So What's Michael Douglas' Career Up to These Days?

I’m not entirely sure what Michael Douglas is up to with his most recent career decision to star in Solitary Man, a picture from Millennium Films. It’s about the former owner of a car dealership whose libido destroyed his career and marriage, which sounds like a similar premise to both Basic Instinct and Fatal Attraction—movies he made when he wasn’t 64. I hope that the script has more sensibility than to try and push a May-December romance on a public that is crude and callous enough to make jokes about a presidential nominee and the 18-year age difference between him and his second wife. A dialogue about male sexuality and how testosterone overload can poison the mind? That’s an interesting subject for a movie.

Meanwhile, Ocean’s 11 and Traffic director Steven Soderbergh was indirectly quoted by Variety writer Michael Fleming as saying that Douglas would also be starring in a biography about flamboyantly and famously closeted gay pianist/entertainer Liberace that the director is developing for Warner Bros. Fleming also wrote that the director has been talking to Matt Damon about playing Scott Thorson, Liberace’s younger secret lover who sued him for over $100 million in palimony (and eventually settled for $95,000). However, “sources” have also said that it’s not going to be Soderbergh’s next project, or even the one after that. I just gotta know, whatever happened to good old-fashioned primary sources and direct quotes in movie journalism, huh?