More good stuff just keeps coming down the pipeline about David Arquette and wife Courteney Cox Arquette. The couple was in town for several weeks filming the Farrelly brothers (Me, Myself and Irene) comedy See Spot Run. David Arquette couldn't attend the wrap party because of another film commitment so he took the cast and crew out for a lavish seafood dinner at a North Vancouver restaurant and shook everyone's hand.

  While the exceptionally bright actor and all-round nice guy was hard at work, his wife was shopping until she dropped during her down time. Must be that cheap Canadian loonie. Courteney bought big bags full of hip shoe designer John Fluevog's latest creations and that's not all. She also spent $18,000 Cdn. on an oil-on-linen painting at Sergio Patrich's swank gallery to give to her husband for the birthday he celebrated here August 19. That's a whole lotta love.

  Speaking of love, remember the lovable death row inmate who just happened to be a 355-pound giant in The Green Mile? Oscar-nominated Michael Clarke Duncan has lost more than 50 pounds since shooting the prison flick. He plays an FBI agent in See Spot Run who can't get over the loss of his drug-sniffing dog. Duncan, who's still a big bruiser, broke his right ankle when he fell off his bike while riding around Vancouver's Stanley Park during a break from the shoot. He spent six weeks in a walking cast and on crutches but finished out the movie.

  Squeaky-clean Cheaters star Mary Tyler Moore may not appreciate the irony. The sign put up to help cast and crew find their way to the set of the teen comedy says Cheaters and points the way to a benign-looking elementary school in a Vancouver neighborhood. But not to worry. The little tykes were all on summer vacation. Martin Starr, Trevor Fehrman, Matthew Lawrence and Elden Henson co-star. Other actors working and playing hard in B.C. are Parker Posey and Rachael Leigh Cook in Josie and the Pussycats, Lena Olin and Bill Pullman in Ignition, Jeff Goldblum and Elizabeth Perkins in Like Cats and Dogs, Denise Richards and David Boreanaz in the thriller Valentine and Eric Roberts, Antonio Sabato, Jr. and Michael Ironside in Mindstorm.
- Valerie Gregory

t's been a summer of Hard Rain and Wild Geese and looks like a real Rat Race is being run in and around Calgary this fall. James Brolin, the star of Hard Rain, spent most of his days and nights filming in Millarville, Balzac, and Drumheller. When his wife, Barbra Streisand, slipped into Calgary the last weekend of production, rumor has it they took off to the resort at Emerald Lake. Brolin claimed it was so perfect there he couldn't believe it.

  Sam Shepard has also been in town, mainly on the old Lonesome Dove set, shooting Wild Geese, a story of love, tyranny, destruction and survival set in the Canadian prairies in the 1920s. Genie Award winner Jeremy Podeswa (The Five Senses) is directing Shepard and his co-stars Alberta Watson (The Sweet Hereafter), Nadia Litz (The Five Senses) and Liane Balaban (New Waterford Girl).

  For the comedy Rat Race, a take off on It's a Mad, Mad World, Cuba Gooding Jr. plays a lapsed NFL official. One of the flashback scenes was filmed at the Edmonton/Calgary football game on Labor Day.

  Two controversial movies that started filming in Calgary at the end of September are Anatomy, the Matthew Shepherd story, and Jet Boy, a Canadian film about a young male prostitute who goes searching for his father. Director Dave Schultz claims Jet Boy is a cross between My Own Private Idaho and Old Yeller.
- Karen Ashbee