he wasn't too happy with it.'

He said Greene had been 'outraged' by the original version of The Quiet American by Joseph L Mankiewicz, seeing it as a complete betrayal of the book's message.

'It was turned from an accurate representation of the historical circumstances of the time into an anti-communist tract, brought about, I suppose, by the climate of the time in America, where you couldn't take an objective view,' Hampton said. 'In fact, that's what the novel's all about - the incapability of people to take an objective view.'

Hampton said he believed Greene's work still carried an important message today.'It's always timely to say "Don't interfere in the affairs of other countries".'

The script has clearly struck the right note with the communist authorities in Vietnam, who gave approval on the grounds that 'it condemns the manoeuvres of hostile forces and foreign aggressors against the Vietnamese people'.

They have allowed the film-makers to shut off a key section of a city centre thoroughfare renamed Dong Khoi - or 'Uprising' Street - after Saigon itself became Ho Chi Minh City with the Communist victory in the Vietnam War in 1975, to recreate the colonial-era rue Catinat.

The production team say they have also secured permission to recreate a 1952 bomb attack Greene was to blame on a 'Third Force' - neither colonialist nor communist - that Pyle championed.

The film-makers have succeeded in creating an authentically period feel on the set, with the ubiquitous Japanese motorcycles and cars of today giving way to vintage Peugeots, Citröens, bicycles and three-wheeled 'cyclo' pedal taxis of the colonial era.

And more than 45 years after France's ignominious exit from Indochina, the kepis and khaki of its colonial police force and military again graced the streets of a city once dubbed 'Paris of the East'.

The crew is scheduled to film for five weeks in Vietnam, with shooting also scheduled in Hanoi, the national capital, as well as the towns of Hoi An and Danang.

Billy Bob Thornton is too excited to sleep

He is acting, writing or directing in six films this year, Johnny Cash is singing on his album, and he's married to one of the world's most beautiful women. Small wonder Billy Bob Thornton is too excited to sleep. Here, he raves to Daniel Voll about buck-toothed dogs, dwarfs and Angelina Jolie

Billy Bob Thornton is waking up. He's been working a lot, making a lot of movies, so he's tired. He's been making a record, too, after hours. The voice of Johnny Cash, in duet with Billy Bob's own voice, streams from the speakers. They sound pretty good together. Marty Stuart, the producer, is up from Nashville, and he's burning CDs tonight here at the studio, and it's late, after 2am, all the girls have gone home, and Marty's switched from champagne to Mountain Dew. This is the first time he's heard the full mix. 'This record is tryin' to be something.' He says to Jim, the engineer. 'It's comin', it's comin', it's comin'. I see its little head.'

Billy Bob's been asleep on the couch, which is funny, because normally he needs to be told to go to sleep, and Marty says this is the most rest he's gotten since 1979. 'I've wore his ass out,' Marty says, even though he's known Billy Bob only a couple years. As Billy Bob's mother says, her boy's been 'keeping the roads hot'. It's a composed sleep, no more than a half-hour or so - his face has not gone slack - and it seems as if he's beginning to stir. His hands are still folded between his knees, his head bowed, chin to his chest. His cap, which reads Henry Swing Club, is pulled low. His skin is amber, the colour of whiskey. A short-sleeved bowling shirt covers most of his tattoos, but one peeks out from under his left sleeve. He wears a black leather band on one wrist and black jeans and black tasselled motorcycle boots, which are starting to show signs of life. He is a parched and worn 45, but in sleep he has the aspect of a baby. People want to stay around and make sure nothing bad happens to him. A hand goes up to his face, an index finger softly rubs the bridge of his nose, and then the hand goes slack as he dissolves again into sleep. He is clean-shaven. He looks like a farmer, not a movie star.

This is Billy Bob's couch, in the recording studio that also belongs to him, in the basement of his new house in Beverly Hills. He's owned the place since June, just after he got married to Angelina Jolie - he calls her Angie - and they paid more than $3m for it. The house is 11,000sqft, and it has this recording studio in the basement, which is a big reason Billy Bob wanted it. Slash, the former guitarist for Guns N' Roses, lived here before. Billy Bob's a Hollywood guy, yes, but his music is important to him, and this is not going to be one of those actor-wants-to-be-a-rock-star records, so he doesn't talk about it much. But the studio is a comfortable room, and he likes it. He hasn't really unpacked yet. Boxes are stacked against one wall alongside a framed Pink Floyd poster. There are a couple of oriental rugs, an acoustic guitar, a box labelled Billy Bob's Drum Kit.

