People: Now he knows how writers go wrong
Josh Hartnett is fantasizing, just for a moment.
The fantasy doesn’t involve women. One of Hollywood’s most eligible bachelors – linked in the gossip columns to the likes of Scarlett Johansson, Penelope Cruz and Giselle Bundchen – the 29-year-old Hartnett doesn’t need to live in a fantasy world, there.
He doesn’t even need to dream about the sort of career he would like. A leading man with coal-black eyes and smoldering voice, he has steadily climbed the ladder to stardom over the past decade, getting bigger roles in bigger movies: “Sin City,” “Black Hawk Down,” “The Black Dahlia,” “Pearl Harbor.”
But he has his dreams, and most of them involve a movie about music.
“I would love to play a rock star,” he says. “If somebody said it was time to make ‘The Iggy Pop Story,’ I’d be there.”
Maybe that’s why Hartnett, who pairs up with Samuel L. Jackson in the new “Resurrecting the Champ,” has been clinging to this idea of making a movie about legendary jazzman (and drug abuser) Chet Baker.
“There’s a lot of people interested in making the film, but we haven’t signed a director, haven’t finished the script,” he says.
“His career, what he went through, is so incredible and so dark that to tell his story honestly would blow people’s minds, I think. … It is wild to think of how much he squeezed into in his life.”
The same could be said for Hartnett. Twenty-plus films into a career barely 10 years old, he has risen from adolescent horror-film roles to holding his own opposite Jackson, who doesn’t suffer fools gladly.
In “Champ,” Harnett plays a young newspaper reporter who stumbles across a human-interest story that could make his career.
Jackson is a worn-out, homeless, drunken ex-heavyweight with a great tale to tell. But it’s only after the story has printed and the reporter’s fame grows that he starts to question what the Champ told him.
“Having done this for a decade now, I’ve talked with a lot of journalists,” Hartnett says, “but I’d never really dissected their goals, their ambitions. I’d never given any thought to how a story like the one we tell in the movie comes to be, where the facts aren’t all checked. …
“The media these days is so saturated with opinion that it feels important to show how facts are lost along the way.”
Being on the receiving end of inaccurate coverage himself made him want to play the ethically challenged reporter even more.
“The tabloids, they get nothing right – 98 percent of what they write about me is wrong,” says Hartnett. “You’re in a movie with somebody, you’re suddenly a couple. …
“And those are written by reporters taking shortcuts, trying to get ahead. It’s a temptation I can see from the other side, now.”
The birthday bunch
Bandleader Branford Marsalis is 47. Actor Chris Burke (“Life Goes On”) is 42. Singer Shirley Manson (Garbage) is 41. Actress Melissa McCarthy (“Gilmore Girls”) is 37. Actor Macaulay Culkin is 27.