If the government won’t spend the money to find a cure for AIDS, there is always Hollywood. Last year, a script for a movie about the search for a cure sold for an exorbitant $1 million. Just recently, thirtysomething’s shaggy professor Peter Horton (below) signed on to direct the saga. The catch is that the search is conducted by a 12-year-old boy during summer vacation. According to one agent who has seen the script, “it’s a bittersweet comedy about two boys who meet at the beginning of one summer, somewhere in the midwest. The boys have adventures, but it gets complicated because one has AIDS and the other tries to find a cure for it.” Call it Huck Finn with AIDS.

This Cure is not to be confused with Cure, the unscripted yet long-in-development saga of a scientist seeking (you guessed it!) a cure for AIDS that no less than the Francis Ford Coppola is supposed to direct. Only in Hollywood, folks.