Tom Cruise in more trouble?

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Poor Tom Cruise. Ever since he went a little crazy and jumped on Oprah’s couch, his career has been in a tailspin, with a flop movie (‘Lions for Lambs’), constant tabloid sniping about his marriage and oh-so-much bad buzz about his upcoming World War II film, ‘Valkyrie,’ which has seen its release date pushed back so many times that it took me a while to figure out that it’s now slated to open Feb. 13 (hardly an auspicious date, since it’s Friday the 13th).

Now the embattled star has Slate’s dogged Kim Masters on his case. She’s claiming here that the Cruise-run United Artists has doctored a photo of the character he plays in ‘Valkyrie’--would-be Hitler assassin Claus von Stauffenberg--to make it appear that Cruise and Stauffenberg are dead ringers. Is it possible UA would really pull such a clumsy stunt?

To bolster her case, since UA had itself released a side-by-side comparison of photos of the two men, Masters took the two photos and submitted them to her design experts at Slate, who agreed, after overlaying the two photos, that there was ‘definite but slight’ altering.’ Since Masters didn’t have any comment from UA in her piece, I thought it only fair to hear their side of the story.

UA marketing chief Dennis Rice jumped out of a screening to respond: ‘The charge is absolutely, totally untrue and I told Kim that. It’s a bald-faced lie. We did absolutely nothing to enhance the photos.’ He says they found an old photo of Von Stauffenberg when ‘Valkyrie’ had started shooting and simply put the photos of the two men together to show the similarities to the press. ‘I never dreamed that anyone would jump on this and somehow try to make a big issue of it,’ Rice added. ‘It’s a non-story.’

Of course, when you’re Tom Cruise, and it’s a slow news day, apparently nothing is too small to be a non-story. He may be a little nuts, but when it comes to Photoshop forgery, I’m inclined to give him the saving grace of being innocent until really proven guilty.