Whitewash in Wonderland

It is a film which was very nearly never made - and to many in Hollywood, never should have been. Nineteen leading actors - including Matt Damon and Willem Dafoe - passed on it. The star who eventually agreed to taking it on only did so because the director effectively tricked him into it.

Even the producers' own in-house production notes, which the Evening Standard has seen, refer to the " sordidness" of the film, only then going on to argue that it is "both an unusual romance and a morality play".

And if the overwhelmingly damning reaction in the US is anything to go by, Wonderland is a movie which - however good or indifferent the actors' performance in it - looks destined to go down as one of Hollywood's most controversial and reviled failures.

The cast list would, in ordinary circumstances, have seemed to guarantee a hit. The movie features Friends actress Lisa Kudrow, current hot young star Kate Bosworth (romantically linked in real life to her British equivalent, Orlando Bloom) and one of Hollywood's heavyweights, Val Kilmer, in his most high-profile role since his depiction of Jim Morrison in The Doors.

But as the movie opens in Britain this week, in the US, Wonderland has already received a critical panning, and an explosion of self-righteous moral outrage. One reviewer likened the film to "a pile of human waste". Another advised cinema-goers to take "moist towels" along to the movie, so grimy and unsavoury are its contents.

The reason is the character played by Kilmer himself. In an admittedly intense performance, Kilmer partly recreates the life and excesses of John Holmes, the outlandish Seventies porn star more famously brought to wider attention by the movie Boogie Nights. In graphic detail, this latest movie focuses on Holmes's duplicitous role in one of Hollywood's most notorious murders, the slaying of four of Holmes's drug-addict friends in a house on Wonderland Drive in the Hollywood Hills more than 20 years ago.

Even Kilmer, well known as one of Hollywood's most quixotic performers, is said to have passed on the role, so controversial was its subject matter. He reportedly sent the script back to director James Cox, only having read a precis of the plot.

Undeterred, Cox resubmitted the proposal to Kilmer's agent - but under the guise of being a completely different film. Only after Kilmer was duped into reading the full script, did the actor finally agree to do the film.

It is a decision he may live to regret. Kilmer's porn star character Holmes was, of course, infamous for his 13-inch penis, rumours that he slept with 14,000 women in the process of making more than 2,000 hard-core porn films and, with predictable inevitability, the fact that he died impoverished and forgotten of Aids in 1988.

But it is Cox's determination to portray Holmes in his new movie as a sympathetic, even agreeable, character (albeit one responsible in part for the murder of four people) which has resulted in such opprobrium.

Many in Hollywood view it as a cinematic whitewash. According to the stylised film version - made with the co-operation of Holmes's wife Sharon (played by Kudrow) and girlfriend Dawn Schiller (Bosworth's character) - the porn star was simply a troubled, sensitive man who more than likely had little to do with the brutal slayings in July 1981. After being arrested by police, and cooperating with the murder investigation, Holmes was controversially acquitted of any wrong-doing.

HOLLYWOOD, of course, often rewrites history. But many remain baffled by a movie which appears to exonerate Holmes of any complicity. "Wonderland skims over its seedy characters to glamorise drug addiction and the role John Holmes had in four murders," the influential Los Angeles Times opined.

The furore has led to the kind of PR circus which the movie's makers have welcomed simply because it has generated mountains of publicity. One leading US newspaper savagely attacked Cox and asked if the film should have been made at all. "It says something about Tinseltown's fascination with sleaze that Cox has managed to sign-up its familiar and hip faces," one reviewer declared.

The backlash comes at a time when Hollywood - which has often sought to depict the West Coast porn industry in a vaguely humorous light - has been forced to reconsider. Last month, two major porn actors were found to be infected with Aids - and another has come forward this week. It has led to 12 leading porn studios to declare a moratorium on production of hardcore sex films. Mary Carey, a porn actress, said: "It's very scary for everybody. It's our wake-up call."