Billy Bob lifts his head and squints for a second, and then suddenly he is all awake, as if he had never been asleep. He hears Johnny Cash. 'I think his voice is a little hot,' he says softly. Marty's sitting at the soundboard. He adjusts a few knobs. Billy Bob wonders if they should get Cash to record his vocals again. Marty says, 'It's easier to sing to Mount Rushmore than to have Mount Rushmore sing to you.' Then Marty says, 'Time to go, cuz. OK, enough work for tonight. Time to go to bed.'

Billy Bob gets to his feet and heads upstairs. He scrapes his heels when he walks, as if the boots are weighing him down. On the landing, he passes a huge arrow pointing back down to the studio. There's a sign on it that reads The Snakepit. Upstairs, the house is a construction zone. Only one room is finished. Newspapers mask the floors. Buckets of paint are stacked along the walls in the foyer. Angie's in London, working, so he's in charge of the renovation. The bedrooms on the second floor all have sliding glass doors that overlook a small outdoor pool. Billy Bob likes the fact that it has the feel of a motel and wants to preserve that. 'I'll never live a normal life,' he says. 'But I try to keep bits of it in my life. Just the idea of having a house, of buying one, knowing there's someplace to call home.'

He walks over, flips off the big TV, which has been playing on mute all night, and then goes to the front door. 'Come on, we're goin',' he says. He steps out, lights a cigarette, and locks the door. He won't be sleeping here. 'Nooo sir,' he says, heading for his truck. 'Not until a guy comes and checks the place out for snake eggs.'

The house may have a snake problem. Slash liked snakes and kept them in cages and boxes and pens all over the house. Billy Bob can't abide snakes. He hasn't yet spent the night in the house, and he won't until the snake-egg guy comes.

He doesn't live in places easily. He once lived in New York City for 10 hours before driving back to Arkansas, defeated and afraid. Tonight he's going to sleep at the Sunset Marquis, the hotel where he's lived off and on for years.

When he gets to the hotel, he'll call his bride, who'll just be starting her day. Well, maybe he'll call her. He's not sure. 'It's one of the things I like about this marriage,' he says. 'I was always afraid in relationships before, but I'm not afraid of her. Well, I am afraid of her, I told her that once. First I told her I wasn't afraid of her, and then 20 minutes later I told her the opposite, that I was afraid of her.' So maybe he'll call.

This is an early evening for him. He's got to get up at six to cut hair because he's in a movie. He's playing a barber.

It's a great night out, warm, swimming weather, but all the Beverly Hills mansions on Billy Bob's street, all built during the same few years - late 20s, early 30s - for the first generation of Hollywood royalty, are dark now. Who could be in bed on a night like this? It's going on 3am, and so Billy Bob's boots and his voice echo a little as he shuffles towards his truck. He's looking at the dark houses. 'I hate people who go to sleep early,' he says.

11pm, second night

Billy Bob will never live a normal life. So he went to work today, made some film, negotiated some deal. All real work in the adult world. A bunch of extras lined up at sunrise for haircuts. 'Most nervous extras you ever saw,' Billy Bob says. He gave a couple of flat-tops with antique clippers. It's a Coen brothers film, known currently as The Untitled Barber Project. He is, by all accounts, a delight to be around with on the set, any set. He is kind, funny and inspiring to other actors, and reverential about the work, having had a strange sense of hillbilly destiny about it ever since his mother told him not to worry, he's made it, one day he would work with Burt Reynolds. (He has.)

He's got six movies coming out in the next year, four of which he's acting in and two of which he directed, including All the Pretty Horses, the $45m-adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel, and The Gift, which he wrote about his mother - both films are due out in the UK next month. He's never been busier and never been more tired; he's got a cough and there's so much day-time work, too, so many decisions to make, so many people to take care of, so much writing to get done, so many stories to get out of himself before it's too late.

'I've got so much shit backed up that it almost gives me an aneurysm,' he says. 'I've got at least another 20 movies in me.'

