LITTLE ROCK — The Walt Disney Co. on Friday night confirmed reports that had been circulating for two days that J.J. Abrams, Emmy award-winning creator of TV’s Lost and directorof 2009’s Star Trek movie, has been pegged to direct the seventh installment of the Star Wars franchise. “J.J. is the perfect director to helm this,” said Kathleen Kennedy, the movie’s producer and president of Lucasfilm, which was acquired by Disney last month for $4.06 billion. “Beyond having such great instincts as a filmmaker, he has an intuitive understanding of this franchise. He understands the essence of the Star Wars experience,” Kennedy said in a statement issued Friday night. The movie will have a script from Toy Story 3 writer Michael Arndt and a 2015 release. Lawrence Kasdan, who co-wrote The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi in the original trilogy, will work as a consultant on the new project. Abrams has already headed the reboot of another storied space franchise, Star Trek, for rival studio Paramount Pictures. The next installment in that series, Star Trek into Darkness, is set to hit theaters May 17.

Ashton Kutcher says playing Steve Jobs on screen“was honestly one of the most terrifying things I’ve ever tried to do in my life.” The 34-year-old actor helped premierethe biopic jOBS on Friday. It was the closing-night film at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Kutcher plays the Apple Inc. founder from the company’s humble origins in the 1970s until the launch of the first iPod in 2001. A digital entrepreneur himself, Kutcher said, he considers Jobs a personal hero. Kutcher even embodied the Jobs character as he pursued his own high-tech interests off-screen. “What was nice was when I was preparing for the character, I could still work on product development for technology companies, and I would sort of stay in character, in the mode of the character,” he said. “But I didn’t feel like I was compromising the work on the film by working on technology stuff, because it was pretty much in the same field.” But playing the real-life tech icon who died in 2011 still felt risky, he said, because “he’s fresh in our minds.”

Front Section, Pages 2 on 01/27/2013