A group of A-listers are set to read some Grade-A literature. Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts and Bruce Willis, among other stars, will recite from the works of Ernest Hemingway in San Francisco this October, says USA Today.

They’ll be joined at the event, which benefits The Painted Turtle, a camp for children suffering from deadly illnesses, by fellow celebs Danny DeVito, Danny Glover and Edward James Olmos.

The staged reading takes place on Oct. 27 at San Francisco’s Davies Symphony, says USA Today.

Tom Hanks still feels a responsibility to the Ohio theater troupe that gave him an early break and will help with a major fundraising campaign.

Maybe that’s only fitting, since Hanks says the Great Lakes Theater Festival taught him an important lesson in responsibility as an actor. The 52-year-old Oscar winner says he learned that you have to show up prepared, knowing your lines and what the scene is about.

Hanks has signed on as the public face of an effort to raise the last $3.6 million needed to provide the Great Lakes with a new home. The historic Hanna Theatre at Cleveland’s Playhouse Square is being renovated into a state-of-the-art facility.

It will be a long way from Lakewood High School, where Hanks performed with the theater company in 1977.

The fight for control of the Screen Actors Guild took a dramatic turn today, when Tom Hanks, Alec Baldwin and Sally Field joined several other high-profile actors in endorsing a group of dissidents  mounting an election challenge to leaders of Hollywood’s largest union.

A group known as Unite for Strength said it had lined up support from several dozen high-profile backers for a slate of candidates who are seeking to fill 11 Hollywood division seats on the national board of the Screen Actors Guild, plus 22 seats for those who serve as alternate board members.

The challengers are taking direct aim at Membership First, the Hollywood-based political group within SAG that holds a slight majority on the national board and came to power in 2005 vowing to take a harder line in negotiations with the studios.

They accuse the incumbents of mishandling the current contract negotiations and waging a misguided campaign to discredit the smaller actors union, the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, which recently reached a new three-year contract with the studios.

In an e-mail message distributed to 38,000 Hollywood SAG members, Field, who won an Oscar for “Norma Rae” and currently stars in the TV series “Brothers & Sisters,” urged her colleagues to support the dissidents in order “to end the senseless war with AFTRA and start building a united front of actors to fight for more working opportunities and better pay.”

The Sept. 18 election could be pivotal in charting the union’s course and determining whether, and how soon, the stalemate with the studios ends.

Membership First has lined up its share of top-drawer backers and candidates. The candidates include Joely Fisher, star of the sitcom ” ‘Til Death”; Keith Carradine, who played a special agent in the “Dexter” TV series; and Scott Bakula, known for his role as the captain in “Star Trek: Enterprise.”

Membership First, which has made issues affecting so-called middle-class actors a priority issue, opposes merging the two unions, contending that AFTRA has too many nonactors as members.

The Hollywood glitterati are regulars on Main Street in Park City, but a celebrity sighting in eastern Summit County is rare.That is likely why some Oakley residents nearly swooned when actor Tom Hanks was spotted Tuesday at Ken’s Kash grocery store at about 3:30 p.m.

“[Hanks] said they were out for a drive,” a clerk at Ken’s Kash told The Park Record Tuesday.

Hanks’ wife Rita Wilson was with him at the store.

“He just stood in line to pay for his drink,” the clerk said.

Weber Canyon resident Matt Gordon, who works at The Park Record, said he “was just standing behind him in line and everybody else was freaking out because it was Tom Hanks.”

Ken’s Kash is a commercial landmark in Oakley started by Summit County Commissioner Ken Woolstenhulme in the 1970s. Woolstenhulme sold the store in July to Sandy resident Larry Devey.

“That’s interesting,” Woolstenhulme said when told Hanks was in the store. “I just think it’s great that he was there.”

It is the set for Tom Hanks blockbuster Angels and Demons, the sequel to The Da Vinci Code.

The original book by Dan Brown so infuriated the Catholic Church that the Vatican banned director Ron Howard from filming there.

As a result, Howard and his cast have been forced to relocate to Los Angeles, where set designers are painstakingly recreating a scale model of the Vatican.

The film is set in Rome and two key locations are the churches of Santa Maria del Popolo and Santa Maria della Vittoria. The makers were denied entry to both.

Now Howard is hoping that audiences will not be able to spot the real from the fake when Angels and Demons is released next year. They have also used the former Royal Palace at Caserta, near Naples, as a double for the Vatican interior.

The film sees Hanks reprise his role as Harvard professor Robert Langdon. This time he is on a mission to save the Vatican from destruction

Declaring the ban, Father Marco Fibbi, a Vatican spokesman, said: “Usually we read the script but in this case it wasn’t necessary. Just the name Dan Brown was enough. Angels and Demons peddles a type of fantasy that damages our common religious beliefs, just like The Da Vinci Code did.”

The Catholic Church previously described The Da Vinci Code as “a pot pourri of nonsense, a phantasmagorical cocktail of inventions”.

Angels and Demons co-stars Ewan McGregor and Stellan Skarsgard.