But after dark, Billy Bob's mind seems so starved that he won't sleep voluntarily or easily; he never has since he was a kid, and at these times he has been known even to seek out the interesting company of those he doesn't know very well, and he is disappointed when they don't have the stamina for his hours. 'Oh, no, come on, you can't leave!' he'll say.

The bar at his hotel is called the Whiskey, and the candlelit patio out front, with its low wrought-iron tables, is Billy Bob's nocturnal office. There's always somebody or somebody's entourage here. Blonde, lithe young things everywhere. And lots of musicians; there's a recording studio in the basement here, too. And everybody touches everybody else. Little touches, lots of hands, which is fine with Billy Bob because he's from the South, and there they drape themselves all over you.

Billy Bob keeps pretty regular hours here, and the Reverend Billy Gibbons from ZZ Top drops by sometimes. He's here tonight, and this is cool because it was not very long ago at all that Billy Bob was the completely unfamous drummer of a ZZ tribute band, Tres Hombres, which Gibbons now graciously calls 'the best little cover band in Texas'. And earlier, Billy Bob jammed in an upstairs room with Chris Robinson of the Black Crowes. And now the Irish director Jim Sheridan pulls up a chair, and Billy Bob talks to him about boxing movies because that's something that Sheridan knows about, and Billy Bob's thinking about directing a boxing movie for Miramax, even though he's said no to all studio films, forever ('Well, at least with Miramax you know whose ass you're kissing'), and lord knows how he'll find the time and preserve his health, but he's already seeing scenes in his head, so he figures it's the right thing to do.

Life at the Sunset Marquis has other rewards. There's a gym that Billy Bob uses when he finds himself in bouts of self-improvement. He sometimes works out in his cowboy-and-Indian pjs, and he'll wear Angie's pink underwear. 'Once I was lifting weights, and I thought they were hidden, but some guy kept looking at me strange,' he says. 'Finally, I said, "They're my wife's." I don't think it's strange at all. I wear them to the set some days. I like having her close to me, you know?'

Another good thing about the hotel is that everybody knows him here, and the bartenders at the Whiskey are as much as he'll indulge himself in psychotherapy any more. Along the way, he's entered therapy a few times and even tried it with a couple of his ex-wives when things started souring. But he doesn't trust it. 'People in LA think you learn by therapy. But you learn by living. I mean, if you've got to get over having your puppy run over when you were nine, fine, but you've got to keep living.

'See, I've fucked a lot of things up. I've been wrong. In relationships, I've been, like, not present. Or doing some wrong things. People talk about working on things. I don't like to work on things. I never like working on things. When I write, I don't work on it. I start, and I finish. If it don't come out in one long stream of consciousness, it ain't for me. I don't want to construct when I love, when I write. I don't want to go to couples therapy to solve a relationship. I don't want to work on it. I don't believe in it, never have.'

Billy Bob had been with the actress Laura Dern for three years when she went off to make a movie. When she got back, Billy Bob was married to Angie. He knows that lots of people out here are sympathetic to Dern's side of things. 'Others may say that you left our girl and married someone else,' he says. 'But it made me happy and somebody else happy. I'm sorry it caused pain.'

As the evening unwinds and the foot traffic slows down, Billy Bob chain-smokes and drinks bottles of water and hangs out, talking about All the Pretty Horses and his idea of the movies. He finished the film some time ago but continues to edit, tweak and fight battles over every little thing. He went to test screenings. He knows the audience out there is finicky. 'You've got people who only want to see someone screw an apple pie. But some people are sick and tired of it. They want raw stuff again. We did the movie the way they used to do it.'

All the Pretty Horses is a modern epic, with 'interiors out of Sling Blade ' and 'outdoors that look like John Ford', with a big budget and big stars, directed by a guy who's never been trusted with more than a few million dollars before. 'I think the natural tendency these days is to use one of the big guys to direct. I'm not one of them.'

Out of nowhere, someone asks, 'When are you going to London?' Billy Bob's fear of flying is famous. Before he gets on a plane, he'll call his mother, who is psychic, to ask her if it's safe. He'll go over there on one condition, he says - if Angie'll take him on the Jack the Ripper tour.

It's quiet for a minute, and then Billy Bob speaks. 'You know she won't do anything to hurt me, because she knows it'll hurt her more,' he says.

