• December 01, 1997
• Vol. 48
• No. 22

The Insider

By Mitchell Fink

It was inevitable that sooner or later either Brad Pitt or his ex-fiancée Gwyneth Paltrow would find romance with someone else. And now, five months after their breakup, I can report that it's Pitt who has a new love interest. She's Katja von Gamier, the 31-year-old German director of Bandits, a quirky drama about four girls in prison who form a rock group and then escape. I'm told that Pitt, 33, and von Gamier first met casually three years ago in Los Angeles but only began seeing each other after their paths crossed again in September at the Toronto Film Festival, where he was doing publicity for Seven Years in Tibet and she was promoting Bandits. Pitt brought von Gamier to the German premiere of Tibet on Nov. 14 in Cologne, and I hear they held hands throughout the evening. Pitt's rep, not surprisingly, says the two are "just good friends."...

Piece of my Heart, a long-awaited film biography of the late Janis Joplin, is going to keep people waiting a little bit longer. Paramount's deal with the movie's star, singer Melissa Etheridge, called for her romantic partner, filmmaker Julie Cypher, to serve as a producer and write the screenplay. That was fine until Cypher turned in her script, which I hear was not up to snuff. Three other writers were subsequently brought in to rewrite it. As a result the production, which was to have begun filming by early January, has been pushed back to mid-February. Neither Etheridge nor Cypher would comment....

Torah! Torah! Torah! On Nov. 8, 14-year-old Grant Shapiro, son of O.J. Simpson attorney Robert Shapiro, was given a huge reception at the Museum of Flying in Santa Monica to celebrate his bar mitzvah earlier this year in Israel. The elder Shapiro, an amateur boxer, seems to have passed his passion for pugilism along to his son: Grant's entrance to the party began with a Michael Buffer-like ring announcer bellowing, "Let's get ready to bar mitzvah!" Young Shapiro then arrived in a helicopter and was escorted by two leggy ring girls to a boxing ring where he proceeded to duke it out with the Shapiro family trainer, who obligingly lost after two rounds. The evening concluded with the 400 guests watching a closed-circuit showing of the Evander Holyfield-Michael Moorer heavyweight fight in Las Vegas, which Holyfield won by TKO....

George Clooney didn't ask for it, but management at the Delano Hotel in Miami's South Beach area knew the actor loved to play basketball, so they constructed a makeshift court behind his bungalow. Clooney is in Miami filming Out of Sight, a crime drama directed by Steven Soderbergh, and word has it that he unwinds every day by playing pickup games with members of the hotel staff. If you're wondering how Clooney manages to make such movies as Batman & Robin and The Peacemaker while still appearing in NBC's ER, the answer is: because he can. Most TV stars, if they're lucky, squeeze in movies during hiatus periods. But in Clooney's case, the show works around him. Not that it's easy: He does double duty, shooting his scenes in future ER episodes at the same time he's filming the show everyone else is working on. As one ER source tells me, "George has been doing this for a long time, and viewers will never notice the difference."

• Contributors:
• Hugh McCarten.