Because the world has been waiting, there are now not one but two Showgirls sequels.

Showgirls is a 1995 cult classic by Paul Verhoeven, which starred Elizabeth Berkley, Kyle MacLachlan and Gina Gershon. It was a critical disaster but later gained a dedicated following on DVD and in late night theatres, in which it is sometimes screened Rocky Horror style with audience participation.

The first sequel, from German “writer/director” Marc Vorlander, is Showgirls 2: The Story of Hope. Penny Hope was a secondary dancer character played by Rena Riffel in the original. Vorlander’s story is, according to filme site Empire.com, about a stripper who is killed by contaminated cocaine. So, her brother travels to Frankfurt to find the person responsible and exact revenge.

Empire showcased the graphic, not safe for work, and rather-less-than-Hollywood-quality trailer for that one a couple of weeks ago. And then…

Well, it seems Rena Riffel – Penny Hope herself! – is miffed about the film and is working on her own version.

“Some media outlets have been reporting and posting about a Showgirls follow-up feature called Showgirls 2, which I am not affiliated with, in any way, shape or form. I’ll admit, I was contacted by the German Showgirls fan-turned-”Hollywood director” to star in his first feature film. However, it was so horrifically graphic and out of the show’s original story theme that I needed to withdraw from those talks,” Riffel says in a statement, also found on Empire.com.

She goes on to state, “I am officially working on my own Showgirls follow-up feature film. Recently, I posted a short sequel teaser on YouTube, which I wrote and directed myself. The teaser is very different than my feature film screenplay, but I wanted to get the ball rolling and have some fun because everyone seems to be so excited, including me!

“My film is titled Showgirl, being that I am the last and only ’showgirl’ still keeping that flame alive. It’s sort of a… ‘Whatever happened to Penny Hope?’ – 15 years later, story. Showgirl is my take on what becomes of a thirty-something year-old stripper who is still obsessed with dancing and fame.”

Riffel is reportedly hoping to work again with some of the original cast on the film, like Gershon and Berkley, and says she is lining up funding to shoot this summer.

17 directors have teamed up for a sketch comedy film. Count ‘em: 17. So far, maybe give or take a few.

Deadline Hollywood reports that Relativity Media has signed on to finance an as-yet-untitled project in the style of 1970s sketch comedy flicks Kentucky Fried Movie and Groove Tube. The final number of directors is actually still to be determined but each one will be shooting segments on the fly, later to be cobbled together into a funny feature.

Directors that have already shot sketches include Pete Farrelly, Brett Ratner, Elizabeth Banks, Bob Odenkirk, and Griffin Dunne. And the actors involved have included Hugh Jackman, Kate Winslet, Gerard Butler, Banks, Naomi Watts, Liev Schreiber, Johnny Knoxville, Seann William Scott, Emma Stone, Matt Walsh, Tony Shalhoub, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Kieran Culkin, Chloe Moretz and Patrick Warburton. Shooting will wrap in May.

Charles Wessler and Pete Farrelly (There’s Something About Mary) are producing.

Like Kentucky Fried Movie and Groove Tube, the film will have an R Rating. It has been in the development stages for a while, apparently, and Deadine says Wessler tried to place it at Paramount but it was killed after the production head was visited by Tipper Gore, and decided it didn’t fit the family-film mode.

Veteran, Academy Award winning actor Dustin Hoffman is about to get behind the camera for the first time. The Daily Mail Online is reporting that Hoffman is in the final stages of negotiations to direct Quartet, based on a 1999 play by Ronald Harwood. Harwood, who won a Best Adapted Screenplay Academy Award for Roman Polanski’s The Pianist, is adapting his own play for the screen.

The project features Maggie Smith, Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay and is set in a retirement home for opera singers. Finola Dwyer (An Education) is expected to produce

72-year-old Hoffman’s career has spanned over four decades. He began acting on the stage and has gone on to star in an array of classic movies that include, but are not limited to, The Graduate (1967), Midnight Cowboy (1969), Lenny (1974), Marathon Man (1976), Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), Tootsie (1982) and Rain Man (1988). He won Best Actor Oscars for his Kramer vs. Kramer and Rain Man performances and has also won 6 Golden Globes. Currently he is filming the screen adaptation of Mordechai Richler’s novel, Barney’s Version, alongside Paul Giamatti.

