Forbes magazine has wasted time joyously by drawing up a rich list of fictional characters. At No 1 is Smaug, Tolkien’s scaly dragon, which accumulated $62 billion of other people’s gold. That’s before it rakes in royalties from The Hobbit this Christmas. Other one-percenter role models include the warmonger Charles Foster “Citizen” Kane ($8.3 billion, minus missing sled), vigilante Bruce Wayne ($6.9 billion), tattooed hacker Lisbeth Salander ($2.4 billion) and dodgy nuclear-power station owner Monty Burns, boss of Homer Simpson ($1.3 billion — excellent). The Malibu playboy Tony Stark, who sells WMDs, but only to friends, is worth a meaty $9.3 billion — and his cinematic alter ego, Robert Downey Jr, who plays him in Iron Man, is not doing too badly, either. He got $50m for Avengers Assemble, making him the highest-paid actor since Johnny Depp picked up $250m for playing a pirate four times. Who says crime does not pay?
Kevin Costner, who nearly sank his career in the film Waterworld, apparently phoned Peter Berg, the director of Battleship, the noisiest release of the summer, before the shoot started, advising him to order three of everything — because filming off Hawaii is tough, and everything breaks twice. Many props performed as predicted. Pity that Costner forgot to mention another essential Berg would need: a story.
American cinemas are deploying video-camera detectors to save the world from soul-sucking, wobbly, blurry “cam” bootlegs. Yet Avatar has emerged as the most pirated movie ever, as well as the top box-office champ. Isn’t it time we got some more realistic estimates of the damage piracy inflicts?
Hollywood winemaking, however, is thriving. Drew Barrymore’s new line of pinot grigio has been roughed up by critics as a girly lunchtime drink. Fergie, of Black Eyed Peas, is getting tougher with a manly red, out this summer.
Complete with a “tramp stamp” tattoo on her back, Emma Watson will play a celebrity-obsessed Hollywood burglar in The Bling Ring, a true-crime movie. It’s based on a middle-class bunch of wastrels who judged correctly that Paris Hilton would leave her key under the doormat and robbed her five times before she noticed, then moved on to Lindsay Lohan, Megan Fox and Orlando Bloom’s Rolex collection. LA police are upset with the film’s director, Sofia Coppola, because she hired their investigator as a consultant without telling them, and the trials are not even over yet.
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A true-enough story: an LA reading group wondered whether, before tackling Brideshead Revisited, they should read the first one.
Maya Rudolph, the bride in Bridesmaids and a fine Beyoncé impersonator on Saturday Night Live, revealed a secret love for Prince in a tribute show at the Largo, the best little theatre in Los Angeles. It was straight funk, with, oddly, no hits from his more popular purple period. She only lost the plot once, when lighters (not iPhones: it was a 1980s evening) were held up during Nothing Compares 2 U. She nearly tumbled off her heels giggling. But Rudolph was born to this: she was in the studio when her late mother, Minnie Riperton, recorded Lovin’ You.
The Humphrey Bogart estate is unhappy with Burberry for using a still from Casablanca. It involves a trench coat. Here’s looking at you, writ.
Richard Brooks is away