Jackson Wants Shaft

Street smart Hollywood boy Samuel L. Jackson is in final negotiations to play the title character in a remake of the 1971 action film 'Shaft'. Stepping into Richard Roundtree's (the original John Shaft) vast street-stomping shoes as a tough-talking private detective, Jackson will - subject to acceptance - star in new Paramount Pictures flick updated from the original Gordon Parks film, itself adapted from a novel by Ernest Tidyman. Following the same plot where Shaft is enlisted by a Harlem mob boss to rescue his kidnapped daughter, director John Singleton plans to shoot this summer from a script recently rewritten by Richard Price. Jackson's imminent deal would make it the first of several other remakes in the works that include 'Superfly', 'Cleopatra Jones' and 'Get Christy Love', for which Whitney Houston has been mentioned as star. With its awesome score by Isaac Hayes, Shaft is largely considered the best in the wave of blaxploitation cinema of the early 1970s. "I loved the original and think it will be a very cool thing to do almost 30 years later,'' Jackson has said of the remake, despite adding concern that his 50 years might work against him, "maybe my doing 'Rules of Engagement' with Scott and Sherry Lansing got them thinking about me. John (Singleton) might initially have thought I was too old, but I definitely have the right sensibility for it, the right temperament, the right attitude."