Meanwhile, The Mail says Hoffman, 72, has always wanted to direct. Dream fulfilled. Shooting starts later this year.

Robert Pattinson fans will soon be able to purchase his clothes, to wear, or do with what they will.

The Twilight heartthrob will be selling off the costumes he wore in his latest movie, Remember Me, according to People.com.

Items such as a blue Prada suit, slip-on Birkenstocks, an off-white LNA T-shirt and more of Pattinson’s costumes from the film will hit the live auction site icollector.com on March 13. The costumes will be sold alongside garments worn by his Remember Me co-stars, including a pair of denim shorts worn by Emilie de Ravin and a gray suit worn by Pierce Brosnan.

People also reports that costumes from other hit movies like Oscar-winning The Blind Side, The Book of Eli, Leap Year and more are also up for grabs as part of Premiere Prop’s Movie Prop Extravaganza, with a portion of the proceeds going to the EIF (Entertainment Industry Foundation).

The foundation is a charitable organization that, according to its website, “harnesses the collective power of the entire industry to raise awareness and funds for critical health, educational and social issues in order to make a positive impact in our community and throughout the nation.”

Bidding on the items begins on March 13 starting at 11 AM PST. You can find out more in the meantime about the featured items and the auction at eifoundation.org.

The release of Oliver Stone’s Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps has been pushed back from April to September.

According to Variety, 20th Century Fox says the film is better suited for a fall release than a summer one. Though the trade magazine seems to suggest that Fox is actually holding out for a spot at the Cannes Film Festival, which runs May 12-23.

The sequel sees the return of Michael Douglas in the role of Gordon Gekko, starring opposite Shia LaBeouf, Carey Mulligan and Josh Brolin.

The story takes place 23 years after the original Wall Street left off. It is 2008 and Gekko, the villain in the first movie, has just been released from prison, a changed man. He tries to warn Wall Street of the pending financial collapse, but his reputation is such that no one listens to him.

Gekko also tries to reconcile with his daughter with the help of her fiance, a young stock broker. In return he aids the young man in exacting revenge for his mentor’s death.

Well, what’s another five months after 23 years?

Recently, Douglas talked about the timing of the sequel with the UK Sun, saying he thinks it is spot on and timely. Douglas said, “There was a recession when the first movie arrived in 1987. There’s a recession now.

“Greed, which Gekko declared as being good, hasn’t just survived but has thrived amid easy credit, sub-prime mortgages and an America that ignored the signs of an oncoming market collapse.

“We brought Oliver Stone a script. Stone, the son of a stockbroker, wanted to do it.”

Last week we got the news that Abraham Lincoln would be appearing on screen as a vampire hunter. This week we have learned that Warner Bros. is turning Leonardo da Vinci into an action-adventure hero.

The Hollywood Reporter says the studio has picked up a treatment titled Leonardo da Vinci and the Soldiers of Forever.

Da Vinci, who lived from 1452-1519, was the definitive Renaissance man. He counted sculptor, engineer, architect, mathematician, musician, botanist and writer among his professions and interests. So, really, action hero is only one more thing to add to an already very impressive list. He is, of course, best known for the paintings “Mona Lisa” and “The Last Supper,” and for the “Vitruvian Man” drawing.

According to THR, the project “re-imagines da Vinci as a member of a secret society who falls headlong into a supernatural adventure that pits the man against Biblical demons in a story involving secret codes, lost civilizations, hidden fortresses and fallen angels.”

The studio is reportedly looking for a writer.

Kristen Stewart and Dakota Fanning share a kiss in their new movie, The Runaways, but there’s no groping. There are laws against that sort of thing.

Stewart,19, explained to Access Hollywood at the press junket for the film, “She was 15, and I wasn’t allowed to grope her,” adding, “I’m actually not kidding, there are major restrictions that I don’t remember [from] when I was younger.

“I don’t want to give anything way. It’s a really passionate, hardcore scene,” she continued, before backpedalling: “No, it’s just a kiss. It’s not really a big deal.”

The two play members of the 1970s all-girl rock band, The Runaways. Stewart is Joan Jett and Fanning is Cherie Currie.

“It’s just something that happened in their lives,” Dakota told Access Hollywood of the kissing scene. “In the script, it’s not like a big build up or something that they talk about afterwards.”

Regardless, it’s getting a lot of press. And one person who apparently thought the portrayal of the lesbian relationship was a bit much was Currie herself.

