Sunday, June 1, 2003		Hollywood Hues

Honkytonk man

Eastwood: Sudden impact

THE tanned, hear-lined face, the chiselled jaw, the lean mean six-foot-four frame and those wimp-kicking Reeboks sure have their advantages. They have all contributed to making Clint Eastwood not just a tough star but also one of the richest guys in Hollywood.

Recently, all this came in very handy when he got a chance to enact his most famous film persons, the San Franscisco police inspector Harry Callahan. A crazy fan who began fooling around with him on the phone realised what it was to mess with the macho star.

Brian Neun kept calling up Eastwood demanding $ 5 m. The cops were baffled till the phone freak told the star that his calls were dictated by ‘Your guardian angel wavelength’, providing Eastwood the vital clue that the caller had taken the line from his movie Play Misty For Me in which he played a DJ harassed by a woman who keeps badgering him to play one particular number.

Eastwood laid an elaborate trap promising to cough up the dough at a prefixed point. Once there, the 72-year-old actor did a Callahan stunt, pounced on the madman and handed him to the cops. Later, when journalists asked him how he felt when he saw his tormentor, Eastwood flashed a smile and said: "I said, ‘Come on creep, make my day!"

First she was known as Peter Fonda’s daughter. Then as an actress of some talent when she played Christine Keeler’s hooker friend Mandy Rice-Davies in Scandal, a role which fetched her $ 75,000. But now, after a series of smart career moves, Bridget Fonda is one of the most sought-after stars with a fee tag of a million dollars per film.

The young actress who trained in London and starred in such notables as Little Buddha and Single White Female was offered the lead role in the hit TV serial Ally McBeal but she’s turned it down to focus on movie, adding that she wasn’t too keen on TV.

If Hollywood gossip is to be believed, Calista Flockhart, who is currently playing Ally McBeal, is said to have indicated to Fox that she may not be available for more seasons as her marriage to Harrison Ford leaves her little time for much else than managing his crowded schedule.

Though Bridget may have turned down the role, it is said that a long list of stars are doing the rounds of Fox Studios for what one actress terms as the role of a lifetime.’

Schwarzeneger: Fortune’s favourite

Many years ago, when Arnold Schwarzenegger came to Hollywood with a duffel bag strung on his shoulder, he asked an agent if he could make it in the movies. The agent looked at him in contempt and said, "Forget it, you’ve got a weird body, a weirder accent and the weirdest name. Go back to the gym."

No one has seen the agent since, but Schwarzenegger is everywhere, his biceps bigger than Madonna’s waist. He’s been listed as one of the ten wealthiest entertainers by the prestigious Forbes magazine. And as he sits behind a great oak desk in his Venice Beach office in California, puffing a $200 Havana cigar, he can look back in satisfaction.

Today, Schwarzenegger is America’s number one immigrant success story, is married into a Kennedy family and most of his movies have been runaway hits. In fact, his latest movie Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, releasing in July, 2003, is all set to create a new box-office record, making him practically the number one movie star of the world.

But Schwarzenegger is not relaxing. If rumours are to be believed, the naturalised American may not be an improbable candidate for the Californian gubernatorial post.

At 62, Faye Dunaway still looks stunning, and age doesn’t seem to have mellowed her temper either. According to her co-stars, she is as arrogant and haughty as she was in the Bonnie And Clyde days in the sixties.

While shooting for her new film The Blind Horizon in Portland recently, the producers had to go through hell to meet her absurd demands. Every day, she had a special blend of yoghurt flown in from a health outlet in Los Angeles. She had senior crew members doing petty errands for her and went into a long sulk when a cameraman refused to fetch her a particular shade of lipstick from her make-up van.

Scared of losing a full day’s shooting; the producer forced the poor guy to apologise to the actress. So annoyed were the crew members that at the wrap-up party they entertained themselves with a montage of film clips in which she was slapped around, beaten and brutalised. Faye was ‘cordially’ invited to attend but she declined and in a huff took the first flight back home.

Gere: Re-enacting a hit role

Richard Gere, who preaches meditation and a self-denying lifestyle, recently shocked Beverly Hills when he checked into the swank $ 3800-a-night Four Seasons Hotel under the name of Richard Tiffany and spent 10 glorious days in a world of fantasy — just like Edward Lewis, the corporate shark he played in the eighties’ bumper hit Pretty Woman.

Reveals a hotel insider, "Whenever his women friends dropped in, Richard had us send up everything we had in the kitchen and almost emptied the gift shop. He seems to revel in acting like a tycoon the way he did in Pretty Woman.

But what the hotel guy can’t or won’t tell is whether Gere has been cruising Hollywood looking for a lady of the night like the one Julia Roberts played in the movie. If that be the case then it surely is a case of life imitating art.

— Newsmen Features