Photos by Ken Ige, Star-Bulletin
"Waterworld," starrring Kevin Costner and Jeanne Tripplehorn,
was filmed in Hawaii in 1994. Filming for five major movies
in the isles is planned in the next several months.

---

Hollywood film crews
will be busy in Hawaii

Five major movies
will be filmed, at least partly,
on Hawaiian islands

By Tim Ryan
Star-Bulletin

Harrison Ford and Anne Heche will be spending six weeks on Kauai this summer filming "Six Days/Seven Nights," a romantic comedy about a woman who proposes to her boyfriend while they're stuck on a tropical island.

The production, directed by Ivan Reitman, also will require six weeks of building sets on the Garden Isle. Filming is expected to begin in July.

Heche recently made news when she and Ellen DeGeneres made public their lesbian relationship. Her latest movie is "Volcano," and she also co-starred in "Donnie Brasco." Ford is known for numerous starring roles, from Han Solo in the "Star Wars" trilogy to his latest film, "The Devil's Own," co-starring Brad Pitt.

As for the new movie's plot, when Harrison's character refuses to marry her, the woman persuades him to fly her home.

But the plane crashes on an island in the South Seas, and they're forced to tolerate each other until help arrives.

Shooting also will take place in Los Angeles and New York.

Michael Browning, Babaloo Mandel and Lowell Ganz wrote the script. The film will be released next year.

Meanwhile, Warner Bros. will film "Sphere," a 1987 novel by Michael Crichton, for five days off Oahu from May 19 to 24.

"Sphere," starring Samuel L. Jackson, Dustin Hoffman, Sharon Stone, Peter Coyote, Queen Latifah and Liev Shreiber, tells the story of a team of scientists sent to investigate the discovery of a spherical spaceship. The sphere, found under 1,000 feet of water in the Pacific Ocean, is carbon-dated to be more than 400 years old, but a computer on board says it was made in the United States in 2048. When the team emerges from the sphere, strange things begin to happen.

All of the filming for "Sphere" will be done aboard a ship offshore of Oahu at a site not yet determined, state film officials said. Most of "Sphere" will be filmed in Los Angeles. The scheduled release is at Christmas.

Crichton also wrote "Airframe," "The Lost World," "Disclosure," "Rising Sun," "Jurrasic Park," "Congo," "The Terminal Man" and "The Andromeda Strain."

Another major action-adventure film, Tristar Pictures' "Godzilla," starring Hank Azaria, Matthew Broderick and Jean Reno, begins filming on Oahu late this summer.

Azaria, who played a feature role in "The Birdcage," will play Animal, a cameraman who chronicles the monster's rampage through New York.

Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin, who wrote the screenplay for "Independence Day," also wrote the script for "Godzilla." The film, with a reported budget of around $90 million, is schedule for summer 1998 release.

(The makers of "Godzilla" got some unplanned special effects while filming yesterday in Jersey City, N.J., when a suspected tornado blew through the city, overturning trees and damaging buildings, among them the one where the crew was filming. The crew escaped with little more than a scare from broken windows, authorities said.)

Cast and crew for the Disney remake of the 1949 film "Mighty Joe Young" -- starring Charlie Theron, Bill Paxton, Regina King, David Paymer and Naveen Andrews -- will arrive later this week for the three-week shoot. A considerable amount of filming will be at Kualoa Ranch. "Joe" is scheduled for release on Memorial Day 1998.

Another Disney movie, "Krippendorf's Tribe," starring Richard Dreyfuss and Lily Tomlin, completed a week of filming on Oahu Friday. The film is about a hard-up professor who disguises his children as tribesmen, films them and sells the footage to earn cash.