Celebrity Mound

Fire officials canceled Friday’s shoot for a new Tom Hanks movie after a special-effects assistant was critically injured when a simulated stinger missile exploded.

Stars of “Charlie Wilson’s War,” including Hanks and Julia Roberts, were not on set at the time of Thursday’s accident, Fire Capt. Darren Moon said.

The handheld device exploded as a group of special effects specialists tested it at Downey Studios, a former aerospace factory 10 miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles, Moon said.

The assistant, whose name was not released, remained in critical condition after surgery, Moon said.

The cause of the explosion was under investigation. The device had been scheduled to be launched from a helicopter during filming Friday, Moon said.

The film is based on a nonfiction book about former Rep. Charlie Wilson’s covert dealings to fund the CIA’s secret war against the former Soviet Union in Afghanistan during the 1980s.

Tom Hanks is seen as one of Hollywood’s nice guys – but the Oscar winner’s first wife, the mother of his kids, strongly disagreed with that perception.
In newly unearthed court papers published in the upcoming bio “The Tom Hanks Enigma,” by David Gardner, actress Susan Dillingham charges that Hanks harassed her and attempted to kill her career.

“My husband has repeatedly verbally abused and humiliated me during the past 90 days in my home. This caused me to suffer great emotional distress,” Dillingham wrote an L.A. court in asking for a restraining order against Hanks.

Dillingham, whose stage name was Samantha Lewes, died from bone cancer in 2002. During their messy divorce, which began in 1985 and dragged on for three years, the actress said Hanks tried to force her into depositions as she took the lead roles in a series of plays. “[It's] designed to harass and upset me at a time when I should be focusing all of my energies on my job,” she wrote in one legal missive.

Hanks shot back in his own legal filing, alleging that Dillingham was delaying a divorce trial “merely to harass me and try to squeeze an unfair settlement out of me.”

The couple – college sweethearts who wed after their son, Colin, was born in 1977 – began to have problems when Hanks’ career took off in hits like “Splash” and Dillingham’s stalled. They also had a daughter, Elizabeth, in 1982.

“Tom was spending less and less time at home . . . [and] with two children to care for and a husband who was away for long stretches . . . it was difficult [for her] to get work,” Gardner writes. A year after the divorce, Hanks wed actress Rita Wilson.

Gardner also reveals that Hanks’ kid brother, Jim, played a Forrest Gump-type character in a little-known soft-core sex flick two years before Tom created the role that won him an Oscar. In “Buford’s Beach Bunnies,” Jim invented the “now-famous jerky run associated with Forrest Gump” and, like Gump, showed a shy politeness toward women by calling them “ma’am,” the author says.

(via Page Six)

Her husband Tom Hanks joins her

(photos courtesy of Getty Images)