The Insider

IT’S CURTAINS FOR MACAULAY CULKIN

It has always been fashionable for actors who have made it big in Hollywood to talk about how they yearn to return to their first love, the theater. Well, 11-year-old Macaulay Culkin may not have reached the yearning stage yet, but sources say his agents at ICM, along with his father, Kit Culkin, are in negotiations for the boy to star in an off-Broadway play, Sam I Am, by actor-playwright Keith Reddin.

We’re told that if the deal works out, Culkin will appear in the dark comedy about a child whose parents are having problems, for a limited run starting in April—after he finishes his starring assignment in Twentieth Century Fox’s eagerly anticipated Home Alone II. Although Mac’s getting a reported $4.5 million for the Home Alone sequel, chances are he won’t be making much more than the Equity minimum of $362 a week for the play.

Incidentally, this won’t be young Culkin’s stage debut; that happened at age 4, when he began appearing in off-Broadway productions.

HARK, A LARK? NOPE, IT’S KEVIN COSTNER

Another film star who may be headed for the stage is Kevin Costner—and in a musical, no less.

The way we hear it, Costner is working with composer-producer Richard Baskin to develop a musical with a South American theme. The plan, says a source, is that the project, based on a play, “would be done first theatrically and then later as a movie.”

Baskin, a friend and former beau of Barbra Streisand and also an heir to the Bas-kin-Robbins ice-cream fortune, confirms only that he is developing “a non-conventional musical” with Costner’s Hollywood-based company, Tig Productions. “But it is so premature,” says Baskin, “that I have no idea at this point whether Kevin will act in it. We haven’t even hired a writer yet.”

But can Costner sing? No one’s saying, so we’ll just have to wait to find out.

YOUNG LOVE

Actress Lala (Pump Up the Volume) Sloatman, 21, and actor Balthazar (Lord of the Flies) Getty, 16—she’s cousin to Dweezil and Moon Zappa; he’s the great-grandson of J. Paul Getty—have moved in together in Los Angeles but as yet have no plans to marry. “Give him a chance,” says a source close to Getty. “After all, hew only 16.”

MADONNA GIVES ICE ADVICE

Madonna has been telling Vanilla Ice what to do. As she recently told TV Guide, referring to the rapper, “I always like to befriend the underdogs because I know what it’s like to be judged unfairly.”

A source close to Ice characterizes that friendship as “a business friendship,” adding, “Madonna has indeed taken up his cause and now advises him in career matters.”

Madonna‘s spokesperson confirms that Miss Truth or Dare has counseled Ice on his career but would say only, “Madonna told him to get rid of his hat and sunglasses.”