In a January interview with HitFix.com, Currie, who has mostly positive things to say about the movie, said the romance was “a little overplayed.”

And it’s not the only thing that’s a little overplayed. In one scene the girls are reportedly put through a rock and roll boot camp that involves getting trash and dog poo thrown at them by teenage boys. According to Currie, that didn’t happen either. “We would have drawn the line there,” she sensibly told Hitfix.

All in all Currie said the film was “a parallel narrative, as Joan puts it. It’s not the real story, but it’s not far from the story either.”

Clint Eastwood has decided on his next directing project. According to The Hollywood Reporter it’s a biopic of the first FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.

THR says Eastwood is teaming with Brian Grazer and Ron Howard’s Imagine Entertainment. The script is by Milk writer, Dustin Lance Black.

Hoover was instrumental in founding the FBI in 1935. He is credited with turning it into a large, efficient crime-fighting organization and remained its director until his death in 1972. But he has become a controversial figure. Hoover is said to have used the FBI to harass political activists and dissenters, to have amassed secret files of sensitive information on leaders, and to have collected evidence employing illegal methods. Many also assert that he was a closeted homosexual and cross-dresser.

As the project is not yet in the casting stage, there is not word on who will take on the lead role. In the past, those who have played Hoover include Bob Hoskins in Oliver Stone’s Nixon (1995) and Billy Crudup in Michael Mann’s Public Enemies (2009).

Eastwood is currently in post on the drama Hereafter, starring Matt Damon and Cecile de France.

Christoph Waltz has dropped out of David Cronenberg’s The Talking Cure and will be replaced with Viggo Mortenesen.

According to Deadline Hollywood, Waltz was to play Sigmund Freud in the film, set to start shooting in May. Based on the play by Christopher Hampton, The Talking Cure is about the relationship between Freud and his pupil Carl Jung. But the Austrian actor — who won this year’s Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his portrayal of a Nazi in Inglourious Basterds — has signed on to play a psychotic animal trainer in Water For Elephants, and this meant walking away from the Cronenberg picture.

Deadline says his departure left producers scrabbling for a replacement and there were fears they would have to scrap production completely. Fortunately Viggo Mortensen, who previously worked with Cronenberg on A History of Violence and Eastern Promises, has stepped into the role and will star as Freud opposite Michael Fassbender as Jung. Keira Knightley will play Sabina, a disturbed young Russian woman brought to see Jung by her father. A romantic relationship develops between Jung and Sabina.

Deadline says the film will feature lots of “spirited sex.”

Corey Haim had big plans with his friend and partner Corey Feldman when Haim died on Wednesday March 10.

The pair was planning a big screen comeback as well as a return to their reality show The Two Coreys., according to Contact Music.

Former child star, Haim, was discovered unresponsive at his mother’s California home on Wednesday morning and was pronounced dead upon arrival at St Joseph’s hospital in Burbank.

Feldman and Haim appeared in several movies together in the 1980s, including The Lost Boys, License to Drive, Watchers and Dream A Little Dream. Their careers floundered in later years but they had worked together recently on the television program The Two Coreys and made a brief appearance together in the 2008 sequel Lost Boys: The Tribe.

They had not starred in a movie together since 1997’s Busted. But Contact Music says Feldman tells Larry King that, in recent weeks, they had been discussing moving in together and resurrecting the TV series and their movie partnership.

Feldman reportedly said, “Just three weeks ago, I sat at his apartment with him and we were talking about my divorce, of all things… And we started talking about, hey, wouldn’t this be a great idea to have a third season [of] The Two Coreys? We can have you move back in with me and, you know, and now my wife is out and you’re in and this is what everybody wanted to see, was the two of us living together in a house.

“Not only were we negotiating a film to do together, but Corey had a concept to do License to Fly, which would have been a sequel to License to Drive. We actually had a series of meetings this week… Both of us would have been in it. He would have been one of the writers. I would have been one of the producers. And we wanted to do a trilogy, which was all his concept, License to Fly and License to Dive. It was going to be caper movies.”

Contact Music says Haim had also signed on for more movie projects, including The Science of Cool with Mischa Barton and The Throwaways with Luke Goss.

Haim’s agent, Mark Heaslip, added, “He was starting to get movie after movie. He was actually starting to book up this whole year. And he was excited. He actually had a chance to direct his first film this year.”