Harry Potter

Monday, Jul 24, 2000 11:00 PDT

Is Mike Myers the next Streisand?

"Dieter's" mother-in-law says she'd "like to kill" the comedian and "slap" Ron Howard; Gene Simmons: Get ready for the Kiss casino, theme park, movie, book and miniseries! Plus: Bo Derek on America's problem with nudity.

By Amy Reiter

The revolutionary war that's broken out over "Dieter" is neither revolutionary, nor a war. Discuss.

Actually, it turns out Linda Richman herself (Mike Myers' mother-in-law and the inspiration for his "Coffee Talk" character) is not too verklempt to discuss the strife surrounding her son-in-law's aborted film project.

Richman tells Entertainment Weekly she'd "like to kill" Myers for passing up his $20 million payday just because he thought the script wasn't up to snuff. What's more, she says, she's starting to wonder if he might not be a little more "meshugge" (i.e., crazy) than she thought.

But the mother-in-law apparently has two faces. Richman also has a few choice words for Ron Howard, one of the producers who's suing Myers. In fact, she says, she'd like "to slap Opie" for labeling her son-in-law "difficult."

Not that she thinks the man who married her daughter and made her a household name should sweat the label.

"They called Streisand difficult, too," she says, "and that's good company to keep."

Oh. Now I'm feeling verklempt.

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And we thought it was just us

"I was going crazy with the boringness."

-- Former "Big Brother" contestant William Collins, upon finding out he'd been voted out of the house.

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The blood spitter

Get ready for sanguinary spray on the big screen. Kiss, the movie, may be coming your way.

Kiss frontman Gene Simmons has been chatting with filmmakers Brad Silberling, Barry Isaacson and Gary Levinson about bringing his life story to the screen once the band's final concert tour wraps.

"It's a modern 'Jazz Singer,'" Simmons tells the Nando Times. He's currently at work on an autobiography tracing his journey from a Hassidic community in Haifa, Israel, to the fire-breathing rock star we know and love, and is thinking of subtitling the book "I Don't Have Time for Whiners."

"When you really think about it, everything you and I do in entertainment is trying to sell ice cubes to Eskimos -- we're not doing essential jobs. The fact that I'm being paid hideous amounts of money to do what I do thrills me. And I don't want to hear anyone in rock complaining about the hardships of fame," Simmons says. "Here's the answer, pal: Move to Nome, Alaska, and nobody will care."

Simmons says, "At the end of every tour, I go, 'Wow, I just made $25 million bucks! That's great! God bless America!'"

And tour or no tour, he's not about to stop fingering his green stuff now. In addition to the book and the flick, he's considering starting a Las Vegas Kiss casino and Psycho Circus theme park -- and creating a TV miniseries.

"The Kiss animal, this thing that we created, refuses to die," Simmons recently told the Edmonton Sun. "So even though the touring band will cease to be, Kiss in other forms will continue. We're going to stop crawling on our bellies on the ground as caterpillars and take to the air as butterflies."

Why, that's almost as beautiful as "Beth."

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Look, just because they had a lesbian kiss ...

"There will be no all-nude episode of 'Ally.'"

-- "Ally McBeal" creator David E. Kelley, dispelling a rumor we hadn't heard.

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Juicy bits

The naked truth about Americans, as Bo Derek sees it, is that we have "a big problem with nudity." If she had her way, we'd all strip down and lighten up. "I always marvel at how really uptight [American] people are," the actress tells the London Daily Mail. "You can have these really heavy-duty sex scenes with half-clothed actors doing really vulgar things on a kitchen table or in a bathroom or on an airplane, but take your clothes off and suddenly it's a big problem. It's a funny, prudish side we have. And it is so silly." Easy for a Ms. Perfect 10 to say ...

Forget all that crud about blonds having more fun -- Winona Ryder has. The actress has revealed to Harper's Bazaar magazine that she's a natural blond, who's been darkening her tresses for years. "I started dyeing my hair when I was 11 or 12," she says. Brunet forever?

Wanted: an actress to take over the role Courtney Love was going to play in "John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars." According to Variety, the Hole singer/actress has sprained her ankle while working out for the role as a police lieutenant opposite Ice Cube and won't have time to heal before the cameras roll on Aug. 8.

Rumors that Hollywood's handing Harry Potter his U.S. passport refuse to die. The U.K. film site Popcorn reports that, after rejecting 300 British hopefuls, Chris Columbus has cast Liam Aiken, the 10-year-old from New Jersey who starred with Susan Sarandon and Julia Roberts in Columbus' "Stepmom." Popcorn's sources say Columbus may sneak Aiken past Potter scribe J.K. Rowling, who has vowed to keep Harry British, on a technicality: Aiken's mom is a Brit. Now, now ... it's not polite to call him a Mudblood.

"Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon"? Hell, if the actor got around in his randy younger days half as much as he claims to, we may all be a few steps closer to him than we realized. "Anybody can [have sex] when they're famous," Bacon boasts to Maxim. "I [had sex] a lot when I was not famous, and that was something I was very proud of back then. Being a bleeping waiter with no money, not a lot of drugs, just a mattress on the floor -- and still being able to pull chicks. That's when you separate the men from the boys." But only by a few degrees.