Well, it’s about time… Author Patricia Cornwell invented her best-selling heroine, medical examiner heroine, Kay Scarpetta, in 1990. That’s 27 books ago, selling more than 150million copies worldwide and influencing such series as CSI. Yet there’s never been a show about the chic doc. Demi Moore was up for such an idea in 1992, Angelina Jolie in 2009, while Cornwall always fancied Jodie Foster In the part. Finally, Nicole Kidman and Jamie Lee Curtis are co-producing Scarpetta for Prime.
So who’s who? “There is no one better than Nicole Kidman to bring Kay Scarpetta to life,” says Jamie, quite content with playing her sister, Dorothy, of whom Kay says: “My sister should never have been a mother. My sister should never have been Italian.” Aha!
Bobby Cannavale is ex-tec Pete Marino and ex-Mentalist SImon Baker is Kay’s husband, FBI profiler Benton Wesley. (Rosy McEwan and Bobby’s son, Jake, will pop up as the flashbacked young Kay and Benton.
Also famous as a Ripperologist (spending $6m to research and announcing Victorian artist Walter Sickert as the real Jack The Ripper), Cornwell is beyond excited about the series. “This will be great fun for all.” “I’m learning all about autopsies,” adds Kidman. “I know where all the body parts are.”)

DANIEL AND SON UNIMITED

Welcome news. At 67, Daniel Day-Lewis – unseen on screen for seven years – has given up on retirement. For one film. Maybe, one film only. Anemone is a special event for him as his son, the artist Ronan Day-Lewis, is directing it. They wrote the script which “explores the intricate relationships between fathers, sons and brothers and the dynamics of familial bonds.” (Ronan’s mother, Rebecca Miller, has made seven pictures including The Ballad of Jack and Rose, with Daniel in 2003). Co-stars include Sean Bean (once tipped for 007) and Samantha Morton. Among the production companies is Brad Pitt’s Plan B. He must have laughed loudly when one UK paper called the movie Avelyne… which happens to be on Margot Robbie’s to-do list. Now there’s a thought: Daniel and Margot!
Memory Lane: I first met Daniel, shooting Nanou in Paris in 1985. Swiss co-star Jean-Philippe Écoffey swaggered into the room and told him loudly: : “I shall call you Dan-Day.” Daniel looked him in the eye and snarled: “No. You. Won’t.” Exit one Swiss actor.

ATOMIC EPIC

Now this one take some believing… James Cameron is actually preparing a new film that has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with his Avatar series, which is all he’s been making since 2007. (#5 opens in… 2031). And what an “uncompromising” new project he has. Last Train From Hiroshima is timed for the 80th anniversary of the dropping of the first atom bomb on Japan on August 6,1945. Script stems from a fusion of the book by Charles Pellegrino and his follow-up Ghosts of Hiroshima. Both contain eyewitness accounts of the bombing from survivors on the melting ground and USAF airmen in the sky. Plus the extraordinary story of marine engineer Tsutomu Yamaguchi, who survived Hiroshima, took the next train home to Nagasaki… where the second A-bomb was detonated three days later. Again he survived the total death toll of between 150,000 and 246,000 people.
Spike Lee was among many wishing Christopher Nolan had portrayed the actual effect of Oppenheimer bomb – “People got vapourised.” Nolan hoped someone else would tell that side of the story. Cameron is that person. “I’ve been wrestling with how to do it, over the years,” he told Deadline. ““I met Tsutomu Yamaguchi just days before he died [at 93 in in 2010]. He was handing the baton of his personal story to us, so I have to do it. I can’t turn away from it.”