‘Donnie Darko’ director returns

Four years after his debut feature “Donnie Darko” tanked in theaters, subsequently becoming a cult favorite on home video and cable TV, writer-director Richard Kelly’s next film, “Southland Tales,” is finally headed into production.

Described as a science-fiction thriller set in Los Angeles on July 4, 2008, the movie will star Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as an amnesiac action star, Seann William Scott (who starred with the Rock in “The Rundown”) as a Hermosa Beach cop and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s” Sarah Michelle Gellar as an “adult film star developing her own reality TV project.”

The movie is scheduled to start filming Aug. 1 in L.A.