Indiana Jones -- he's got to be Harrison Ford, doesn't he? Okay, we had young Indiana Jones characters -- River Phoenix in the opening sequence of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and Sean Patrick Flanery in The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles -- but I never really thought of Indy as a character who could be cast in any other way. You know, you figure the part in Raiders of the Lost Ark was practically written for Ford, who'd been in a couple of George Lucas films before that anyway (Star Wars and American Graffiti).

However, that assumption couldn't be more wrong. I've been digging around on that great source of reliable information, the Internet, and reading all kinds of stories about the casting of Indiana Jones. The general gist is that Steven Spielberg was interested in Ford, but Lucas didn't want to be one of those directors who cast the same guy in all his movies. So they tested a bunch of other actors, and were seriously interested in one who had to back out ... and then ended up with Harrison Ford after all. We are all profoundly grateful. But let's take a look at some of those actors allegedly under consideration, and a few more that I threw into the mix just for fun. (I picked only actors who were alive and the right age at the time, which is why you don't see Steve McQueen on the list.)

I've got to wonder... If there is an afterlife, can those who have died see what's happening on earth? Variety has just reported that Peter Hyams is going to helm a remake of Fritz Lang's last American film -- Beyond a Reasonable Doubt. What would Lang say if he heard this his film was going to be remade by the man who brought us Running Scared, Timecop, The Relic, and End of Days? That's not to say that the man can't do it, or that great directors can't fail (as Gus Van Sant's Psycho taught us), but his track record doesn't instill much confidence.

The classic, which focuses on an ill-advised scheme to point out the flimsiness of circumstantial evidence, will get "a true 21st century spin for a new generation of cinema-goers," according to Foresight head Mark Damon. Yet again, I ask why it couldn't have just been "inspired by." The original plot: A publisher wants to make a point about how crappy circumstantial evidence is, so he talks his would-be son-in-law into planting clues suggesting he was behind a recent murder. At the last moment, they could bring out the truth and reveal the flaws in the system and death penalty. However, the guy holding that all-too-important information dies and mucks up the plan.

Anyhow, it's got an, um, interesting cast to boot -- Michael Douglas, Amber Tamblyn, and Jesse Metcalfe. They've certainly younged it up a bit -- the main players in the original, names like Dana Andrews and Joan Fontaine, were all at least in their mid-thirties. Whatever the case, we've got the King of California, plus a girl with a kick-arse 3D glasses-wearing dad and some traveling pants, and John Tucker all spun together for this century. I like most of the cast, and I still can't help but think: Why bother?

It is always a curiosity when Hollywood families come together for a project. I love seeing the Estevezes (aka Sheens) appear together -- sure, even in Men at Work. And sometimes the Coppolas do well with one another -- Talia Shire in her brother's Godfather movies, for example. But often it is a bad idea to work with or cast family members. The most obvious case is Sofia Coppola (Shire's niece) being in her father's The Godfather: Part III. Just recently Jake Paltrow received a paltry reception for a movie he made featuring his sister, Gwyneth. Now, another new filmmaker is attempting a similar feat: According to Variety, Bruce Dern will make his directorial debut with Hart's Location, in which he'll appear alongside his ex-wife, Diane Ladd, and his daughter, Laura Dern. Written by Ashley Reed, the film will appropriately be about family estrangement. Laura will star as a woman seeking to regain custody of her son while also attempting to locate her father, who left when she was 3.

It is worth noting that Diane Ladd has been nominated for three Oscars, all for films in which her daughter also appears (Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore; Wild at Heart; Rambling Rose). The last of these even saw a nomination for Laura, as well, marking the first time a mother and daughter were ever recognized by the Academy for the same film. So, for the women, at least, Hart's Location seems to be a great idea. Maybe there's more Oscars in their future. On the other hand, it also seems to have a sort of novelty to it, like the badly-received It Runs in the Family, which featured a lot of the Douglases (Michael, Kirk, Cameron and Diana), in what appeared to exist just for the stunt-casting. Like that movie, Hart's Location also unites a real-life divorced couple (Dern and Ladd parted ways in 1969). Interestingly enough, though, Ladd has already directed her ex-husband, in 1994's little-seen Mrs. Munck. Hopefully Dern can do better in this reversal of roles. As long as he spends more attention on making a good movie rather than on working out his personal issues (he told Daily Variety that the project makes sense for them because it's about the things you wish you'd said to your family members), then I'll be looking forward to it. The film begins shooting in New Orleans in February.

I have this theory that everyone was freaked out by something in their childhood, something that haunts them for years on end. My younger brother used to burst into tears if anyone so much as mentioned the Incredible Hulk (and boy, is he glad I just revealed that to the world). I have one friend who can't bear to watch balloons float up into the sky, and he's blocked out the memory of why that is, exactly (maybe his parents broke up while he was watching The Red Balloon?).

