Diane Ladd is deep into meetings on "The Last of the Bad Girls" — her first attempt at writing a New York stage musical, which is rapidly gaining momentum.

"It's good. It's really good," says the Mississippi-born actress/director/writer who is anything but shy. "I'm not stupid — I've got a young sexy girl lead and a young sexy boy lead. But the stars of the show are Lainie Kazan, Connie Stevens, Renee Taylor, and Diane Ladd."

The show has already gotten positive feedback in workshop form from the likes of Rex Reed, she lets us know. "They put it on at The Actors Studio and people said, 'Good God Almighty, Diane Ladd. You have the next "Producers."'"

She's not naming her musical collaborator at this time, because their contract is being worked out, she says. However, "She's just brilliant. I wrote four of the songs with her. This was first a play, then a play with music, and now it's a full-out musical. I worked on it like a dirty rotten dog, and it's ready to be tried out!"

"The Last of the Bad Girls" is one of several projects Ladd is pushing through in this particularly prolific period for her. Those include books, and her long-long-long in the works Martha Mitchell movie.

"I've waited 33 years to get it going," she says. "Richard Attenborough took me to lunch one time and told me it took him 37 years to get 'Gandhi' made, so I guess I'm on schedule. Warren Beatty said it took him 12 years to get 'Bonnie & Clyde' made — and that's a picture that had everything they wanted: sex, killing and romance."

Ladd recalls that in 2001, she had all the pieces in place for her project about the wife of Nixon-era Attorney General John Mitchell — a woman considered a kook, "the mouth from the South," for phoning reporters with her opinions and inside information on matters of national concern, including the Watergate scandal. Martha Mitchell has inspired characters in movies and series ("24") before, but never been the subject of her own biopic.

Ladd says that she and her husband were in New York, and they celebrated at Essex House, a favorite haunt of her cousin, Tennessee Williams. "We cried and sobbed, had a bucket of champagne — I had the money to do my movie! And the next day, the towers were bombed. Our investors were Taco Bell and Pizza Hut, and they left." And she found herself starting the long climb to get financing over again.

THE BIG SCREEN SCENE: With his Navy SEAL movie, "Lone Survivor," now set for a September start in New Mexico, Peter Berg is heavy into preproduction on the Emile Hirsch-Mark Wahlberg-Taylor Kitsch-Ben Foster starrer. Being cast now are little boys, 10-12 years old, all ethnicities, who appear to be of Afghan descent. This is the film based on the ill-fated real-life "Operation Red Wing" — in which four SEALS were sent to kill the Taliban's Admad Shad, and only one made it out alive. You may recall that when "Friday Night Lights" creator Berg agreed to make the big-budget "Battleship," Universal promised to let him make his passion project about the SEALS as well. He is so passionate, he got himself embedded with a SEAL team in Iraq for a month before writing the script.

After all those decades of maligning big "bad" wolves, it sounds like Disney's getting all PC with its planned untitled wolf adventure movie. The plot has to do with four young friends who sneak behind their parents' backs and embark on a journey involving a mysterious wolf.

It's getting closer ... Subsidiary roles are being cast for "Hangover III."

To find out more about Stacy Jenel Smith and read her past columns, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.