The second trip to the big screen for Fahrenheit 451 -- a long and tortured journey that has seen the project pass through the hands of Mel Gibson and others -- seems to finally be gathering speed for Frank Darabont, who's been attached as director and screenwriter since 2001. In fact, according to Ain't It Cool News, Darabont has chosen and signed his star.

For those unfamiliar with the Ray Bradbury novel (first adapted for film by François Truffaut in 1966), we can only question the methods of your freshman English teachers, and tell you the story takes place in a dystopian future when books have been outlawed and the population is entertained by in-ear radios and interactive television. Fahrenheit's protagonist is a "fireman" (book burner) named Guy Montag who, as the story begins, has no qualms about his job.

We're talking about a classic 54-year-old book, so there's bound to be squabbling over the idea of Hanks as Montag, but he really isn't a bad choice for the role; in fact, considering that Gibson and Tom Cruise were attached to the part during earlier stages of production, he might just be the best.
 

Nicole Kidman reveals a side seldom seen – lonely on the night she won her Oscar, and enigmatic when it comes to recounting her attempts to bear a child with Tom Cruise.

"From the minute Tom and I were married, I wanted to have babies," Kidman, 40 (and 22 when she met Cruise), tells Vanity Fair for its October issue. "And we lost a baby early on, so that was really very traumatic. And that's when we would adopt [daughter] Bella," now 14.
Asked how it felt when she won her 2003 Best Actress Academy Award, for The Hours, Kidman (interviewed in her Sydney home, while she and costar Hugh Jackman are shooting Australia) says, "It felt big. It felt lonely and big .

he adds, "That was painful, not having that person to share it with. That's why it was more for my mom and dad and my kids. But even the kids were young enough that they were like, 'Oh, cool. Over. Move on. Not interested.' " 

It was not until a 2005 Australian promotional event in Los Angeles that she met country star – and Queensland native – Keith Urban. "I think we were two lonely people. I would probably say that two very lonely people managed to meet at a time when they could open themselves to each other," she says. "We were a mixture of frightened and brave." 

After months of negotiations and controversy, Tom Cruise finally won permission to shoot his movie at a key historical location in Germany.

"A majority of the film material is unusable," a spokeswoman for the production company told the German newspaper Bild. "

A key scene in Valkyrie, Cruise's WWII historical thriller about the plot by top army officers to assassinate Hitler in 1944, was shot in the Bendler Block where the original action took place. Cruise was originally barred by the German government from filming in the national monument. 

Eventually granted permission, the night scenes were shot there after the crew first held a minute of silent meditation. The film was shipped to a professional post-production studio in Munich, and was deemed unusable when it arrived. 

And the images cannot be recovered, but will need to be re-shot. According to a report by the local daily, Tagesspiegel, the film was treated with the incorrect chemical and ruined.

The German government has already given the okay for more filming at the site, and Dennis Rice, a United Artists spokesman, tells PEOPLE that "everything is moving along smoothly."

Born Thomas Cruise Mapother IV on July 3, 1962, in Syracuse, NY, Cruise led a peripatetic existence as a child, moving from town to town with his rootless family. A high-school wrestler, Cruise went into acting after being sidelined by a knee injury.

Moving to New York in 1980, Cruise held down odd jobs until getting his first movie break in Endless Love (1981). His first big hit was Risky Business (1982), in which he entered movie-trivia infamy with the scene wherein he celebrates his parents' absence by dancing around the living room in his underwear. The Hollywood press corps began touting Cruise as one of the "Brat Pack," a group of twentysomething actors who seemed on the verge of taking over the movie industry in the early '80s. But Cruise chose not to play the sort of teen-angst roles that the other Brat Packers specialized in -- a wise decision, in that he has sustained his stardom while many of his contemporaries have fallen by the wayside or retreated into direct-to-video cheapies. 

Top Gun with a solid characterization of a fledgling pool shark in The Color of Money (1986), the film that earned co-star Paul Newman an Academy Award. In 1988, Cruise took on one of his most challenging

Tom Cruise Biography:
An actor whose name has become synonymous with all-American testosterone-driven entertainment, Tom Cruise spent the 1980s as one of Hollywood's brightest-shining golden boys. With black hair, blue eyes, and unabashed cockiness, Cruise rode high on such hits as Top Gun and Rain Man. Although his popularity dimmed slightly in the early '90s, he was able to bounce back with a string of hits that re-established him as both an action hero and, in the case of Jerry Maguire and Magnolia, a talented actor.



Born Thomas Cruise Mapother IV on July 3, 1962, in Syracuse, NY, Cruise led a peripatetic existence as a child, moving from town to town with his rootless family. A high-school wrestler, Cruise went into acting after being sidelined by a knee injury. This new activity served a dual purpose: performing satiated Cruise's need for attention, while the memorization aspect of acting helped him come to grips with his dyslexia.