Me, I spent years traumatized by Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. Patrick Walsh has already mentioned Willy Wonka in his brilliant post on non-horror movies that scared the crap out of him as a kid, but for me it wasn't the tunnel scene that did me in. All I remember is seeing a kid (Augustus, as it turned out) falling into a chocolate pond and getting sucked up a tube with a look of abject horror on his face -- and I ran from the room in a blind panic. From then on, even thinking about the movie made me shudder in fear; and when I finally forced myself to watch it just a few years ago, I felt 100 percent vindicated. Man, that is one creepy flick.

Celebrities aren't so different from you and me. Recently, in honor of Halloween, we asked a bunch of them what movie freaked THEM out when they were kids, and their responses were immediate, sometimes surprising and always interesting, even (or especially) if it wasn't a horror movie that haunted them -- Michael Douglas, for example, couldn't shake the memory of his father, Kirk Douglas, playing Vincent Van Gogh. But their confessions included tons of classic and obscure horror movies, too. Which movie makes Ellen Page cry after sex? Who spent their childhood terrified of Stephen King's clowns? Why did Cate Blanchett spend years avoiding swimming pools? Perhaps most interesting is that so many of them were allowed to watch horror movies when they were so young. Quick, someone call protective services! It's not too late, Adrien Brody!

Check out our lineup of movies that scared celebs when they were kids, and see if any of their fears match yours. Then let us know: Which movie from your childhood still makes you break out in a cold, cold sweat?

Judging from the weekend box office estimates reported by Variety, David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises was the greatest beneficiary of positive buzz generated by the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). Earning $36,851 per screen, the film known alternately as "the Russian mobster movie" or "the one where Viggo Mortensen fights naked," Cronenberg's latest soared to the top of the specialty charts. You can catch up by reading the review by Cinematical's Ryan Stewart and listening to James Rocchi's interview with the director. As I noted yesterday, Eastern Promises won the People's Choice Award at TIFF.

Julie Taymor's Across the Universe, driven by the music of The Beatles, drew some of the harshest reviews of any gala presentation at TIFF, though some, like Roger Ebert and Anne Thompson of Variety, vigorously defended it. Audiences flocked to see it, to the tune of an estimated $29,783 per screen. Trailing behind in third place, another TIFF gala presentation, Paul Haggis' war-themed drama In the Valley of Elah, still averaged a strong $16,666 per location. James Rocchi was not very enthusiastic, though: "You can tell everyone involved wanted to make an important statement. What they would end up making was a fairly indifferent movie."

Two other films that screened at TIFF also opened this weekend, though neither generated much buzz coming out of the festival. Mike Cahill's comedy King of California, with Michael Douglas and Even Rachel Wood, played at five locations and averaged $7,411 at five locations. While that's not terrific, it's far better than Francois Girard's period film Silk, with Keira Knightley, which tanked, earning just $1,058 per screen at 122 locales.

He's glorified greed, fended off a psycho ex-girlfriend and even served as president of the United States -- but at heart, Michael Douglas has always been plain ol' crazy. In King of California, a festival crowd-pleaser from first-time director Mike Cahill, Douglas is Charlie, who's just been released from a mental institution and is convinced that there's Spanish treasure buried under the local Costco; Evan Rachel Wood, as his teenaged daughter, plays Dulcinea to his Don Quixote. Though Douglas has always excelled at playing characters who are slightly unhinged (as Kim Voynar notes in her review), Charlie is what you'd call certifiable, and in a way this role brings Douglas back full circle -- he did, after all, launch his movie career by producing an indie about nutjobs called One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. After endearing himself forever to this interviewer by chatting at length about the finer points of Cal football (go Bears!), Douglas spoke easily about his attitudes on directing, his lovely co-star and his recent return to madness.

Cinematical: It's rare to see you in an indie. Do you think that's because you see fewer smaller scripts these days, or do they just not jump out at you?

Michael Douglas: First of all, my whole career began in indie pictures to a large degree. I don't know. You know, I just haven't been been offered ... maybe people just get intimidated. I've had a few, but I haven't made that many movies really since I got married. If you look back, since 2000 I've only done about four pictures or something like that, so maybe that has something to do with it.

If there's one thing Michael Douglas does really well, it's crazy. In 1993, he did crazy to near-perfection as William "D-Fens" Foster in Joel Schumacher's Falling Down. I still think of Douglas's performance in that film 14 years later -- I ruminated on it most recently while stuck in traffic for 40 minutes due to road construction on my way to the Telluride Film Festival. Visions of Douglas wigging out and blowing up the construction site after he confronts the foreman and confirms his long-held suspicion that there was, in fact, no reason whatsoever for the construction that was tying up traffic danced in my head as I sat there whiling away the endless minutes. Douglas tackled a different kind of crazy in Wonder Boys, the film adaptation of one of my favorite novels, in which he perfectly embodied Professor Grady Tripp, who's gotten lost in a haze of pot smoke while having an affair with his boss's wife and endlessly writing a novel called Wonder Boys, which seems to have no end.

