UPDATED: Rumor control--Is Iron Man 2's Downey a real hero? What's Stan Lee's cameo?

[Updated: Paramount confirmed that the story about Iron Man 2 star Robert Downey Jr. is absolutely not true.]

The Web rumor mill centers on Iron Man 2 today, with reports of star Robert Downey Jr.'s reported real-life heroism and comic legend Stan Lee's rumored cameo role. (Spoilers ahead!)

First, the Irish IOL Entertainment site reports that Downey rescued an injured extra during the shooting of a scene:

The 44-year-old actor halted shooting on Iron Man 2 and rushed to help the man, who had been injured during a scene. A source said: "Robert charged into a live scene yelling, Cut! Cut! The extra was writhing on the ground in agony after a rampaging evil robot smashed him flat". The extra had been involved in a sequence which saw a group of people running away from a group of robotic villains. ... Robert called for paramedics and comforted the man until they arrived. The injured extra was taken to hospital, where he was diagnosed with a broken hip.

Now we're big fans of Downey and believe this is just the kind of thing he would do, but given our experience with U.K. Web sites reporting all kinds of outlandish things, not to mention its dubious anonymous "sourcing," we kind of knew this was bogus.
In the meantime, our pals at Collider.com report a rumor about the cameo casting of Marvel Comics legend Stan Lee. Fans know he's had a walk-on in virtually all Marvel-themed movies. Here's what an anonymous source told Collider:

"Since I hadn't read this news anywhere, I wanted to let you know Stan Lee filmed his cameo for Iron Man 2. I was told Stan filmed earlier this week, and he was dressed as Larry King. The scene has Stan asking Tony Stark when he's going to be on his show."
Iron Man 2 is still in production with an eye to a May 7, 2010, release.

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How weird is True Blood going to get this season? A preview

Think True Blood is getting weird with that teenage vampire "intern" or the underground cells? It's only going to get weirder, according to Carrie Preston, who plays Arlene Fowler on the show. Explicit violence and nudity are nothing compared to what's in store for season two.

"It gets more bizarre," Preston said in an exclusive interview last week in Burbank, Calif., where she represented the show for its Saturn Award nomination (it didn't win). "Like, truly dark and bizarre. It was pretty explicit last year, but I guess they have to go somewhere from last season."

So far in the first two episodes of the season, Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin) is trying to make peace with Bill's (Stephen Moyer) commitment to the new vamplette, and Jason (Ryan Kwanten) is trying religious abstinence camp. Preston told fans to expect even bigger surprises.

"Oh, my gosh, you're going to see characters do things that you would never expect them to do," she said. "You're going to see them do things they would never expect themselves to do. It goes to a pretty crazy place."

As for Arlene's crazy character shifts, "You'll just have to wait and see. Let's just say there are some things that are beyond her control."

True Blood debuted last year and became HBO's newest hit. Based on the novels by Charlaine Harris, the series began with the conflict of a telepathic girl trying to date a vampire in a world where synthetic blood permits "safe" interactions between vampires and humans. After developing all its supporting characters and story arcs, Preston said that work on season two has felt as though it is on a surer footing.
"It's just much more exciting," Preston said. "There's a relaxed feeling. We all know that we're kind of in it now, and people are liking what we're doing, so we can feel free to keep doing what we're doing, because apparently it's working."

Evan Rachel Wood joins the cast at the end of the season as the lesbian vampire queen of Louisiana. Arlene will not get to encounter Wood just yet. "Mm-mm, I don't have any scenes with her, so I haven't met her, but she's shooting right now. We're shooting the final episode right now."

True Blood airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on HBO

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X-Men writer Zak Penn breaks his silence about adapting The Avengers

Screenwriter Zak Penn is already scratching his head about how to piece together and overlap stories from three, maybe four or more movies as he sits down to write The Avengers this summer, based on the Marvel Comics superheroes.

Penn was on a panel Tuesday night called "Graphic Explosion" at the Los Angeles Film Festival in the Westwood Village area of Los Angeles, along with History of Violence screenwriter Josh Olson and Radical Publishing co-founder Barry Levine. During the question-and-answer segment, Penn answered some questions he said "I might get in trouble for."