During shooting in Rome earlier this year, Hanks won widespread admiration when he halted filming to escort a passing bride to her wedding at the Pantheon.

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To arrive at our top 10 stars with the most devoted followers, we reached out to E-Poll Market Research for the 30 actors with the highest E-Score appeal data. We then created a metric that weighed these scores with online fan activity through Google Blogs and the average international box office of each star’s last three wide-release films according to Box Office Mojo.

At the top of our list, Smith has the second-highest E-Score appeal ranking, an average box office gross of $420 million and is the second most talked about star on the Web.

Tom Hanks, who ranks at No. 2 on our list, is another actor who retains his personality through various roles. Hanks’ appeal ranking placed him just outside of the top five, but his box office success boosted his rank. As the man who brought Forrest Gump to life, Hanks has made a career out of choosing characters that are charming and possess honorable ambitions.

That consistency in choice of likable roles leads to continuous box office success. “There’s an aspect of brand familiarity there,” says Michael Levine, Hollywood media expert and author.

But the likability factor of celebrities is dependent on the intersection of their personal and private lives. As most of the names on our list prove–the less the public knows about the personal lives of stars, the more favorably they feel towards them.

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Some things just aren’t worth fighting for after all.

Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson have dropped their breach-of-contract lawsuit against three companies that put up part of the money to make My Big Fat Greek Wedding, which they had accused of hanging onto a bigger-than-fair share of the proceeds.

Production companies representing the powerhouse couple, coproducer Gary Goetzman and Wedding star Nia Vardalos, whom Hanks and Wilson teamed up with after catching her one-act play the culture-clash comedy was based on, sued Gold Circle Films, Big Wedding Productions and Vortex Pictures last August.

An attorney for the plaintiffs filed papers Friday in Los Angeles Superior Court requesting a dismissal “without prejudice,” meaning they can choose to refile their complaint at a later date. There was no immediate comment from their camp as to why they decided to abandon ship.

They had sought unspecified damages and a full accounting of the film’s overall profits, including box office, home video, cable and all related grosses.

Last year, Gold Circle VP Scott Niemeyer said that they had never opposed Hanks & Co.’s right to a full audit.

“Gold Circle has fully complied with its contractual obligations and has already paid plaintiffs a combined total of over $44 million in profits,” he said.

But while Gold Circle’s account of the film’s grosses totaled about $287 million, My Big Fat Greek Wedding’s estimated worldwide take at the box office was $368.7 million, per tracker BoxOfficeMojo.com.

The movie cost about $5 million to make, according to the lawsuit. Vardalos’ contract had her making off 8 percent of the gross profits, while her fellow plaintiffs were promised one-third of the remainder after the necessary disbursements were made.

Tom Hanks has hired a pistol-packing security guard to patrol his posh Sun Valley getaway to keep the constructors crew away from his estate.

According to reports last month, the two times Oscar winning actor has been engrossed in money battle with Storey Construction, which built his home in 2002, for the past six years.

While earlier the star and his actress wife, Rita Wilson, withheld the final 3 million dollar payment, claiming “shoddy construction,” they were later forced to pay up. Now they”re appealing to get back 2.5 million dollars.

Now, Miles Stanislaw, the lawyer for contractor Gary Storey, who has the right to inspect the site to gather evidence for his defence, has said that his workers are horrified because Hanks has a guy with a semi-automatic and two clips of ammo eyeballing them.

“It’’s as hazardous a condition as you can have. The other day, the guard tripped and fell on a piece of plywood with his gun on him. It could have gone off and had fatal consequences. It is inconceivable a person like Tom Hanks, who claims to be the voice of the little people, could tolerate this,” The New York Post has quoted the lawyer, as saying.

In response, Hanks” rep, Leslee Dart, said: “One security guard had to be hired after Storey tried to force his way onto the Hanks” property at 7 a.m., unannounced, with five pickup trucks full of his cronies. The one guard that was hired is an off-duty police officer who, by Idaho law, is allowed to carry a gun.” Stanislaw called Dart’’s dawn raid allegation “a total fabrication.”

Meanwhile, the security guard himself, Shane Gilbert, said: “I”m very well-trained and capable. Security guards don”t pack heat just to go around shooting people.” But he added he thinks the ongoing Hanks-Storey war is “a ridiculous battle. It’’s a big pissing match.” (ANI)

Added pictures from the John Adams press conference.

A Blaine County judge has ruled he has no authority to stop guards employed by actor Tom Hanks from carrying guns while accompanying inspectors at the star’s sprawling compound north of the central Idaho resort town of Ketchum.

Fifth District Court Judge Robert J. Elgee made the ruling Wednesday.

Hanks and his wife, Rita Wilson, accuse Storey Construction Inc. of shoddy workmanship in the building of a house and three cottages, but lost in arbitration and earlier this year had a second arbitration request rejected.

They have appealed to the Idaho Supreme Court.

An attorney for Storey Construction says inspectors must enter the property to prevent destruction of evidence, but don’t feel safe if accompanied by armed guards.