Books and the Stars: Snoop Dogg, Natalie Portman and Keanu Reeves

A few funny items that caught my eye recently:

The latest celebrity to step up to the children's-book plate is rapper Snoop Dogg. The artist formerly known as Calvin Broadus is working on WHERE'S THE CHEESE, a series about a mouse which is also being shopped as a Saturday morning cartoon. For your information, "cheese" is a hip-hop slang term for money (possibly welfare-related) -- for example, in Snoop's song "Life in the Projects" he declares "grass [drugs] is cheese and cheese is power."

Natalie Portman is rumored to star as tragic lover Catherine Earnshaw in a new adaptation of Emily Bronte's WUTHERING HEIGHTS directed by John Maybury (whose biopic "The Edge of Love" of poet Dylan Thomas is due out this year). Other famous Catherines: Juliette Binoche and Merle Oberon. The last notable adaptation was a 2003 modernization by MTV starring "Traffic" actress Erika Christensen, which will probably never be a Filmbook entry.

Author James Ellroy, who wrote real page tuner of 2006 THE BLACK DAHLIA, cowrote this weekend's new release (and probably #2 movie) "Street Kings" starring Keanu Reeves and Forest Whitaker. Five of his novels have now been adapted to film, with the sixth, WHITE JAZZ, coming in 2009. He also has a cameo in one of my favorite movies, "Wonder Boys," based on the Michael Chabon novel of the same name.