Penn said he ran into frustration while writing the last two X-Men movies because he wanted to include a few of the other characters—the Fantastic Four, for instance—but was prevented by studio executives. That, perhaps, led to the ho-hum response to his Incredible Hulk movie.

But Penn is aware that Marvel movies coming up—with Iron Man, Thor and Captain America—will precede his Avengers film (slated for 2012), so he has to figure out how all the movies fit together. Now that Marvel is itself producing movies as a company, Penn said, "It is a world of difference; it is a lot easier to do things like that, and they encourage it."

Penn said he is meeting this coming week with the team writing the other movies so they can piece together storylines and overlap some of the film plots.

"They're doing Captain American and Thor first, and then Avengers is coming out," Penn said. "They want to see that they're all connected, not like the Fantastic Four can't come into the X-Men world, like I was told. I'm taking a meeting next week with the Thor and Captain America people, and we are all going to get together, and I will see what is going to happen. I'll see where they are leaving the characters; it's pretty complicated. ... There's a board that is tracking what is happening. [We'll see] how this movie overlaps in that movie. ... Marvel is autonomous now. It is night and day:

Everyone has read every comic. They know how to make a cool movie."
And although Penn holds the responsibility for bringing all the characters of the other films together, he remains insecure. "It's hard to make a good movie," he said. "We all have the best intentions, and it still might suck."

sci-fi wire...

Why Shyamalan let us on the Airbender set, what we saw and why it's special

After the less-than-stellar critical and box-office reception for his last two films, Lady in the Water and The Happening, director M. Night Shyamalan might have been expected to crawl into a hole somewhere dark and secluded, where he could ruminate over what went wrong.

Well, we're here to tell you he's holed up somewhere dark and secluded all right, but there's not an ounce of self-flagellation. Matter of fact, in the bowels of several massive complexes in the suburbs of Philadelphia, Shyamalan has gone in a direction that would surprise most: The man's gone epic in his new movie, The Last Airbender.
On June 16, SCI FI Wire was among a small group of reporters invited to visit the top-secret set of Night's upcoming live-action adaptation of the popular Nickelodeon animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender (the movie loses the "Avatar" to avoid confusion with James Cameron's own upcoming sci-fi epic).

This is no small thing: It's the first time that Night has let the press set foot on one of his locations or soundstages. On his previous films, lockdown was the name of the game.

So on this day it's something special for Night to give our small group carte blanche to observe the shooting of a pivotal character reveal, get a guided tour of the film's massive sets and even chat with him and much of his cast. The new openness is probably a response to the very public hits he's taken, but it's also part of Night's choice to stretch himself to outrageous new heights with some of what may be his savviest creative decisions in some time.

The movie marks a lot of firsts for Shyamalan. The Last Airbender is the first film he hasn't created strictly out of his own head; rather, it's based on the work of Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko, who created Nick's series. It's the first film he's shooting on extensive green-screen stages. And it's the first film for which he left Philadelphia to shoot some scenes (more on this later).

Fans of this engaging animated series will know that the story centers on a fantastical world that is separated into peaceful nations that represent the four elements: Air, Water, Earth and Fire. That tranquility is shattered when the Fire Nation wages a campaign of destruction against the other three nations with the intention of ruling them with an iron fist.

Over the course of a century, the world is nearly shattered by relentless battles until the only hope for peace appears in the form of Aang (Noah Ringer), a bald little boy with some serious kung-fu skills. An Airbender from the Air Nation, Aang discovers that he is the legendary Avatar, the lone human who can harness the powers of each element to restore balance to the ravaged world. Together with Katara (Nicola Peltz), his Waterbender best friend, and her headstrong brother, Sokka (Jackson Rathbone), Aang reluctantly goes on the journey to fulfill his destiny of restoring the world through his remarkable gift of "bending" the elements to his will.

Cast with relative unknowns or up-and-coming performers such as Slumdog Millionaire's Dev Patel as Fire Nation bad boy Prince Zuko, The Last Airbender is nothing less than Night's opportunity to create his own mythic cinematic series, his own Star Wars for this millennium. And the structure is already set up for him, since the animated series is conveniently broken up into books based on each element. The film series will follow suit, with the first film adapting Book 1: Water and subsequent sequels focusing on the next elements. And from the looks of the first film location we're taken to, this is not a franchise that is being created on the cheap.

