Armageddon, already one of the summer's eagerly awaited films, starring Bruce Willis, just wrapped principal photography. Willis plays an expert oil driller who's hired to rocket out to a gigantic asteroid and blow it up before it hits Earth. The opening scenes on an oil rig 200 miles off the Texas coast were the last to be shot. Liv Tyler, who plays Willis's daughter, was one of the only women on the deck in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico, save for a few hair and makeup people. She spent four nights aboard the acre-size platform with 90 men (40 crew, 50 real-life oil drillers), while Willis commuted the two-plus hours by helicopter back to terra firma. "Liv could have gone back and forth, but she seemed to be enjoying herself," says a rep for the film. "She wanted to stay out there."...
Lisa Marie Presley's lifehas been a bit of a roller-coaster ride—if you count, say, her 20-month marriage to Michael Jackson—so it was fitting that a week before her 30th birthday on Feb. 1, her mother, Priscilla, threw her a big bash at Six Flags Magic Mountain amusement park north of Los Angeles. Lisa Marie and some 200 of her closest friends had the Colossus roller coaster all to themselves. A Beverly Hills bakery even whipped up a birthday cake in the shape of the 10-acre Colossus. The total cost of the five-hour fete, I hear, was $80,000. Elvis would have been proud....
Best friends Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, who co-wrote and costar in the critically acclaimed film Good Will Hunting, may now be double dating too. That's because Affleck's new flame, Gwyneth Paltrow, recently introduced Damon to her best friend, Winona Ryder, and now the pair are quite serious....
John Grisham is not only a man of words; he's also a man of his word. Before the Mississippi lawyer became a bestselling author, he had written a script called The Gingerbread Man, now a Robert Altman-directed film. But after producer Jeremy Tannenbaum first approached Grisham in late 1990 and made an oral agreement to buy his script for "a modest five figures," the novelist published his soon-to-be bestseller The Firm, scoring a substantial payday. Even so, Grisham sold The Gingerbread Man to Tannenbaum for the set amount, although the savvy attorney added one clause to their contract that allowed him to use a pseudonym if he didn't like changes made to his script. When Altman added a hurricane and some vulgarity to the movie, Grisham took his name off the drama "because it changed the flavor," Tannenbaum says. The writing credit now reads "Al Hayes," for no particular reason. Explains Tannenbaum: "John said, 'You pick a name,' so we came up with something generic. It's not anybody's uncle or anything."
Your Reaction