Billy Bob orders more cigarettes and gets up to pee. As he's walking back, he's already talking. He seems excited, maybe exercised. 'Did you ever look at a woman when she's asleep, and you think, who the fuck is that ?' he says, and sits down. 'And, like, the moonlight's coming in when you're sleeping next to her at night and you can kind of see her face - and she looks like a fucking monster ? This might be somebody you have been with for years. And you look at her, and it's like, who in God's name is that? Why - she's a stranger. What is she doing here? I don't even know her. And much of the daytime, you're like, "Oh, honey, I love you. Are you OK? How was that today?" But when she's asleep, that's how you really feel about her.'

8pm, same night

Billy Bob bleeds [St Louise] Cardinal red, but the Dodgers will do for tonight. He got good tickets and decided to catch a game. Back in Malvern, Arkansas, Billy Bob was a hometown baseball hero, the promising kid who got a major league try-out at 18, got nailed by a bad throw, and broke his collarbone. 'There's nothing in the movies or entertainment that feels like the third pitch that strikes a guy out,' he says.

Billy Bob remembers that his father hung a tyre up in the yard so that he could practise his pitching. 'It's the one place my dad and I connected every now and then,' he says. He looks around Dodger Stadium, shrugs his shoulders, and squints. 'Or maybe that's my fantasy.'

Billy Bob was not close to his father. Billy Ray Thornton was gone a lot, teaching and coaching mostly basketball at small high schools out of town. Billy Bob says that every film he does is reckoning with his father. 'In my movies, there's either shitty fathers, absent fathers, fathers that you want their approval. Or the father's just not there. He died or whatever.'

After the game, Billy Bob's in the car talking on the phone to his most recent ex-wife, Pietra, with whom he has two young sons. 'Don't make any plans for Friday night. We can make a dessert like strawberry shortcake or something like that.' He's sweet and kind to her now. It's late, but his kids aren't asleep. One of his boys announces over the phone that he's trying to kill a spider. 'Your mom ripped his body off? Wait, what - the spider's on his back, shivering with a chicken bone in his mouth? Well, that's a huge spider. Oh, that's the dog. OK, honey, did your mom tell you that I'm coming Friday night and we're gonna cook? We're gonna make something, just you and your brother and me and your mom. You sure are, baby, you are the luckiest boy. I love you. Goodnight, baby.'

1am, first night

The house is rockin', sort of. In the one finished room, Billy Bob's trying to convince Odessa, his young assistant, that he always wanted to 'fuck a midget'.

'I always wanted to fuck a midget,' he tells her in earnest. 'I just wanted to see what it was like. I don't any more. But didn't you ever want to?'

'No!' Odessa yelps in a slurry North Carolina accent. She's 25, pretty, and has worked with Billy Bob for a couple of years.

'I always wanted to just pick them up by the ankles,' Billy Bob goes on. 'Think of all the things you could do with 'em. You can pick 'em up, turn 'em upside down by their ankles.' He holds up an imaginary midget, shakes it a little.

Then he's slow dancing, loving the midget up and down. Odessa backs off a bit. Kristin, another assistant, is on the couch with Odessa's pit bull, Percy, giggling.

'I've seen midgets fucking,' Billy Bob says.

'You've seen it?' Odessa asks.

'Of course!' he says

'What do you mean, of course ? Like everybody has?'

'Not like everybody else has,' he says. 'Like I have.'

'I don't ever want to see that,' Odessa says. 'It's just wrong.'

Marty Stuart comes whistling up from the studio. 'More bubbly?' Billy Bob asks, cackling. He's broken out champagne, ecstatic that he wrote a new song tonight. And that's as good a reason as any to make this night the first party in the new house.

'Slash had a room full of iguanas over there.' Billy Bob points past the bar. 'Man, I can't stand a lizard. I don't like that skin, I don't like the way they look.' Percy the pit bull ambles over and rubs against Billy Bob's leg. The dog's got a long, mean scar on his back. Odessa rescued him from somewhere up in the Hollywood Hills. It's one of the things Billy likes about Odessa, that her heart's so big. Another thing is that she genuinely doesn't seem to know or care who's famous and who's not, except for the day she saw Rhea Perlman [Carla from Cheers ] on the street and just about lost it.

