COBB

Rhode Island College Prof. Tom Cobb’s debut novel Crazy Heart will be made into a movie starring Jeff Bridges, Robert Duvall and Maggie Gyllenhaal. Variety reports that the film is scheduled to begin shooting next month in Santa Fe, N.M., for CMT Films, a division of MTV, and Informant Media.

Bridges, currently starring in Iron Man, will play a down-on-his-luck alcoholic country music singer who gets his life and career back on track with the help of a reporter played by Gyllenhaal, who is currently on screen in The Dark Knight.

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Dr. Scott Haltzman, a Barrington psychiatrist and medical director of NRI Community Services in Woonsocket, is scheduled to appear on the ABC show 20/20 tonight at 10 on Ch. 5, 6. Haltzman, the author of The Secrets of Happily Married Men and The Secrets of Happily Married Women, will appear in a segment titled “The Big Boss.” The subject of the segment is whether it’s natural for a man to stay with one woman for a lifetime.

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Bruce Kalver, 53, of Cranston, has been named the national president of the Society of American Magicians, the organization announced yesterday. Kalver, who began learning magic at the age of 10 from his grandfather, Samuel Woolf, a prop builder for Harry Houdini, is the second Rhode Islander to lead the organization. In 1940, H. Adrian Smith was its president. Kalver officially takes over the post at the society’s annual convention next week in Louisville, Ky.