In the heart of an old, decaying automotive factory about 10 miles outside of Philly, Night's army of 600 craftsman, techies and designers have filled every corner of a massive warehouse with detailed sets that are dizzying in their sheer number, scale and attention to detail. Gone are Night's trademark claustrophobic spaces and intimate environments, traded for the gigantic bow of a Fire Nation warship that serves as a staging area for our group.

Across the way, there's a monastery set with columns of intricate bronze prayer wheels sitting idle in the dark. And along the walls behind everything hang green-screen curtains that will be replaced with computerized set extensions and visual effects for each and every scene.

Before we are allowed to wander the space, producer Frank Marshall references the drapes and says, "We are creating a completely fantastical, make-believe world. A couple of firsts on this film for Night: One is shooting all this green screen. He's never really done much of that before ... at all. And we went out of Philadelphia for the first time. We went and shot in Greenland for three weeks. It's really the first time he's shot on location, and that's another reason Kathy [Kennedy] and I were called [to produce,] because we have a lot of location experience with these big kinds of movies. He's expanding his talent and range, and that's what I find exciting about it. He's taking his filmmaking style and applying it to this fantasy world, which he hasn't done before."

We walk a few yards away from the mouth of a white "ice" cave, carved from foam and plastic and covered in a blanket of faux snow. Its steps lead into the mouth of a darkened bluish-gray cave that twists along for 40 feet before the path opens up into a glorious chamber that looks as if it was plucked from the canvas of a beautiful Asian landscape painting. High walls rise to create a cocooned oasis of (now dry) koi ponds, with green moss banks that lead to the stunning focal point: a towering, twisted-limbed, resplendently blooming cherry tree filled with blossoms. Even with the set not fully dressed for filming, the tree is a breathtaking vision, with 3,500 hand-placed tiny pink blossoms. It's called the Spiritual Place, where Aang will meet the Moon Spirit, and it elicits authentic goosebumps for what this place will look like once captured on film.

Eventually we come to the live set of the Northern Air Temple, where Night breaks away from his star Ringer, the delightfully enthusiastic anchor of this whole film. It's a relatively relaxed Night who ambles up to take stock of what he's creating around us. With about two weeks left of principal photography, Night admits he's coming out on the other side of a humbling process.

"It's been such a great growing experience for me as a director and a human being, because I am a complete control freak," Shyamalan says with a grin. "You know, I feel like a little bit of pain when I look at a frame and it's not right and I have to correct it. This has taught me there are just so many factors going on; it's doing two and a half times a [normal] movie of mine, so it made me go back a little bit and become a student. Any time you can become a student again, that's the way to do it. You learn again, and you are open about everything. I felt like I've become a much better filmmaker, because I have had to go through this process where it's just not possible for me to do that for 400 extras with the action going on. It's overwhelming. I am scared to death."

Shyamalan laughs with sincerity. "There are two and a half weeks left of not being as scared to death, but there were plenty of days where I was scared to death of what I'm doing," he admits.

One can only imagine what Night looked like a few weeks ago in the snows of Greenland or on the first day he shot on the biggest set ever created for a movie on the East Coast (which is inside an old airplane hangar about 15 miles away). But today he's got that famed Night confidence on full display, enthusiastic about how it's coming together.

"It's so original, which has always been my hope: that it's not like anything else," Shyamalan explains about his vision for Airbender. "It's not really Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter or The Matrix or Pirates of the Caribbean. But there is a little bit of this and that, with me smothered all over it. There is pathos in it, yet it's really fun. You pray that it will find its own personality and will be its own self and the world will appreciate it for that."The Last Airbender opens July 2, 2010.

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Why Johnny Depp worried about being fired from Alice in Wonderland

Johnny Depp made a dramatic switch to play the Mad Hatter in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland after starring in this summer's historical crime drama Public Enemies, in which he played real-life gangster John Dillinger.

