UK showbiz mogul Simon Fuller goes to Hollywood

The man who has made millions by inventing Pop Idol and American Idol, who created the Spice Girls phenomenon and works as the agent for David and Victoria Beckham, has decided it's time to break into Hollywood. Simon Fuller will dip his first toe in the film business by executive producing a Hollywood romance starring the young British heartthrob Robert Pattinson.

The film is an adaptation of Guy de Maupassant's erotic story Bel Ami. Pattinson, known as 'Rpattz' to the teenage female fans of his performance as the vampire Edward Cullen in Twilight, plays a young journalist, Georges Duroy, who rises to to the heights of 1890s Parisian society by manipulating a series of older, wealthy mistresses.

Or in Hollywood-speak, it's How to Lose Friends and Alienate People meets Dangerous Liaisons.

Fuller has already got a taste of Tinseltown's fickle ways: Nicole Kidman was down to star opposite Pattinson but three months before filming is due to start in Budapest it has been announced yesterday that she is no longer associated with the project.

Which is a pity because, according to an interview she gave to GQ magazine this month, an erotic romance would be right up her street. She told the mag that as well as having "explored the mundane aspect of marriage, and monogamy" she had also explored "strange sexual fetish stuff".

In Hollywood, they're still working out where her ex-husband Tom Cruise and her current one, country singer Keith Urban, fit into these revelations. ·