'Marty and I were talking today,' Billy Bob says, 'about how in the South it's all right to beat a dog.'

He and Marty are trying to work each other up.

'It's a kind of a way of life,' Marty says. Both men are laughing, their shoulders shaking. 'There's a place in Nashville,' Marty says. 'where you could get braces for your dog's teeth. The dog dentist. If your dog had buckteeth, you could get him braces.'

'Oh, well, that's just ridiculous,' Odessa says.

'Not if you're a buck-toothed dog!' Billy Bob says.

Ime Etuk walks in, a soft-spoken black man in his twenties. Ime's an assistant director around town and Billy Bob's bowling buddy.

'You got a marijuana cigarette?' Billy Bob asks Ime.

'Not on me,' Ime says.

Billy Bob is happy and loose, and he wants to have fun. He wants to have fun like Sinatra did, all night and whatever the hell he wanted. He can't wait for the house to be up and running so that he can get a little of that Southern Rat Pack feeling. A pool table, table football, and a Velcro room of his own design.

'Where are all my bitches?' Billy Bob cries out. 'I know I have more bitches than this! Odessa, call people! Tell 'em to come over!'

'We tried to call everybody,' Kristin says. 'We told them it was a pyjama party.'

'What's wrong with the world?' Billy Bob says.

'Everybody's tired,' Kristin says.

'Well I'm tired, too .'

Alex, Billy Bob's chef, shows up, along with a blonde actress and a producer and a guy in a suit. Alex says that during the filming of All the Pretty Horses, she had to call Arkansas to 'find out from his momma how to make chocolate gravy and biscuits'. Billy Bob veers into a story about the night he saw a man barking his ass off in a grocery store. This was in Santa Fe late at night, after a day of shooting All the Pretty Horses , when Billy Bob and a couple of the girls were looking for a midnight snack. 'We've always been addicted to various kinds of cereal,' Billy Bob says.

'Cap'n Crunch!' Odessa says.

'Golden Grahams!' Kristin says.

'There was a guy there barking his ass off, just throwing his head back, doing the whole thing. I love that shit. I love that shit!'

The party never becomes more than Ime, Marty, a couple of girls, and a dog on the couch. It's a work night. The girls want to go home. Billy Bob's got a joke. Won't they stay to hear it? 'So Bubba and Marcel decide they're going to go back to school...' He turns to Odessa. 'You know this one right?'

'No!' Her voice is rising now, a little irritated. 'I don't know what you're talking about.'

Billy Bob looks at her.

'I'll call you in the morning,' she says.

'Will you call me at 5.30am?' Billy Bob asks gently. 'And again at 6am? I need like nine wake-up calls.'

The girls are gone. 'It's a holy day,' Billy Bob says softly. 'Elvis died today.' When Billy Bob was two, his mother took him out to the highway to watch as the King's bus passed by their little town. They stood there by the road, waving.

He stretches out on the couch, his physical depletion starting to show. His enthusiasm is faltering. He seems tamed. 'I know I'm compulsive,' he says. 'I'm hungry for the horrible shit, but I can't do that. Not any more. I got something good, and I'm not gonna mess it up.' It's quite late, going on 2am, and he's tired and ruminative all of a sudden. He's thinking about his father. 'Some of the things he loved are things I love, even though he and I didn't know each other or get along. And I have some of his traits.' He says that when his father got upset, he'd go away, disappear. 'That's me, too,' he says.

His voice is rasping. Some involuntary twitches. Sometimes he gets so tired that his face starts to twitch. He'll blink his eyes and his whole face seems to blink. He just doesn't have the reserves he had when he was young.

'But my father didn't like music,' he says. 'At all. He might be the only man I ever met who didn't like music. There were two songs he liked - "Puff the Magic Dragon" and "Easter Parade". It seemed incongruous.' He's talking so softly now, almost whispering. 'One's about the magic and wonder of childhood and the hard, cold facts about loss, and the other one is a celebration with hats.' He begins to hum, closing his eyes, and then he sings softly: In your Easter bonnet/With all the frills upon it/You'll be the grandest lady/In the Easter parade.

