Quick Cuts

“I just want to take this moment to say to Dennis [Hopper] that if I’ve said anything to hurt you in the past, I’m sorry.”

--PETER FONDA

“Well, I’ll accept, because it’s Yom Kippur. But normally I don’t share a stage with someone who’s called me a fascist punk.”

--DENNIS HOPPER

During a panel discussion at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences after the 30th anniversary screening of “Easy Rider” on Sept. 17.

Buzz

The hottest video-screener circulating town right now isn’t even of a full-length feature film: It’s a promotional reel for Lions Gate Films’ “American Psycho,” Canadian director Mary Harron’s film adaptation of the Bret Easton Ellis novel of the same name. People who’ve seen the seven-minute preview say actor Christian Bale, right, is almost unrecognizable as the upper-crust, charming and completely psychotic serial killer Patrick Bateman, and they describe his performance as disturbingly convincing. The project has been a magnet for controversy from its inception. Bale was Harron’s first choice for the lead role, but when Leonardo DiCaprio expressed interest in the part two years ago at Cannes, Bale and then Harron were unceremoniously dumped. When DiCaprio decided to star instead in Danny Boyle’s “The Beach” (which 20th Century Fox now plans to release in early 2000), Harron and Bale returned. Then, during shooting earlier this year in Toronto, the production was protested by victims’ advocacy groups who are also planning a boycott for the April 2000 release. The video making the rounds is a copy of the promotional reel for potential foreign buyers at this year’s film market at the Cannes International Film Festival. The official movie trailer will hit theaters in November. Oh, and just to avoid typecasting, Bale will next be seen as Jesus in the NBC miniseries “Mary and Jesus,” which is scheduled to air in November.

Scarlet Letters

The Motion Picture Assn. of America has upheld the R rating for Paramount Pictures’ upcoming “Angela’s Ashes.” The studio, which issued a “no comment,” had appealed the rating, most likely in the hopes of getting a more marketable PG-13 for the Christmas release, but the MPAA is standing by its original decision. No word yet on whether Paramount will ask director Alan Parker to make any cuts to the film. The R rating is “for sexual content and some language.” . . . In other alphabet news, a reedited version of Fox Searchlight’s well-received Toronto and Venice festival entry “Boys Don’t Cry” (which is based on a real-life story about a particularly brutal hate crime), has received an R rating from the MPAA. The first cut submitted was handed an NC-17 because of “an intense depiction of a rape and a sex scene.” The new, more commercially viable (and, interestingly, more descriptive) rating is for “violence including an intense brutal rape scene, sexuality, language and drug use.”