In King of California, which played at Sundance earlier this year and opens theatrically this weekend, Douglas tackles another kind of crazy as Charlie: long-haired, wild-eyed dad to a teenage daughter, Miranda (Evan Rachel Wood, who's become rather the go-to girl of the moment for angsty teen girl roles). As we enter Charlie and Miranda's story, Charlie has just returned home after a relaxing two-year stay in a mental institution, during which the now 16-year-old Miranda has fended for herself, dropping out of school in order to hold down a crappy fast-food job to pay the bills and keep their dilapidated house, and even buy her own car. Miranda has achieved a measure of scrappy independence without Charlie in her life, and his reappearance is met with something less than the enthusiasm Charlie anticipated.

Twenty years have passed since 1987's Wall Street taught America that "Greed is good." The film won Michael Douglas a Best Actor Academy Award for his blistering performance as Gordon Gekko, a high-powered corporate raider. I re-watched Wall Street recently. It is definitely a product of the 1980's (ginormous cell phones, etc.) but still holds up, and has spawned a lot of imitators, like the very good Boiler Room. And now a sequel is on the way -- 20th Century Fox has just sealed a deal to bring the character of Gekko back to the big screen. At the end of Wall Street, Gordon Gekko had been busted with the help of his protege, played by Charlie Sheen. His fate was left up in the air, but the sequel confirms that he went to jail. The new film will take off with Gekko out of jail and "resuming his machinations on a global scale in the hedge-fund era." The title will be Money Never Sleeps -- which is one of Gekko's mottos.

Douglas is returning to the role and as for Gekko, he says "I don't think he's much different. He's just had more time to think about what to do." The new film's writer, Stephen Schiff (The Deep End of the Ocean, True Crime), says Gekko will be restyled and might just have an influence on big business fashion all over again -- "If you weren't wearing suspenders before Wall Street, you were certainly wearing them after." (I hate to contradict the man, but I've never worn suspenders in my life). Master of machismo Oliver Stone co-wrote and directed the original Wall Street, but will not be back for the sequel, despite having been begged for months by Douglas and Schiff. Schiff doesn't think Bud Fox, Charlie Sheen's character, will return either, and that surely rules out Martin Sheen as well. Remember that scene in Hot Shots! Part Deux where Martin and Charlie Sheen pass each other on the river, point, and yell "I loved you in Wall Street!" That was hilarious.

Todd Wagner and Mark Cuban's 2929 Prods. is stepping up its game, signing Michael Douglas to star in the courtroom thriller Tragic Indifference. Pic is based on the real-life story of Donna Baily, a single mother who was paralyzed back in 2000 following a car accident in which her Ford Explorer flipped over. Douglas will play Tab Turner, the attorney who helped force her liability case into court (instead of going the "keep quiet and take the money" route) where he scored her a huge settlement, as well as managed to get some of Ford's top guns to show up to the hospital to apologize for the faults in their vehicle. Now there's something you don't see every day.

Stephen Gerard will pen the script; he'll work off Adam Penenberg's 2003 book of the same name. I'm actually looking forward to seeing Douglas' new film, King of California, after his previous three (You, Me and Dupree, The Sentinel, The In-Laws) left me feeling -- how shall I say it -- indifferent, I suppose. Speaking about the role, Douglas said, "This gives me the chance to play a different kind of character. I played a lawyer once, in Fatal Attraction, and there wasn't much about the law in that picture." He does have a point; though I wonder if Tragic Indifference will include any scenes in which Douglas and the not-yet-cast single mother engage in risque activity in the backseat of a Ford truck. I mean, this isn't the greatest film in the world for Ford -- the least you can do is show some of the benefits of owning their product. Then again, that would be so wrong on so many different levels; I don't even want to go there.

Michael Douglas excels at portraying middle-aged men who are a few yards shy of being neurologically balanced. Witness his turns as a pot-smoking writer in Wonder Boys and as a same-sex-loving cop on TV's Will & Grace for examples of this. And now there's another role to add to this list -- that of the mentally unhinged Charlie in King of California, the rights to which were just picked up by First Look for a cool $3 million.

This funny, poignant, crowd-pleasing dramedy from talented first-time writer-director Mike Cahill tells the story of Douglas' Charlie, who returns home to his daughter Miranda (the sublime Evan Rachel Wood) after a two-year stint in a mental institution seemingly crazier than ever -- muttering about naked Chinese men washing up on the California beaches and 17th-century Spanish doubloons buried somewhere in SoCal. Thanks in part to her dad's magnetic eccentricity, his unflinching optimism that there is indeed buried treasure nearby, and her own sheer boredom, Miranda agrees to aid Charlie in his quest.

The film that emerges from their father-daughter treasure hunt could have been one 90-minute cliche. It could have been just another quirky indie about a cartoonishly dysfunctional family. But Michael Douglas, looking as bearded, mustachioed and grayed as the Man of la Mancha, is so sympathetic, so pure of heart in his delusion that it's impossible not to see him as a modern-day Don Quioxte. One crazy yet tender look from Douglas, his eyes popping wide out of his head, an innocent (and mildly deranged) smile playing across his lips, and it's easy to see why Miranda would line up next to him to joust a windmill or two. That said, the film would be lost without Wood's compelling performance to anchor it.