Cameron Diaz: Straight to Cable

By Stephen M. Silverman

08/28/1998 at 12:00 AM EDT

In an unusual move for a star of her magnitude, Cameron Diaz is seeing her latest movie, MGM's "Things You Can Tell Just By Looking at Her," go straight to cable TV, reports Variety. The film -- which also stars Calista Flockhart, Glenn Close and Holly Hunter in a series of five feminist vignettes with overlapping characters -- was slated to be released theatrically next month. It is now expected to air on Showtime sometime in early 2001. The film was politely received at Sundance and the Cannes Film Festival. Flockhart even talked about her lesbian kiss in the film on Conan O'Brien's show Thursday night. Yet the studio fears that such an intimate piece would become lost among this summer's blockbusters, says Variety, which notes that it now requires $20 million to advertise and market feature movies, a gamble MGM obviously wasn't willing to take.