A look inside Hollywood and the movies : ‘The Firm,’ the Movie: Guess They Didn’t Like the Book

When a handful of heavyweights get involved in bringing a bestseller to the screen, it’s almost guaranteed that there’ll be some serious mucking about with the book to accommodate casting. Star power , as it’s called.

In the latest example of this practice, a key character, the womanizing senior attorney Avery in John Grisham’s novel “The Firm,” could become a female attorney instead. Specifically, Meryl Streep.

How does the Oscar-winning actress play a middle-aged lawyer in what was once an all-male Mob-run firm? Very simply--director Sydney Pollack wants her in the movie, due to shoot in the fall.

Pollack and Streep collaborated in the multi-Academy Award-winning “Out of Africa,” making them members of a mutual admiration society. So why not have her team up with Tom Cruise, who’s been cast in the leading role as junior attorney Mitchell McDeere? They are most definitely “box-office material.”

The script is now in the hands of a third writer to incorporate Pollack’s wishes. David Rabe wrote the first three versions, Daniel Pyne a fourth and now David Rayfiel is working on a fifth. Rayfiel is concentrating on creating a romance between Streep and Cruise; in the book, Cruise’s character had eyes only for his wife, and their close relationship is critical to the plot.

The book’s other important relationship is the one between McDeere and Avery. But since he’s now a she, one of the most dramatic sequences will have to be completely revamped.

Sources say author Grisham is not pleased with how his book is being adapted, though, for the record, the final script is probably months away.

Still, in the words of someone who read one of Rabe’s early versions (one without the sex change), the screenplay “hardly resembled the book at all.”

Director Pollack didn’t return a reporter’s call. Producer Scott Rudin was unavailable for comment and fellow producer John Davis said “no comment.”

How the memory fails. Wasn’t “The Bonfire of the Vanities” only a couple of years ago?