‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ tops weekend box office

Los Angeles — Bloodshed continues to rule at theaters.

“The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” the remake of the 1974 horror tale that helped launch the modern slasher genre, opened as the top weekend movie with $29.1 million, according to studio estimates Sunday.

Quentin Tarantino’s bloody vengeance saga “Kill Bill — Vol. 1,” the previous weekend’s No. 1 movie, slipped to second place with $12.5 million.

Here are other estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at North American theaters, according to Exhibitor Relations Co. Inc.

3. “Runaway Jury,” $12.1 million.

4. “The School of Rock,” $11.3 million.

5. “Mystic River,” $10.36 million

6. “Good Boy!”, $9 million.

7. “Intolerable Cruelty,” $6.9 million.

8. “Out of Time,” $4.1 million.

9. “Under the Tuscan Sun,” $3.4 million.

10. “The Rundown,” $2.8 million.

King delays teaching plans

Lewiston, Maine — Best-selling writer Stephen King has backed out of a plan to teach writing to middle school students over the Internet, at least for now.

King said last November that he would like to teach an interactive class for Maine seventh- and eighth-graders as part of a program that puts a laptop into the hands of all 36,000 public middle school students.

But the master of the horror story is too busy to teach for another year or more, said his personal assistant, Marsha DeFilippo.

King is currently in the middle of final production for “Stephen King’s Kingdom Hospital,” a 15-hour TV drama series that will premiere on ABC in February. He also is writing a monthly column for Entertainment Weekly and is editing his final book in the Dark Tower series.

Tony Sprague, director of the laptop program, said King’s writing class was “still in the planning process.”

Wedding bells for Ken Burns

New York — Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns has married his girlfriend, Julie Deborah Brown, the founder of a nonprofit organization, Room to Grow, in a civil ceremony in New Hampshire.

The couple were married by a justice of the peace Saturday at their Walpole, N.H., home.

Burns, 50, has produced and directed hit documentaries covering a wide variety of topics, including “The Civil War” in 1990, “Baseball” in 1994 and “Jazz” in 2001.

Copyright violation alleged

Miami — Enrique Iglesias and his producer have been accused of stealing a songwriter’s copyrighted composition for the title track for the 2001 album “Escape.”

Henry Lorenzo Haynes claimed in a federal lawsuit filed last week that Iglesias’ producer Steve Morales recruited him for compositions in early 2001 and accepted a song titled “Remind Me” in the middle of the year. Haynes claims that song turned up, without any credit to him, on the album.

“Even an ordinary observer can hear the exact copy” in the English and Spanish versions of the song, the lawsuit said. “The misappropriation is severe.”