According to an article from Michael Riedel in the NY Post, Tom Hanks has signed on to play tabloid newspaper columnist Mike McAlary in Lucky Guy, a play that will open in Broadway in January for a limited run at a Shubert theater.

Lucky Guy is a new play written by Nora Ephron, with whom Tom Hanks has worked on Sleepless in Seattle and You've Got Mail, and that will be directed by George C. Wolfe.
It will captures the end of the era of newspaper dominance, when one last of the great NYC newspaper columnists, Mike McAlary, sold papers, drove stories and had the pulse of the city.

A tough guy who drank with cops, McAlary covered the major crime stories of the ’80s and ’90s, most famously the sodomizing of Abner Louima by the police. McAlary won the Pulitzer Prize for his aggressive coverage of the case in 1998, just a few months before he died of colon cancer at 41.

McAlary didn’t always get it right. Some of his editors suspected he “piped,” or made up, quotes for dramatic effect. And he screwed up spectacularly in 1994 when, in the Daily News, he accused a woman of making up a rape charge to promote a feminist rally.

The woman, a lesbian, claimed to have been raped in Park Slope. McAlary wrote that the police doubted her story. His column ran under the incendiary headline “Rape hoax the real crime.”

The next day Police Commissioner William Bratton held a press conference to announce that, in fact, there was evidence of rape. He also apologized to the victim.

The woman hit McAlary and the News with a $12 million libel suit.

Ephron’s play deals with both the Louima case and the libel suit — the high and low points of his career.
Source : NY Post

Tom Hanks has been looking to do a play in New York for several years. He’s been offered many scripts but reportedly chose this one because of its compelling lead character and his own friendship with Nora Ephron.

We'll let you know when we learn more about this.

Tom Hanks is currently filming the movie Captain Phillips, directed by Paul Greengrass. We added some photos of the shooting a few weeks ago and now we have seven more to our gallery, that were also taken around April 18th, so there are not really "new". Since a lot of the scenes are shot at sea, it's pretty difficult to get more photos.

On April 8, 2009 Somali pirates approached the American cargo ship Maersk Alabama. The pirates and American crew members exchanged fire.
The pirates gained access to the ship as their boat sank due to the gunfire exchange. As the pirates searched the ship, Americans overcame one pirate and took him captive.
After 13 hours of negotiations, Captain Richard Phillips agreed to board a lifeboat with the pirates. The plan was for the two groups to exchange prisoners at sea. However, Phillips ended up captive on the lifeboat for three days and was tortured by the men who held him. He attempted one daring escape and failed before being rescued by the Navy SEALs on April 12, 2009.

Tom Hanks is the narrator of the audiobook version of I Am a Pole (and So Can You), Stephen Colbert children's book about a flag pole. It's good to know that it's a satirical children's book and it is therefore more addressed to adults than children.

Stephen Colbert first pitched the idea of a book about a flagpole's search for its identity during a two-part interview in January with Where the Wild Things Are author Maurice Sendak. The interview became a viral sensation and Colbert's fans clamored for a real book.

The print version and the audio download will go on sale May 8, with the audio CD following on May 29. You can already pre-order the Hardcover book for $8.69 and the Audiobook (on CD) for $3.48 on Amazon. This eight-minute audiobook will be just $1.49 as an audio download.

All of Stephen Colbert's and Tom Hanks's proceeds from the audiobook will go to USVets, an organization that helps military veterans transition back to civilian life.