| HOLLYWOOD: Australian director Peter Weir (''The Truman
Show'') is in discussions with 20th Century Fox to shoot the first installment
of what the studio hopes could be a big franchise: the "Master and Commander''
series of high-seas adventure novels from late author Patrick O'Brian.
If the film works, the series really could go on and on; O'Brian wrote 20 novels, starting with "Master and Commander'' in 1969, set in the world of the Royal Navy amid the 19th century Napoleonic wars and featuring captain Jack Aubrey and physician, naturalist and spy Stephen Maturin. The books have a passionate cult following of the sort studios love -- a built-in base of devoted fans that makes a green light for a big-budget period film with lots of special effects a notch less mortifying. Weir, in Europe recently to attend a tribute to him at the Taormina Film Festival in Sicily, has been detouring to visit tall ships to get the feel of the genre. No script is in hand, but there's no doubt that the project could attract an admiral-rank writer. O'Brian's admirers include such luminaries as playwright Tom Stoppard, who won an Oscar for co-writing ``Shakespeare in Love,'' and director-writer David Mamet (''State and Main''), who wrote a recent paean to O'Brian in the New York Times. Mamet compared O'Brian to Mark Twain and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and celebrated the writer's gripping and unpretentious stories as an antidote to "putrid and despicable Graduate Degree sensitivity.'' O'Brian died in January at age 85. Weir was part of the group of young directors who brought Australian
cinema to world prominence in the 1970s. His early pictures include "Picnic
at Hanging Rock'' and "The Last Wave.'' In Hollywood, he's known for "Witness,''
"Dead Poets Society'' and "Fearless,'' among others, and he has picked
up four Oscar nominations.
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