July 21, 1997

Michelle Pfeiffer's getting close on the two films she might well star in back to back. Treat Williams is in talks to join her in Mandalay's "The Deep End of the Ocean," the adaptation of the Jacquelyn Mitchard novel which Ulu Grossbard will direct. Pfeiffer and Williams play parents whose child is kidnapped. The couple moves away, but when they return nine years later, the mother discovers her son had been living nearby the whole time.

At the same time, Pfeiffer's long-held plans to star as a tabloid journalist in the Kasi Lemmons-scripted "Privacy" are finally materializing. The project had been set up by Pfeiffer and her Via Rosa partner Kate Guinzberg at New Line, but it languished there. Paramount has stepped in to pick it up, and it might be the project she'd do after "Ocean."

In Privacy,she'd play an investigative journalist who gets fired for reporting a high-profile story that proves bogus. The only job she can get is for a tabloid and is assigned to befriend an actress and find dirt on her. She gets the goods, but has misgivings about printing the story.

June 6, 1997

Michelle Pfeiffer is returning to the blackboard jungle. Her production company is working on a script about the Rosewood Community Education Center in south-central Los Angeles for a movie that would be about gang members who work with handicapped kids. Scriptwriter Marlene King describes it as "Boyz N the Hood" meets "Rain Man." Pfeiffer, who played an inner-city teacher in "Dangerous Minds," may play the mother of a handicapped child in the film.

June 4, 1997

Michelle Pfeiffer and her husband, David Kelley, are not going to settle with the man who not only claims that he is the father of their adopted daughter, but that he authored several scenes in Dangerous Minds. Lawrence Booker, a thirty-eight-year-old office manager and would-be screenwriter from Michigan, claims in a lawsuit filed in Detroit last week that he is the biological father of the couple's daughter, Claudia Rose, and that parts of his screenplay were used in the 1995 hit film starring Pfeiffer. He is seeking the paltry sum of $75,000. Booker says he gave a treatment for a film called Barrio Kids to the child's biological mother, who allegedly visited Pfeiffer and Kelley as part of an open-adoption arrangement. Booker says he never heard any feedback from the couple, but contends that they used parts of the treatment as a basis for the film's opening and other non-dialogue sections. But Pfeiffer's spokeswoman, Lois Smith, tells the New York Daily News that Booker's lawsuit is "a total fraud." Smith also says that Booker is not the father of Claudia Rose, and that his claims about the birth mother visiting the couple are untrue. "It was a closed adoption," she says. "Neither set of parents ever met each other." Smith claims that Dangerous Minds, which was based on the LouAnne Johnson book My Posse Don't Do Homework, was already completed at the time Booker says he sent his script. "This is a shakedown," Smith tells the News. "That's why he's only asking for $75,000. He thinks they'll pay it to make him go away." Pfeiffer and Kelley plan to battle Booker, and have hired a private investigator to dig into the office manager's past.

June 2, 1997

The man who fathered Michelle Pfeiffer's adopted daughter is suing the actress, claiming she stole film ideas that later appeared in her 1995 hit film Dangerous Minds. The Detroit News reports that thirty-eight-year-old Lawrence Booker, who filed the suit in federal court in Detroit, is suing Pfeiffer, her husband, David Kelly, and Hollywood Pictures. He accuses them of using parts of his film treatment, titled Barrio Kids, as a basis for the film's opening and other non-dialogue sections. He is seeking more than $75,000 in damages. Booker, a Wyoming, Michigan, office manager and first-time screenwriter, met Pfeiffer four years ago when she adopted his newborn daughter. The actress maintained an open-adoption approach that allows visits by the birth parents, and the baby's mother frequently visited the couple. On one visit in June of 1994, about a year after the adoption, she allegedly passed along Booker's film treatment, which Kelley looked at overnight and returned the next day. The lawsuit contends that Kelley and Pfeiffer made a copy of Barrio Kids and passed it along to producers at Don Simpson-Jerry Bruckheimer Films. Dangerous Minds starred Pfeiffer as former marine LouAnne Johnson, who was assigned to a tough Los Angeles classroom. The film was based on Johnson's book, My Posse Don't Do Homework, and it grossed more than $100 million. "He feels doubly wronged," said Booker's attorney, Joan Lowenstein. "Not only does she have his child, but she profited from his idea." Booker was apparently unhappy that the child, later named Claudia Rose by Pfeiffer, was put up for adoption.

May 13, 1997

Michelle Pfeiffer has come full circle since playing a vicious drug dealer's girlfriend in "Scarface" 14 years ago. Now she's interested in playing an undercover drug agent in a project titled "The Ice Queen." It's based on the true story of DEA agent Heidi Landgraf, who posed as a glamorous drug queenpin and helped send 200 dealers to jail. There have been problems with the script, however, with the husband-wife team of Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne among those working on it before Sidney Pollack brought in a new writer.

May 9, 1997

Michelle Pfeiffer has a new project in the works for Warner Brothers. She will produce and star in "Waltz Into Darkness," a period film about a tobacco planter and his mail order bride.

Last updated : 22 July 1997.