Van Damme To Remake ‘Saturday Night Fever’
Just kidding with that headline up there, hehheh. It was just our way of letting you know that one Los Angeles martial arts trainer thinks Jean-Claude Van Damme is a total fake.
Worse, charges Frank Dux (pronounced “Dukes”), the source of Van Damme physique came not through fighting but through ballet.
Dux, who is suing Van Damme in Santa Monica, says that he met Van Damme in 1986 when the would-be actor was laying carpet. Dux says he was asked to train Van Damme for his break-through role in “Bloodsport.”
“I asked Jean-Claude to do a simple forward roll, and he landed on his head,” Dux said. “He knows that he had no business doing those kinds of fight scenes.”
Dux wants money, naturally. Van Damme’s lawyer says that Dux is interested only in embarrassing his client.
Loose talk
Model-turned-actress Elizabeth Hurley on Hollywood (in London’s Tatler): “It’s quite strange that in 12 years I’ve been in the business I’ve never been propositioned or been out in a ‘casting couch’ situation. Nobody’s ever suggested anything untoward to me whatsoever. I can’t decide whether I’m pleased or insulted.”
Today, get it? Not tonight, not tomorrow, but today
Bryant Gumbel turns 49 today.
Yeah, we hear the Deja Vu is hiring
Folks, Bob Packwood still doesn’t get it. “You go through life and the dial spins, and occasionally it comes up your number,” the former U.S. senator from Oregon told the newspaper the Hill, explaining the sexual harassment charges he faced two years ago that forced him to resign from the senate. “There’s no sense griping or complaining about it. I’m young enough to start another career.”
Or was that ‘Insufficient Interest’
San Francisco Chronicle readers share the strangest items with columnist Leah Garchik. One sent her a letter addressed to “Governor Pete Wilson; Office of the Governor; Capitol Building; Sacramento, CA 95812” that had come back stamped “Insufficient Address.”
Gee, what if he had said something actually untrue
When New York Times writer Bernard Weintraub wrote about Kim Basinger’s “temperamental” nature, her husband, actor Alec Baldwin, responded in kind. Calling Weintraub an “untalented writer and a studio lapdog” and a “petty and small-minded man,” Baldwin suggested that the writer “quit your day job.”
Now there’s a new definition of stupid
Say this much about comic Drew Carey, he knows good fortune when he sees it. “The money is ridiculous, and you’ll never hear me complaining about an overpaid sports star again,” he says. “My manager calls it ‘stupid money.”’
They go good with your pickup and huntin’ dog
Burt Reynolds still hasn’t overcome his macho image. “There are only two sure things in life,” he said recently, “a Bud distributorship and a Harley-Davidson.” He was, incidentally, appearing at the opening of a Harley-Davidson Cafe in Las Vegas.
, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 2 Photos
The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Compiled by staff writer Dan Webster