When first you heard of Bernie Madoff's $50bn Ponzi scheme, a single thought will have run through your head: please God, tell me entertainers weren't involved.
Prepare for disappointment.
This week it has emerged that Madoff was - and let's get the obligatory parlour game reference out of the way now - a mere one degree of separation from Kevin Bacon. The actor and his wife Kyra Sedgwick were massive Madoff investors, and though their spokesman refuses to elaborate on specific details, there is speculation that the well-liked couple might have lost everything bar the land they own and the contents of their current accounts.
Alas, it doesn't stop there. This one goes all the way to Mr Spielberg himself, whose Wunderkinder Foundation has also taken an unspecified hit, along with his DreamWorks colleague Jeffrey Katzenberg.
So already we have a producer, a director and an actor with a personal motivation for telling the Madoff story on the big screen - and the project could be scripted by fellow multimillion-dollar victim Eric Roth, the guy who wrote the Forrest Gump screenplay. And who is presumably discovering that Mama's homily "life is like a box of chocolates" is not quite the philosophical comfort he once averred.
As for where it will all end, the full extent of Hollywood's exposure to the fraud is still far from known. Though, of course, we're all praying that the Church of Scientology's fortune remains wholly undiminished.
