- Hollywood producers couldn’t have written Colton Harris-Moore’s story better if they had dreamed it up themselves.

No one was surprised to hear that 20th Century Fox jumped at the chance to purchase the rights for a film based on the 19-year-old Washington native’s exploits.

Harris-Moore, suspected of stealing automobiles, boats and airplanes, as well as committing a number of other thefts, earned his nickname — the Barefoot Bandit — by committing some of his crimes without shoes. In 2009, police found footprints in an Iowa airport hangar.

Harris-Moore was apprehended on July 11 after a high-speed boat chase in the Bahamas. He has since been moved to Miami, Florida, where he appeared before a federal judge at an identity hearing. He is being transferred to a federal prison in Seattle, Washington.

His story, which mirrors 2002’s “Catch Me If You Can” — based on the true story of con-artist Frank Abagnale Jr. — has people talking, although details of the “Barefoot” film are still under lock and key.

“I wrote when he first started running that he would get a movie deal,” CNN commenter SICKBOY70 wrote. “They offered him a reward to come in that was nowhere near what the movie people would offer.”

Another CNN.com commenter, BostonChuck, wrote: “It’s a good thing he was caught, he was breaking the law. However… this all seems like something out of Hollywood. It’s going to make a heck of a movie!”

The prospect of a film version also has Hollywood casting directors talking about which young actor might play the role of the barefoot bandit.

“Crash” and “Iron Man” casting director Randi Hiller didn’t hesitate when asked which young Hollywood star would make a good barefoot bandit. “['Percy Jackson' star] Logan Lerman. … He’s young, he’s charming and he’s a really good actor,” Hiller said.

Lerman’s charm could come in handy, too. Hiller said It’s important to cast a likable young man because, while the Barefoot Bandit may be in the wrong, he’s also the protagonist. “You kind of root for him, even though he’s done something really, really wrong,” she added.

Regardless of who nabs the role, Hiller said the film is sure to do well. “Everybody wants more information.”

The movie will most likely follow the tone of “Catch Me If You Can,” Hiller said. “It’s not laugh out loud funny, but there’s definitely amusing bits.”

Casting director Tammara Billik, who also made the connection between the Barefoot Bandit and Leonardo DiCaprio’s “Catch Me If You Can,” said the movie will be a success, whether it’s on the big screen or the flat screen.

When casting a role like this one, it’s important to choose an actor who resembles the other person, she said. However, Billik added, it’s important to remember that “his story is more familiar than his face.”

“You don’t want somebody who can’t act, but looks exactly like the guy,” she added, noting that it might be difficult to find an actor with Harris-Moore’s 6-foot-5 frame — which is why she suggests taller actors like “Friday Night Lights’ ” Zach Gilford and “The Last Song’s” Liam Hemsworth

NEW YORK – “Damages,” the award-winning, critically acclaimed legal thriller, has won a reprieve after three low-rated seasons on the FX network.

DirecTV and Sony Pictures Television announced Monday that the drama series will return for 20 episodes spanning two more seasons. Emmy-winning Glenn Close, Rose Byrne and other stars will return for the new episodes. They will be produced early next year and air exclusively on DirecTV’s satellite service.

DirecTV also will have the rights to air the previous three seasons of “Damages,” the companies said.

The series, which was not expected to be renewed by basic-cable network FX, has won a Golden Globe award, four Emmys, and recently landed five Emmy nominations.

LOS ANGELES – An auction house selling Lucille Ball memorabilia says it is returning the actress’ lifetime achievement awards to her daughter.

Heritage Auction Galleries says a deal reached Saturday will return the awards to Lucie Arnaz Luckinbill, Ball’s daughter with first husband Desi Arnaz.

A sale of dozens of other Ball-related memorabilia will happen Saturday. Items up for bid include a Rolls Royce and love letters to second husband Gary Morton.

The deal announced Saturday ends a legal fight between Luckinbill and Susie Morton, who married Gary Morton after Ball’s death in 1989.

