SHOW B I Z

Let the casting games begin: It looks as if Tom Wolfe’s wonderfully critical stroll through the groves of modern academe will become a movie. By now, I guess the thinking must be, everyone has forgotten what a gobbler his first novel,

The Bonfire of the Vanities, was as a movie. So his new one,

I Am Charlotte Simmons, has a fighting chance. Anyway, these two outfits, Trilogy Entertainment and Syntax Entertainment, have bought the movie rights. There’s no director yet, but who cares? The real question is who plays Charlotte, the smart, pretty, industrious small-town girl who strays — marks high, virtue intact and illusions unshattered — into a modern university, which proves to be a swamp of booze, drugs, hormones, greed and political correctness. So who gets the role? Kirsten Dunst? Too old. Lindsay Lohan? Too cute. Mischa Barton? Too dim. Mandy Moore? Too voluptuous. Scarlett Johansson? Bingo! She’d be perfect. Variety, reporting the sale, notes that Trilogy has produced about a dozen movies, including Backdraft and The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys. Fruit of the Loom, the underwear company, has offered Kirstie Alley a cool US$1-million if she’ll be the spokes … errr … spokesfigure for their new “oversized women” line, Fit For Me. Alley, who has recently lost 50 pounds, has agreed to the deal, says the National Enquirer, but won’t do the ads until she loses 10 pounds more. Big buzz in Tinseltown about Charlize Theron’s secret wedding, and the gossip wasn’t wrong, either. Not exactly. The South African actress and her boyfriend, Stuart Townsend, did indeed host a marriage ceremony the other day at the Bel Air Bay Club in California. But it wasn’t for them, it was for her mom, Gerda, whose new hubby’s name nobody seems to know. Charlize herself says she and Stu are “in no hurry” to get to the altar. Townsend is in a new ABC series called

Night

Stalker. Charlize is 30. Doug Camilli, CanWest News Service