We've heard some strange inspirations for movies in our time – the Monopoly film springs to mind. But basing a movie on an apartment? That's a winner. This is not a remake of The Apartment, which would be sacrilegious, but a film based on actual living quarters in a swanky area of New York. Paramount has bought the right to an article that appeared in the New York Times called Mystery On Fifth Avenue. JJ Abrams, who likes a little mystery, will produce the film about a flat that was designed to feature hidden compartments, messages, puzzles, poems, codes and games in order to entertain the (apparently outrageously spoiled) kids of Wall Street financial experts Steven Klinsky and Maureen Sherry. The gimmicks all came together as a kind of scavenger hunt, with the apartment even having its own accompanying book and soundtrack. Maya Forbes and Wally Wolodarsky are tasked with writing the script. Two things occur to us. Firstly, with a bit of imagination, this could make an intriguing, and rather dark, children's film. Secondly, our own parents really screwed us over in the toy stakes.

When Spike Lee's not busy calling Clint Eastwood out for a bout of fisticuffs, he also makes films - and he's just added a new one to his To Do list. He's planning Time Traveler, an adaptation of the memoirs of one Ronald Mallett. Who, you may ask, is Mallett? Well, if you have to ask, you clearly aren't a theoretical physicist. Mallett is, however, and a distinguished one at that - one of the first African-Americans to get a PhD in the subject, he rose from poverty to an intellectually distinguished career, and has taught at the University of Connecticut for over 30 years now. Along the way, he's written several highly advanced works on the question of time travel. His obsession with the subject apparently stems from the death of his father when Mallet was 10, when, inspired by a comic book version of HG Wells The Time Machine, Ronald vowed to go back and save his father's life. So it's a rags to, well, not riches story (honestly, what they pay academics nowadays) but perhaps rags to intellectual riches. Lee's planning to co-write the film and direct, which should fit him well. After all, he's been flirting with the idea of a time-travel movie for some time, at one point having been attached to make Selling Time, wherein a guy sells a few years from his life expectancy to relive, and correct, the worst day of his life.

Cyd Charisse, one of musical cinema's great icons, died yesterday aged 86. She died in Los Angeles, apparently from heart attack. Charisse, born Tula Ellice Finklea, may not be well known to young movie fans, but her dancing in films of the 1940s and 50s made her one of the genre's best-known faces. Actually, it was her legs for which she became most famous. Her gams that went on for miles (and were said to be insured for a million dollars) were put to good use hoofing with Gene Kelly in Singin' In The Rain and Fred Astaire In Silk Stockings.