THE GHOST/OF A CHANCE

How do you succeed in the film business? By hard graft mainly, if writer Robert Harris is anyone to go by.

Here is a man with a estimable reputation as a novelist. Some half dozen book published all of them intelligent and yet also best sellers – and all of them eminently suitable for the big screen.

Yet, so far, only one of them – Enigma, the WW2 thrilled about code-breaking (directed by Michael Apted, starring Kate Winslet and Dougray Scott, pictured) - has made that transition successfully.

Fatherland and Archangel have both been filmed, but for TV rather than the cinema.

And plans to shoot Pompeii, his second most recent novel, suffered a volcanic meltdown a few months ago when Roman Polanski walked away from the director’s chair.

Pompeii was meant to be done at $100 million and would have been Europe’s biggest production ever.

Was Harris gutted when the deal fell through? Not a bit of it. Seems he had been working on his latest novel, Ghost, while prepping with Polanski for Pompeii.

Ghost, the best selling fiction of a Blair-like Prime Minister in trouble, is now set to shoot next year. And the director? None other the RP himself.

What is that saying about "If at first, you don’t succeed …"?

So hat’s off to Harris for sticking with the cause. Mind you, the film is a long way off, with filming likely to continue through to next year, and in film - (as in Blair’s politics) - there may yet be "many a slip between the cup and the lip."

Filed December 6, 2007