A judge agreed to stop the auction Friday but imposed a high bond Luckinbill couldn’t meet.

She has said the awards will be displayed in a museum honoring her mother.

Jesse James says he’s moving to Austin, Texas so his three children can maintain a close relationship with stepmom Sandra Bullock and their adoptive brother, Louis.

But there’s a problem: An Orange County, California judge has yet to decide in an ongoing custody trial whether to allow Sunny, 6, James’s daughter with ex-wife Janine Lindemulder to leave California, where Lindemulder lives.

“Jesse’s moving either way, and ideally Sunny is going with him,” James’s attorney John Schilling told PEOPLE outside the courthouse. “I think Sandra Bullock’s role is irrelevant here. Of course she has a lot to offer his kids so it’s a fringe benefit to bring them to Texas. But the focus in this case is Jesse and Janine as parents. Janine still has a lot to prove.”

James testified that Sunny visited him while he was in rehab in Arizona, and that at one point the child stayed with Bullock in Texas while he was receiving treatment. Sunny has phone conversations with Bullock “two or three times a week” and they sometimes have iChat conversations, he added.

He called Austin “a better place to be,” without the prying lenses of paparazzi. “We have a big gated house with lots of land,” he said. “Sandy and I spent time there and never once had a problem.”

Lindemulder, 41, a former porn actress and recovering drug addict, has accused James of moving to Texas for the sole purpose of winning Bullock back at the expense of Lindemulder’s relationship with Sunny.

“Jesse treats me with great disregard as a mother, he doesn’t want me in the picture,” Lindemulder testified Tuesday. “I believe I’m trying to be replaced by Sandra Bullock. I can’t compete with what they have.”

Lindemulder has repeatedly stated that she wishes to co-parent with James, Bullock and James’s other ex-wife Karla James. Lindemulder testified that Sunny “loves [Bullock] very much,” but added, “Jesse and Sandra have not reached out to me.”

James has repeatedly raised concerns over Lindemulder’s past drug use, but she has denied relapsing and doesn’t abuse prescription drugs, she has said.

The judge is considering three options: Allowing James to move with Sunny to Texas, leaving Sunny with Lindemulder in California, or having Lindemulder relocate to Texas along with James.

MIAMI – The American teenager who police call the “Barefoot Bandit” was deported to the United States on Tuesday, just hours after he pleaded guilty to a minor offense in the Bahamas.

Law enforcement officials escorted Colton Harris-Moore on a commercial flight to Miami to face prosecution for a two-year string of break-ins and plane thefts across the United States. The FBI took him off the plane and put him into a waiting car. Officials said the 19-year-old convict was taken to a federal jail in Miami, where he is scheduled to have an initial court appearance Wednesday. It’s likely he will eventually be taken to Seattle, where he was indicted.

Harris-Moore was on the plane with Bahamian authorities as well as FBI agents, but he did not know FBI agents were aboard, said John Gillies, FBI special agent in charge of the Miami office. The FBI did not have any authority to arrest Harris-Moore in the Bahamas and waited until he reached Miami to take him into custody, Gillies said.

Earlier Tuesday, Harris-Moore pleaded guilty in the Bahamas to illegally entering the country. He had been arrested in the island country Sunday following a high-speed boat chase.

The charge stemming from his alleged crash of a stolen plane on Great Abaco Island carried a $300 fine. His lawyer, Monique Gomez, said the U.S. Embassy would pay it. Gomez said Harris-Moore wanted to go home.

The shackled teen smiled after the judge read the sentence. Bahamian police had earlier said that he would face other charges including illegal weapons possession related to a string of break-ins and thefts during his weeklong hideout in the country.

Harris-Moore wore white sneakers without laces and kept his head down as armed officers escorted him to the courthouse. A police SWAT team stood by as authorities put up street barricades ahead of the hearing for the celebrity suspect.

