Universal Pictures has announced the cancellation of American Gangster, the film based on the true story of Harlem drug lord Frank Lucas, who smuggled heroin into the US in the coffins of soldiers killed in Vietnam. The movie was to have begun shooting in New York next month with a budget of $80m - but after director Antoine Fuqua walked off the film citing creative differences with studio heads, the entire project has now been shelved. It was to have starred Denzel Washington as Lucas and Benicio Del Toro as the New York detective who eventually apprehended him.

Mel Gibson has been granted a three year restraining order against a homeless man who allegedly trespassed on the star's estate and demanded they pray together. 34-year-old Zack Sinclair is being charged with six counts of trespass and disorderly conduct and has received an extended restraining order barring him from coming within 100 yards of Gibson, his wife or their seven children, their home, the Gibson children's school and the chapel that the family use.

Johnny Depp is lined up to star in an adaptation of a novel for which a multi-million dollar rights deal has just been signed. The rights to Gregory David Roberts' novel Shantaram have been sold to Warner Brothers for a reported $2m, a week before the book is even published in the US. Depp will play the novel's narrator, a young Australian heroin addict who escapes from prison and goes on the run to the slums of India before journeying to Afghanistan in the 1980s to fight the occupying Soviet army. After completing work on Pirates of the Caribbean 2 and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Depp will also co-produce the project.