STALLONE TO TALK TURKEY WITH POLITICAL ‘HOT POTATO’
By Oliver Duff

The Independent/UK
18 January 2007

* Sylvester Stallone is in town this week to promote his latest slice
of testosterone-fuelled hokum, Rocky Balboa, which sees the ageing
boxing champ return to the ring for one more fight. His next rumoured
project will require more cerebral direction – if no less fake blood.

Stallone is touting the idea that he might direct an adaptation of
the controversial novel The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, which describes
the Turkish massacre of its Armenian community in 1915.

A movie based on the Austrian author Franz Werfel’s 1934 fictionalised
account would, Sly says, be "an epic about the complete destruction
of a civilisation".

The topic is, to understate it somewhat, a thorny issue over in
Turkey, where the claimed "genocide" has never been wholly accepted
as historical fact.

A group calling themselves the Association on Struggle Against Armenian
Genocide Acknowledgement is targeting Stallone with an angry letters
campaign urging him not to make the film.

"The book is full of lies, since the author got his information from
nationalist and radical Armenians," says the association’s chairman,
Savas Egilmez.

"We have already sent necessary documents about the mentioned days
to the producer of the film. Our allies will urge the producer not
to produce this film."

Stallone concedes: "Talk about a political hot potato. The Turks have
been killing that subject for 85 years."

The uproar about Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ could seem
tame.

* The author and transatlantic socialite Plum Sykes has a fractious
relationship with the Fourth Estate.

In 2004, hours before the launch of her chic lit novel Bergdorf
Blondes, Plum’s embarrassed publisher rang the diarists of Her
Majesty’s Press Corps to announce that they could consider themselves
uninvited.

Plum told perplexed gatecrashers that they were "ghastly", adding:
"I don’t like English journalists. Apart from anything else, they
dress so badly."

Harsh – given that her own brother, Tom, was a New York hack at the
time. She blacklisted us.

So she was a surprise (if elusive) presence last night, then, at
the launch of Tom Sykes’s new book, A Drunkard’s Tale, accounting 14
years of drugs and drinks since his expulsion from Eton.

Plum was clutching a shabby, ancient, leopard-print handbag and
wearing a see-through black top.

Pot, kettle.

* Word has it that the latest addition to this rather shabby
series of Celebrity Big Brother is uber-paparazzo Darren Lyons,
the cockatoo-haired boss of the Big Pictures sleb photo agency.

Viewers of the pap’s late-night television series may recall his
"forthright" opinions and abrasive management style.

And Lyons has a head start on the other housemates: his friends cackle
that he knows all about the racism row that has sparked rioting on the
streets of India, and that he plans to wind up the other housemates
(who are banned from knowledge of the outside world).

"Jade Goody’s in the firing line," says a pal. "The contestants are
about as sharp as bath sponges and probably won’t realise Darren
got rich by selling pictures of them falling over drunk with their
nipples hanging out."

* Evening Standard theatre critic Nicholas de Jongh – known as
"de Dongh Corleone" for his assassinations of new productions –
was beside himself with praise yesterday for Days of Significance,
now showing in Stratford.

The wannabe mafioso described the play, about a bunch of squaddies
on the day before assignment to Basra, as a "brilliantly acted,
in-yer-face and get-out-of-the-way promenade".

One distinguished theatregoer disagrees: "It was a load of rot,
tantamount to treason, and very rough around the edges." He suggests
cruelly that de Jongh’s thumbs-up has something to do with the
playwright Roy Williams, who happens to be the partner of Standard
arts editor Fiona Hughes.

"Either that or he really loved it. He is normally very mean with
his stars."

* The must-go event in Labour MPs’ diaries for February is the 50th
birthday party of Keith Vaz, the exuberant former minister and friend
of the Hindujas. The invitation to the trendy Soho curry house The Red
Fort on 21 February is adorned by a charming sepia photograph of the
cherubic young Keith (aged seven?) astride what appears to be a rocking
camel. (Like a rocking horse.) Guests are promised "amusing anecdotes"
from the Lord Chancellor Charlie Falconer, Tony’s old flatmate.

But what to do about the delicate subject of gifts? In 2001 the
Parliamentary standards watchdog found Vaz guilty of failing to
properly declare a donation; he was cleared of other severe charges. So
bravo to KV, who asks his friends to send money to the Silver Star
Mobile Diabetes Screening Unit in the Midlands. Who says a leopard
never changes its spots?