Authorities say he earned the “Barefoot Bandit” nickname by committing some crimes while shoeless, and in February he allegedly drew chalk-outline feet all over the floor of a grocery store during a burglary in Washington’s San Juan Islands.

Harris-Moore is suspected in about 70 property crimes across eight states and British Columbia, many of them in the bucolic islands of Washington state. He is accused of stealing a plane from an Indiana airport to fly to the Bahamas.

His mother, Pam Kohler, seemed relieved.

“I’m really tired,” Kohler said from her home on Camano Island, Wash. “Yes, I look forward to seeing him.”

Asked what she planned to say to her son when she saw him, she said angrily, “What kind of question is that?” and hung up the phone.

His arrest came as a relief to people across rural Camano Island, Wash., where authorities say he learned to dodge police.

“There’s a lot of relief throughout the community,” said real estate agent Mark Williams. “I think the man’s luck just wore out. You run through the woods long enough, you’re going to trip over a log.”

Residents of the island also lashed out at the teen’s mother this week, saying her decision to hire a well-known Seattle lawyer suggests she’s trying to profit from a crime spree that police say took her son from the cedar trees in Washington to the bright beaches of the Bahamas.

“Of course she wants the money. She doesn’t work,” said Joshua Flickner, whose family owns an island grocery store. “What makes me more angry than the fact that she’s trying to profit off this is that there’s any profit to be had.”

The mother’s attorney downplayed any profit motive, saying Kohler contacted him for advice after being inundated by requests from news reporters as well as inquiries about book and movie deals.

“Her feelings are relief and exhaustion,” O. Yale Lewis said. “Obviously, there is enormous interest in this story, and she wants to be careful about how to proceed. But her first concern has been to make sure her son is safe.

“And I think she hasn’t given much thought beyond that,” he said.

Harris-Moore told police in the Bahamas that he came to the country, located off the Florida coast, because it has so many islands, airports and docks, according to an officer who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the case.

The teenager claimed that he told islanders he was trying to get to Cuba so he could throw police off his trail, but he intended to make his way to the Turks and Caicos Islands southeast of the Bahamas, the officer said.

The suspect learned from the Internet that the British territory has a small police force and no marine defense force, according to the officer.

Harris-Moore spent Monday being questioned by investigators. Police Commissioner Ellison Greenslade described him as eloquent, calm, cooperative and “obviously a very intelligent young man,” but declined to say whether he made any confession.

Kohler’s older sister, Sandra Puttmann, of Arlington, was the first relative to hear from Harris-Moore after his arrest Sunday. She said he was “holding up” but scared now that he’s in custody for the first time since he walked away from a halfway house south of Seattle.

Puttmann angrily criticized news stories about her nephew, saying reporters typically gloss over his difficult upbringing. She said police routinely accused him of stealing even when he hadn’t and school officials didn’t give him a chance — something police and school officials have adamantly denied.

Harris-Moore told a psychologist in 2008 that his mother was abusive when she’d been drinking, according to a court document cited Monday by The Herald newspaper of Everett. His father left when he was a toddler, and his stepfather died when he was 7, Kohler has said.

He is accused crimes in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, South Dakota, Nebraska and Iowa.

Emily Langlie, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Seattle, said Tuesday she expected the U.S. Marshals Service would fly Harris-Moore from Miami to Seattle, where he faces a federal complaint of interstate transportation of stolen property, alleging that he took a plane from Idaho and crashed it in Washington.

“Exactly when he would arrive here is a moving target as far as I know,” she said.

LOS ANGELES – “The Hills,” the landmark reality soap that cemented Lauren Conrad, Heidi Montag and their pals as tabloid superstarlets, died Tuesday at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood. It was 4.

The popular series’ cause of death wasn’t provided, but MTV president of programming Tony DiSanto previously called it “an organic culmination of this saga.”

“I’m oddly devastated that it’s come to an end,” said Ben “B-Side” Mandelker, who blogs about “The Hills” and its New York-set offspring “The City” on bsideblog.com. “My five-year goal was to appear as a sidekick on the show, ideally with a subtitle that defines me solely as the friend of someone else. Sadly, that dream never came to fruition.”