He wants to go downstairs. He wants Ime to hear the new song he wrote, 'Beauty at the Back Door'. They follow the arrow down the stairs into Slash's Snakepit, where Marty and Jim, the engineer, are behind the glass. Ime and Billy Bob sit on the little couch.

It's a song about screen doors and myrtle bushes and love, about memory and desire and loss. A little slide guitar, but mostly Billy Bob's voice. It's a spoken-word song, raw, stripped down, a Southern-gothic Leonard Cohen.

'My, that's a snappy western shirt you got on,' Billy Bob says to Marty faintly. 'You goin' to a singin'?'

'Yeah, I'm going to a singin',' Marty says.

And then Billy Bob sings another song, called 'Poison Honey'.

His voice is smoky. She draws me in like a moth to a flame/And sometimes at night, I call out her name.

'Albums are supposed to reflect what's going on in your life,' Marty says.

Billy Bob laughs. 'Then I'm fucked.'

There's darkness all around, as the evening shadows fall/Time keeps dragging by, but she ain't coming home at all.

Billy Bob listens to the music, his fingers touching his lips. He likes the song, likes where it's going. He crosses his legs, gets comfortable. His eyelids slip down, shut, open, shut. In a few weeks, he'll have run himself down so bad that he'll be in the hospital. But for now, he's got to be up in a few hours, working. His cough will become bronchitis, and an infection will inflame his heart. But in the morning, the extras will be waiting for haircuts. Angie will rush from London to his side. But for now, he folds his hands, nestles them between his knees. The doctor will tell him, 'You know, Billy Bob, you don't have to starve yourself and not sleep.' And Billy Bob, in a burst of light, will promise himself to go on living. But now his shoulders hunch. The music sounds good, like a dream from childhood. His eyes close.

Billy Bob Thornton is asleep.

Billy Bob Thornton: A life in film

As far as most people were concerned, Billy Bob Thornton arrived fully formed as the surprise package of the 1997 Oscars. Having written, directed and starred in Sling Blade, he came across as a backwoods Orson Welles, getting a nomination for Best Actor and an Oscar for Best Screenplay. But his Hollywood CV already included two TV series and 19 movies. Among the pre- Sling Blade efforts was 1993's One False Move, which is still the best film he has been involved with. Written by Thornton and Tom Epperson, it is the strongest of contemporary film noirs. Thornton is terrifying as Ray, a criminal on the run with his accomplices after a cocaine heist.

But his real contribution is the script, which alternates between the criminal's tense journey and the difficult relationship between the big-city FBI agents and the small-town sheriff waiting for them. It established what remains a theme in much of Thornton's work: don't underestimate country folk, no matter how dumb or weird they might seem.

Sling Blade, as well as proving that Thornton could direct, established his other trademark: a willingness to look odder or uglier than any actor around. Thornton, with an awkwardly cropped head, stars as Karl, the hulking, low-IQ but sweet-natured man who has spent almost all his life in prison for murder. The critic Roger Ebert described the film as ' Forrest Gump written by William Faulkner'. It's a great performance in a very good film. Other Thornton looks have included bizarre thick glasses and a hairy beer belly when he played the grotesque mechanic in Oliver Stone's U-Turn, and more heavy glasses and lank hair in A Simple Plan, where again his character appears to verge on the mentally handicapped, but turns out to be more perceptive than his college-educated brother.

A couple of Thornton's finest performances have been in less-than-great films. In Primary Colors he is perfectly cast as a character based on Bill Clinton's aggressively Southern spin doctor James Carville. And he steals the show in Pushing Tin as an eccentric air-traffic controller, who enjoys lying on runways as planes are landing. His slutty wife in the film, incidentally, is played by Angelina Jolie.

Once in a while, he shows he can play the straight man in the suit, like his Nasa chief in Armageddon. There's more folk wisdom at the expense of the seemingly sophisticated in The Gift, a swampy supernatural thriller which Thornton wrote but doesn't appear in. Cate Blanchett plays a single mother using her psychic abilities to eke out a living: Thornton claims that his mother had the gift.

But acting, writing and directing isn't the whole package: there is music, too. Before he was an actor, Thornton sang and played the drums in the band Tres Hombres (think early ZZ Top), which released one album in 1983. He still writes songs and occasionally performs. We can judge those musical abilities when we see him play a country singer in the forthcoming Wakin' Up in Reno.

