Not so long ago, director Simon West was going round saying “We don’t want to ram a Hollywood star into this thing, because Lara is visually known”. ‘This thing’, for those of you for whom the name ‘Lara’ conjures up images of Julie Christie wrapped in fur, is the movie version of the phenomenally successful computer game, Tomb Raider. This solitary, two-handed pastime has inveigled its way into the dreamlives of a zillion teenage males thanks to the comic-book proportions of its butt-kicking heroine, Lara Croft. Well, either Mr West - the English TV director who cornered the market in American testosterone with Con Air, then went slightly more sensitive with The General’s Daughter (and, more significantly from a studio point of view, topped $100 million with both) - has different ideas about stardom to the rest of us. Or somebody changed his mind.
At all events, the live-action Paramount version of Tomb Raider, which West is slated to direct, looks like signing up Angelina Jolie for the role that is being touted as “the female Indiana Jones”. Now Ms Jolie, being Jon Voight’s daughter, has been around Hollywood folks since she could walk and she has been a top-ranked actress for the past couple of years. Moreover, since March 26 - Oscar night, when she walked off with the Best Supporting Actress statuette for her role in Girl, Interrupted - she is definitely a star. Whatever Michael Caine may have joked about the salaries of supporting actors.
Undaunted by the fact that no movie based on a computer game (as opposed to movies like The Matrix, which are merely inspired by computer games) has yet to fulfil expectations at the box office, Paramount bid high for the film rights to Tomb Raider against most of the other studios, and plans to open it big, probably in the summer of 2001, if the slated summer 2000 start-of-shoot is anything to go by. Jolie, though is not wholly inexperienced in the kick-ass department: she did some nifty stuff on roller-skates in the not-widely-seen Hackers; she showed a fair degree of gumption in last summer’s The Bone Collector; and she will be out there tangling with the boys - well, Nicolas Cage - in this summer’s big action movie, the Jerry Bruckheimer-produced Gone in 60 Seconds. And ‘Gone in 60 Seconds’ is something one can predict that Tomb Raider won’t be. Strands of Iwo Jima He took what is probably the most famous war-time photograph of all: the one of US Marines struggling to raise the Stars and Stripes on Iwo Jima. He had a distinctly colourful life, fleeing Hungary as a boy, then working as a photographer in the Spanish Civil War and World War II. And he died at the age of 40, after stepping on a land mine while covering the French war in Indo-China (or Cambodia, as it is now known).

His name was Robert Capa, and he is soon to be the subject of a biopic called Blood and Champagne, with Pierce Brosnan portraying him. The script - by David Bernath and Alex Kershaw - is based on a profile of Capa written by the latter which appeared in The Guardian a couple of years ago. Kershaw also has a biography of Capa in the works. The movie version is being made by Brosnan’s production company, Irish DreamTime, in conjunction with the UK’s Intermedia.

Size Has Everything to Do With It

Having reinvented the Nutty Professor franchise (episode 2, The Klumps, will be on US screens at the end of July), Eddie Murphy has now set his sights on the saga of Scott Carey, who got sprinkled with sparkly glitter while sunbathing with his wife one day. It was, however, what happened six months or so later that gave the 1957 movie its title: The Incredible Shrinking Man.