Moving to New York in 1980, Cruise held down odd jobs until getting his first movie break in Endless Love (1981). His first big hit was Risky Business (1982), in which he entered movie-trivia infamy with the scene wherein he celebrates his parents' absence by dancing around the living room in his underwear. The Hollywood press corps began touting Cruise as one of the "Brat Pack," a group of twentysomething actors who seemed on the verge of taking over the movie industry in the early '80s. But Cruise chose not to play the sort of teen-angst roles that the other Brat Packers specialized in -- a wise decision, in that he has sustained his stardom while many of his contemporaries have fallen by the wayside or retreated into direct-to-video cheapies.



Top Gun (1985) established Cruise as an action star, but again he refused to be pigeonholed, and followed up Top Gun with a solid characterization of a fledgling pool shark in The Color of Money (1986), the film that earned co-star Paul Newman an Academy Award. In 1988, Cruise took on one of his most challenging assignments, as the brother of an autistic savant played by Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man. "Old" Hollywood chose to give all the credit for that film's success to Hoffman, but a closer look at Rain Man reveals that Cruise is the true central character in the film, the one who "grows" in humanity and maturity while Hoffman's character, though brilliantly portrayed, remains the same.



In 1989, Cruise was finally given an opportunity to carry a major dramatic film without an older established star in tow. As paraplegic Vietnam vet Ron Kovic in Born on the Fourth of July (1989), Cruise delivered perhaps his most outstanding performance. Cruise's bankability faltered a bit with the expensive disappointment Far and Away in 1990 (though it did give him a chance to co-star with his-then wife Nicole Kidman), but with A Few Good Men (1992), Cruise was back in form. In 1994, Cruise appeared as the vampire Lestat in the long-delayed film adaptation of the Anne Rice novel -Interview with the Vampire. Although she was vehemently opposed to Cruise's casting, Rice reversed her decision upon seeing the actor's performance. 

Cruise was born in Syracuse, New York,^[4] the son of Mary Lee (née Pfeiffer), a special education teacher, and Thomas Cruise Mapother III, an electrical engineer.^[5] Cruise has German and Colonial English ancestry from his paternal great-grandparents, William Reibert and Charlotte Louise Voelker; and purportedly Welsh ancestry from his paternal great-great-grandfather, Dylan Henry Mapother, who emigrated from Flint, Wales to Louisville, Kentucky in 1850.

His great-great-grandmother Mary Cruise married twice. Her first husband was Dillon Henry Mapother, by whom she had six children. She remarried after Dillon's death, to Thomas O'Mara. Their son Thomas O'Mara, enumerated as such in the 1880 Census, was later known as "Thomas Cruise Mapother". The reason(s) for him changing his name are not entirely clear. Thus, from his and his wife Anna Stewart Bateman, he has Irish and Colonial English ancestry, respectively. His maternal ancestry is half Irish and half German (including Alsatian).^[8] Anna Stewart Bateman's great-grandfather was a third cousin of President George Washington and descended seven times from King Jean de Brienne of Jerusalem, once from King Louis VIII of France, once from King Henry III of England, twice from King Edward I of England and three times from King Edward III of England.

When Cruise was twelve, his mother left his father, taking Cruise and his sister Lee Anne with her.^[11] Cities in which Tom lived included Ottawa, Ontario (where he attended Colonel By Secondary School), Louisville, Kentucky, Winnetka, Illinois and Wayne, New Jersey. In all, Cruise attended eight elementary schools and three high schools. He briefly attended a Franciscan seminary in Cincinnati and aspired to become a Catholic priest. He eventually graduated from Glen Ridge High School in New Jersey in 1980.

While injured, he successfully auditioned for a lead role in his high school's production of Guys and Dolls and decided to become an actor after his success in the role. His cousin William Mapother is also an actor most known for playing Ethan Rom on Lost.

Tom Cruise's controversial new movie has run into yet more trouble. Scenes from Valkyrie, a historical drama about the plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, will need to be reshot after footage sent for post-production was accidentally destroyed.

There were problems with the negative development in Arri Munich, one of the top post-production companies in Germany. The images were wiped away," a spokesman for the firm that delivered the film for post-production, Colin Ullman, told the newspaper Bild.

The accident is the latest in a long series of setbacks for the Bryan Singer-directed project, which sees Cruise controversially portray Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, the Wehrmacht colonel behind the plot to kill the Führer in July 1944.

Producers were initially denied permission from the German government to shoot at the Bendler Block, a historical site where the plotters were executed. Then last month, 11 extras playing German soldies injured themselves when they fell out of a moving military lorry in Berlin.