"The Hatter was awfully fun," Depp said in a news conference on Monday in Beverly Hills, Calif. "After doing something like John Dillinger, a performance where it's somewhat restrained because of the responsibility you have to that guy and his memory, that Mad Hatter was like being fired out of a cannon. The Hatter was great fun, and, again, it's one of those things that you're just amazed you weren't fired. I truly am."

Depp plays the Mad Hatter in Burton's vision of the Lewis Carroll tale. Combining practical costumes, motion capture and 3-D computer animation, Burton is adding new levels to an aesthetic that already bears his name, "Burton-esque." USA Today published photos of the characters, including Depp's Hatter.

With orange frizzy curls, pasty porcelain makeup, a frilly black top hat and goth-y circus touches, the Hatter looks exactly as Depp said he intended. "All I've seen, I've just seen the little bits and pieces of it, but, yeah, what I ended up looking like is how I thought he was going to look, how I thought he should look, which was one of the first reasons why I'm surprised I didn't get fired," Depp said.

It's not the first time Depp expressed surprise at keeping a job: He also thought he'd be fired from the first Pirates of the Caribbean film because of studio disagreements with his portrayal of Jack Sparrow.

Alice in Wonderland is due in theaters March 5, 2010. The film also stars Anne Hathaway, Helena Bonham Carter, Alan Rickman and newcomer Mia Wasikowska as Alice.

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Is there no future for the Terminator film franchise? Christian Bale speaks

Is the Terminator film franchise terminated? Star Christian Bale had something to say about it today.

While doing press a while back for Terminator Salvation, director McG and his screenwriters Michael Ferris and John Brancato kept teasing that they had ideas for two more sequels to make a new trilogy. Of course, they would never presume to discuss specific plotlines before the audience gave them the thumbs-up that they wanted more.

Then Salvation opened to a lukewarm reception and saw its box office plummet in its second week. The expected announcements of Terminators 5 and 6 have not come. Yet.

Now Bale, who played a grown-up John Connor, confirmed that there has been no development on his end for a fifth Terminator."We've had no talks about it or discussions about it," Bale said at a press conference in Beverly Hills, Calif., today to promote Public Enemies. Perhaps McG did not get the pat on the back he was hoping for from the audience?

Still, this is the kind of franchise that signs actors for multiple films, especially A-list actors in starring roles such as John Connor. Bale indicated that his involvement was not contractually guaranteed. "It all purely depends upon script," Bale said.

Terminator Salvation took place in 2018, when Connor takes the lead in the human resistance while trying to come to terms with a new kind of cyborg who believes he is human. The film's epilogue suggests that Connor will continue to lead the resistance in other parts of the world after destroying Skynet's San Francisco headquarters.

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What Johnny Depp thinks was wrong with earlier Pirates movies and what could be in 4

When Disney announced it was full steam ahead on a fourth Pirates of the Caribbean film, the biggest asset was Johnny Depp, returning as Captain Jack Sparrow. Director Gore Verbinski has said he would pass on the fourth film, and the screenplay and its writers are still up in the air. But that apparently doesn't matter, though, because all fans want is more Jack.

Depp—speaking in a press conference in Beverly Hills, Calif., where he was promoting Public Enemies—acknowledged that the previous sequels may have gone overboard with overly complicated stories and plots. "Not that I've seen the movies, but I hear tell," Depp said.

In response to that, Depp says there's no such thing as perfect cinema, but he considers another sequel just another chance at bat. "Call me a glutton," he joked. While he'd like the screenplay to be right, he feels Pirates 4 could be just about anything at this point.

"I'm trying to turn it into a Beckett play," Depp said, adding that perhaps Captain Jack could show up in a geisha costume. He's joking. We think.

The first movie, Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl, was based on the classic Disneyland theme park attraction. It introduced the character of Sparrow, a bumbling pirate whom Depp based in part on rocker Keith Richards. The massive success of the film led to back-to-back sequels, Dead Man's Chest and At World's End. The chance to see more Jack brought in the audience, despite complaints about the overly complicated storylines.

Now Depp says filmmakers are free to explore a lot of possible storylines, unhindered by the pesky need to tie up plot points. Pirates of the Caribbean 4 is in development with Jerry Bruckheimer films, aiming for a 2012 release.

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