T.S. Eliot said April is the cruellest month. Why he needed to spell it with two L’s, I do not know. Look it up if you don’t believe me.

Seems like everyone’s cutting corners. You’ll be seeing cheaper movies coming these days. Sure, the big-budget ones have been announced for the summer – the Wolverine, the Harry Potter, the Star Trek – but there are a whole lot of Fridays in 2009, and Hollywood wants to make sure that each one is chock full of goodness … or at least full of dollar-making opportunities. It’s the American Dream!

So studio heads have a plan to keep costs down. There are a few major areas of spending they’re trying to keep down in particular. The first is production design. To that end, there will be more movies shot on location.

But since they don’t want to just transfer funds that they were going to spend on building sets to moving vast amounts of people and equipment, they’ll not be venturing far to find these exotic locales. The end of this year will see movies set in West Covina, Oxnard, and Rancho Cucamonga. (Oh my goodness, I just wrote the word Oxnard. I feel like I’m talking about bovine testicles.)

In particular, there’s a science fiction tale coming from New Line about a 1950s scientist who travels forward to the year 2009. He lands in Rancho Cucamonga, discovering a world that is so alien to him, though it is very familiar to us.

From a monetary point of view, talk about a deal! You could get wardrobe for the scientist from your local thrift store and spend the rest of the time in present day, and it’s still sci-fi! How innovative. How avant-garde. Twenty bucks says it’ll stink like yesterday’s kitty litter.

Another place to cut costs is in special effects. Several big techmasters from Industrial Light and Magic, the foremost leader in special effects in the entertainment industry, were seen reading Ed Woods’ Making Saucers Fly.

Seems like, starting this fall, there will be some big superhero, science fiction, or fantasy flicks coming out, but there will be very few laser beams, explosions, or fire-breathing, 100-foot-tall, scaly, fully-rendered, CGI dragons. More likely, you’ll find stock-footage explosions, sound effects of laser beams followed by clever edits of burn marks, and dudes in medieval garb happening upon a fire-breathing, 100-foot-tall, metallic, real-life Robosaurus that has been rented for the day at a reasonable rate.

And finally, there’s the question of who will star in these movies. Sure, there may be the ones that volunteer to take a significant pay cut just so they can continue to practice their craft, but most everyone in Hollywood is too vain for that.

You might be able to sucker a few bimbos and mimbos by paying them in rubels or pesos instead of dollars. (Oh! My paycheck for my last picture was 20 million, but this one, I’m scoring 25 million! And with this bad economy, they must really want me!!)

For the most part, though, this will require ingenuity on the part of the executive producers that are afraid of losing their precious gravy trains. You can still get big – that is to say, recognizable – names without spending the millions it would take to get a Jessica Biel or a Tom Cruise.

First off, troll the list of child actors that have disappeared. Everybody wants to know what happened to Rudy from The Cosby Show. Yeah, she was a hooker in the latest Madea movie, but that wasn’t too far from where she wound up in real life. Trust me, I know. FYI, $200 can buy you a lot. Let’s just say I think we can talk her into doing a movie or two.

And there’s always having people play multiple roles. It works for Tyler Perry and his Madea films. In the last movie, of the 28 characters credited, he played 23 of them. Word has it from dbais.com that Al Pacino will be playing at least 17 roles in a film coming up this fall, including a priest, the boy he befriends in an inappropriate way, a circus clown, an elephant, an ichthyologist, and a baby being born.

Well, that’s all the intelligence I could gather from Hollywood, not that they could spare much, so I’ll just sign off for now. And this month, I’ll make no reference to Alyssa Milano!

Oh darn, I just did, didn’t I? Maybe next time.

Your friend, the Faux.