Bridget Jones’ diary seems to have some smutty parts: Beeban Kidron, the director of Bridget Jones: Edge of Reason, is taking on a famous British obscenity case, and she has a passel of stars to do it with her.
Cillian Murphy will star in Hippie Hippie Shake as Richard Neville, an Australian who brought his satire magazine Oz to London, where he became the target in the longest obscenity trial in English history after the mag did a sexually explicit issue. Co-starring with Murphy will be Sienna Miller (who finally made a movie I unabashedly like, Interview), CHUD Disappointment list start Max Minghella and Emma Booth, who I have never seen in a film before but whose pictures lead me to hope that she’s the thing that’s obscene in the movie.
The film is based on Neville’s double colon memoir, Hippie Hippie Shake: The Dreams, the Trips, the Trials, the Love-ins, the Screw Ups: The Sixties. Variety says that Oz magazine will be “a metaphor for a journey through the swinging ’60s in London,” and I don’t know how much of the film will focus on the obscenity case; I suspect this won’t be a courtroom drama. The case itself is fascinating, since Neville and friends lost and were sentenced to hard labor, which they avoided upon appeal by agreeing to shut down their magazine. Makes you appreciate free speech a little bit more.