After 102 installments, “The Hills” faded into the sunset Tuesday with a goodbye gala attended by the show’s cast and a wink, wink twist ending in the final episode that had friends-with-benefits Kristin Cavallari and Brody Jenner seemingly saying goodbye in front of the Hollywood sign, then appearing in front of a backdrop on the Paramount Studios’ lot.

“With ‘The Hills’ off the air, I no longer have to field questions about the show’s authenticity,” said Mandelker. “I can think of about 10 different things I’d rather do than engage in yet another dumb argument about whether or not ‘The Hills’ is staged. I just tell people it’s like professional wrestling: Don’t take it so seriously, and enjoy the ride.”

The club-hopping, music-pumping, cat-fighting, mascara-dripping, mouth-dropping, crystal-worshipping drama of “The Hills” debuted in 2006 as a spin-off of MTV’s popular high school reality docudrama “Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County.” The series originally documented the journey of bubbly “Laguna Beach” graduate Conrad to Los Angeles.

As the show progressed, “The Hills” morphed from a coming-of-age story centering on the budding fashion designer to a splashy soap focusing on a bevy of beautiful people. Andy Dehnart, who has blogged about reality TV for more than 10 years at realityblurred.com, said the series’ lush cinematography and phony authenticity left a lasting impression on the medium.

“The legacy of ‘The Hills’ is that it improved the visual language of reality TV while proving that a series could be sustained in an M.C. Escher-like circle where tabloid coverage of the cast members sustained interest in a narrative that largely ignored their real lives, including the intense media coverage that generated interest in the show,” said Dehnart.

Fans never seemed to mind the show’s fabrications. Kelli Hughes, who has followed the series since its inception and blogs about “The Hills” and its stars at hillsfreak.blogspot.com, bemoaned that her Tuesday nights would never be the same. Despite the end of “The Hills,” Hughes said she would continue to monitor the cast’s off-screen exploits.

“I still plan on blogging about all the girls because, for me, that’s what the show was always about,” said Hughes. “The news may not flow as freely, but I will always be interested in what they are all doing. They have all had issues on-screen and off that we can relate to. That’s what drew me to ‘The Hills’ and always kept me coming back for more.”

Throughout its tumultuous six seasons, tabloids and blogs were enamored with the show’s never-ending series of breakups, make-ups and fall-outs, most notably the epic divide between best friends Montag and Conrad, who left “The Hills” in the middle of the fifth season and was replaced by her sassy, raspy “Laguna Beach” adversary Cavallari.

The transition from Conrad to Cavallari as the series’ narrator and Montag’s marriage to bad boy Spencer Pratt — the real wedding, not the phony Mexican one — marked the beginning of the end of “The Hills.” Villainous couple Pratt and Montag, who underwent 10 plastic surgery procedures earlier this year, were later phased out of the final season.

“Now that the gang is leaving my TV, my blogging choices will be limited,” said Mandelker. “Maybe I’ll bring a folding chair to Les Deux and just blog about what I see. Realistically though, I’ll just focus my attention to my other guilty pleasure: ‘The Real Housewives.’ They’re crazier, anyway.”

NEW YORK – Denver Nuggets star Carmelo Anthony and actress LaLa Vazquez have tied the knot in New York City.

Michael Gagliardo, a publicist for Vazquez, confirms that the wedding took place Saturday night at the Manhattan restaurant Cipriani. He provided no details.

Us Magazine first reported the nuptials on its website.

The magazine says 30-year-old Vazquez and 26-year-old Anthony were escorted down the aisle by their 3-year-old son, Kiyan.

Vazquez wore a Vera Wang gown and carried red and hot pink flowers.

Kim Kardashian, Serena Williams, Spike Lee and LeBron James were among the roughly 300 guests.

Vazquez, a former MTV VJ, and Anthony, an All-Star forward, were engaged in 2004.