A shooting schedule was established, and the production team headed out to New Zealand to record his scenes.”He did a lot of ad-libbing,” Burnett told The New York Times “Some of the funniest stuff in the pilot came from him. He, in turn, was enthused and called Burnett to tell him he would do it. That was when Jagger’s name was first floated.In time-honoured Hollywood fashion, the script was shipped to Jagger’s people, who liked it enough to pass it on to the main man. He liked the concept but was committed to a pilot for ABC’s rival NBC. For months, as they were developing the scripts and pitching the idea to network executives, they thought of Jeff Goldblum, known for his work in The Big Chill, The Fly and Jurassic Park.Executives at ABC (and at a couple of other networks) loved the idea, but there was one snag: nobody had actually approached Goldblum to see if he was willing As it turned out, he was and he wasn’t.

They were interested in exploring the sort of real-time, reality TV-inflected material that has been so successfully produced in shows such as 24 (about an anti-terrorism unit and its multiple races against time) and Lost (about the survivors of an air crash) – only they wanted to make their show funny.Having settled on the idea of a celebrity heist caper, they then needed to find a celebrity. (A hotel room in Auckland stood in for the Manhattan penthouse).The series is the brainchild of Rob Burnett, whose day job is executive producer for the late-night chat show host David Letterman, and his partner Jon Beckerman. But agreeing to be the victim of a Manhattan penthouse robbery for the benefit of US network television is a new one even for him. The 62-year-old Rolling Stone was reported yesterday to have agreed to take the pivotal role in a new television series being developed at ABC.
The premise is both simple and alluring: a janitor in a swanky New York apartment building becomes so enraged by the carefree lifestyle of Manhattan’s rich and famous that he and a group of like-minded associates decide to track one down and take him for everything he’s got.Their target, at least in the pilot episode, is none other than Jagger, who read the script a few weeks ago and liked it so much that he has already completed his scenes while on one of his frequent world tours. It withdrew it unreservedly and apologised for the distress and embarrassment caused.. Mick Jagger has been feted, idolised, busted for drugs, schmoozed by French politicians, courted by some of the world’s most beautiful women and cast in a number of movies. However, it was now happy to accept that the allegation was untrue.

Kirsty Howarth, solicitor for Associated Newspapers, said that it published the articles in good faith on the basis of information with which it had been provided and which at the time it had no reason to doubt. She was content to accept this, together with her costs, in view of the apology which the newspaper was to provide in open court. Mr Grey said that Miss Stone had accepted a substantial sum in damages which she proposed to give to charity. Those witnesses would have included members of her security team, her driver, staff at The Ivy, and friends dining with her. Had it proceeded to trial she would have called evidence from numerous witnesses to demonstrate that her son had dinner with her that night and that he was not left in the car outside. Mr Grey said that Miss Stone was appalled to find these allegations appearing in the Daily Mail and then repeated elsewhere in the media.

She had no option but to issue the claim for libel to set the record straight. Mr Grey said that the allegations in the first article, and repeated in the second, were completely untrue. Far from leaving her son outside in the car for two hours – or at all – they had dinner together inside the restaurant. It was their last night together before her son flew back to America the following day. Neither was there a shred of truth in the allegation that Miss Stone was having a late-night dinner date with a “mystery male companion”. The next month the Daily Mail published another article – “Sharon’s dinner date and this time her baby goes too” – which was accompanied by a photo of her carrying her other son, who is two months old, in a carry-cot outside a restaurant.

It reminded readers that three weeks before, Miss Stone had attracted criticism when she left her other son in her car with a minder as she enjoyed a late night meal at The Ivy. “The article conveyed the clear allegation that Sharon Stone had neglected her son in a shameful and selfish way.” The behaviour ascribed to the actress was subsequently reported in other newspapers in the UK and worldwide. Mr Grey said that it included various remarks critical of her for doing so, said that the boy was likely to be uncomfortable in the heat and traumatised by paparazzi flash photography. It said that Stone had left the four-year-old asleep in a car with her driver for more than two hours outside The Ivy while she enjoyed a late-night dinner date with what it described as a “mystery male companion”. The Basic Instinct star was not at London’s High Court for the settlement of her libel action against the Daily Mail.
Her solicitor, Rupert Grey, told Mr Justice Eady that the newspaper published the article last June accompanied by a photo, taken through a car windscreen at night, of Stone’s son, with his face blanked out, asleep in the back with the driver in the front seat.