Derek Malcolm at the Berlin Film Festival

(Derek Malcolm  Guardian Newspapers Limited)

The two top awards for the controversial Intimacy and the failure to honour Emma Thompson for her powerful performance in Wit were the main talking points at the end of the Berlin Film Festival

Berlin's huge film festival - more films than Cannes and Hollywood stars by the bucketful - celebrated its 51st year with a jury decision that was roundly castigated by the assembled press. The Golden Bear went to Patrice Chereau's Intimacy, a Franco-Italian co-production made in London and culled from Hanif Kureishi's autobiographical novel of the same name. Not only that, but the Best Actress award went to the Australian actress Kerry Fox, the lead with Mark Rylance in the film.

This was a considerable shock since it was generally thought that Steven Soderbergh's Oscar-nominated Traffic would win the main award as the best of the big American movies on view, and that British actress Emma Thompson deserved the Best Actress award for a magnificent performance in Mike Nichols' Wit, an adaptation of an American play in which she plays a successful academic taken to hospital with terminal ovarian cancer.

Intimacy split its audiences, if not the jury, into two parts - the larger of which thought this tale of sexual obsession was both portentous and unsatisfactory. It's the story of two married people who meet each Wednesday for sex, scarcely speaking to each other and forming no kind of relationship other than in bed. One of them (Rylance) has left his wife and children and the other (Fox) is an actress with a loquacious taxi-driver husband (Timothy Spall).

Gradually, however, the man gets intrigued by his sexual partner and decides to attempt to discover something about her. Then the fun begins, since the taxi driver is not best pleased by what he finds out and the woman herself wants to give up the relationship. The moral of the film clearly is that sex alone is not enough - fairly obvious, in fact. But done with this intensity it's at least capable of forging a tale of amour fou to be remembered.

Unfortunately, this is a French director's film which means that the screenplay, written by Chereau himself with an accomplice and not by Kureishi, sits oddly on its English setting. Added to that, the sex, which includes an unsimulated fellatio sequence for the first time in an openly commercial film, gets boringly repetitive. You can't have much sympathy for anyone in the picture except perhaps the taxi driver whom Spall paints with all his familiar near-to-caricature skill.

Traffic, however, was not totally ignored. Benicio Del Toro rightly won the Best Actor award for his performance in a film that at least proves that Hollywood isn't totally bereft of anything but obvious talent these days. Wit, however, was, and most people couldn't understand why.

This clever and moving adaptation of Margaret Edson's prize-winning play gave Thompson the chance, in her first film part for three years, to give a stunning performance as a woman whose whole life has been a success until she is forced to confront failure for the first time. Told by her doctors that the only hope is the heaviest dose of chemotherapy, she decides to take the chance and suffers accordingly.

Added to that, she also faces the members of an American medical establishment who, in order not to involve themselves emotionally, deliberately distance themselves from their patients, and it is left to the black nurse (Audra MacDonald, also very good) and her old tutor (Eileen Atkins) to help her through the final stages.

Such a film, made for Home Box Office, the American television channel, is not an easy one to look at since it makes very few of the usual compromises and refuses a feelgood ending. But Thompson's often humorous performance - she helped to write the screenplay with Nichols - leavens it a little. And anyway such acting, put completely to the service of the material and in no sense a star turn, is very rare indeed.

Elsewhere, the festival, which finally said farewell to Moritz de Hadeln, its director for some 20 years, and a controversial figure since he is half Swiss and half English, unleashed upon us so many films in each of its three sections that it proved impossible to see more than a tenth of them.

One of the most popular films in the competition was Italian for Beginners, the first Danish Dogma film to be directed by a woman. Lone Sherfig's film adheres to most of the Dogma rules, such as no artifical light, hand-held cameras (and no sex during the shooting), but does so with enough skill to make its watchers scarcely notice the difference between this and an ordinary production.

It's a light-hearted piece about a group of Danes from a dreary Copenhagen suburb who go to Italian classes and get romantically mixed up with each other. But its skill lies not in its effervescence but in the natural characterisation and unaffected acting. The film received a rousing reception from both the critical audience and the general public. The International Critics Jury gave the film its prize for the competition and even the main jury admitted its charm by according Italian for Beginners its minor Jury Prize.

As usual, the East, always given a good showing in Berlin, also came into the reckoning. Wang Xiaoshuai's Beijing Bicycle, a sympathetic and skilful Chinese film about the travails of a courier from the countryside in the big city, won the Grand Jury Prize, virtually the second best award in the festival, and, more surprisingly, the Best Director prize went to Lin Cheng-sheng for his work on Betelnut Beauty, a rather meandering Taiwanese film about young people growing up in Taipeh.

Some of the best films were shown in the Forum and Panorama sections. The Forum, also under new management next year since Ulrich and Erika Grigor, who built this radical section up from nothing, are also retiring, produced several outstanding documentaries and bravely included 10 features from Vietnam which had never been seen in Europe before. Most of them were not exactly masterpieces. But one, The Scent of Guavas, certainly deserved the considerable praise it gathered.

In all, the Berlin programme, now housed in the most modern and luxurious cinemas on the festival circuit, and blessed with enough money to expand even further, could be called a qualified success this year. There were just enough good movies to suggest that world cinema isn't yet totally defeated by the money and star-power of Hollywood, if not quite enough to give that much hope that America will cease to be the be-all and end-all of commercial film-making. Next stop Cannes in May, where hope also springs eternal.

CAILLOU Books Based on the Popular 'PBS KIDS' Televison Series Debut at New York Toy Fair, Four new Titles Will Delight Parents and Children Alike

CINAR Corporation and Chouette Publishing are thrilled to announce that four new CAILLOU® book titles were launched on the American market at Toy Fair, held just last week in New York. Now preschoolers and their parents can spend even more time together, immersed in the world of the adorable four-year-old, sharing in his daily discoveries and adventures.

The colorful, easy to read soft-covered books are: "CAILLOU RIDES ON A PLANE'', "CAILLOU AND THE BIG SLIDE'', "CAILLOU AND GILBERT'', and "CAILLOU PUTS AWAY HIS TOYS.'' They are ideal for children ages 3 and up. Each story is an adventure in itself as CAILLOU encounters the daily challenges of life as a four-year-old boy.

The four new book titles extend the world of CAILLOU for children and parents. Children can wake up and watch CAILLOU on PBS KIDS in the morning, and read about CAILLOU at bedtime.

"These books supplement the CAILLOU franchise which features a line of toys, games, apparel, CD-ROMs and videos. All of these products bring CAILLOU and his world into the day-to-day lives of preschoolers,'' said Kelly Elwood, vice president of marketing for CINAR. "Story-time with CAILLOU completes this product line, putting the finishing touches to his world.''

Copies of the books, which retail for $3.95 U.S. each, will be on display during Toy Fair, February 11-15, at the Chouette Publishing booth (Javits booth #4849).

"CAILLOU came to life in a series of books first published by us in 1990,'' said Christina Young, director of marketing for Chouette Publishing. "These new books, based on the successful debut of the PBS KIDS series CAILLOU, will surely delight the ever-growing number of CAILLOU fans, big and small, in the U.S.''

Produced by CINAR in association with PBS, CAILLOU (pronounced KY-YOO), presents a unique combination of animation, puppets, music, dance, and live action, to chronicle its hero's adventures as he bravely encounters the infinite miracles and dilemmas of four-year-old life. CAILLOU doesn't slay dragons or other mythical beasts; his daily challenge is to conquer the everyday real world around him. The CAILLOU Web site is www.pbskids.org/CAILLOU

CINAR Corporation is an integrated entertainment and education company involved in the development, production, post-production and worldwide distribution of non-violent, quality programming and educational products for children and families. Visit the CINAR Web site at www.cinar.com

Chouette Publishing was founded by Christine L'Heureux in 1987. Chouette Publishing has published more than 50 books in eight separate series aimed at children ages three months through six years. Book sales exceed 3 million copies worldwide. The CAILLOU books are multiple award-winners, earning the Sceau d'excellence (Seal of Excellence) from the Association des consommateurs du Quebec, being named an Our Choice selection by the Canadian Children's Book Centre, and garnering a Mr. Christie's Book Award.

Contact:
CINAR Corporation Mahalia Verna Tel: 514/843-7070

or

Chouette Publishing Christina Young Tel: 519/433-2234