  Ryan Gosling. REUTERS FILE/Mario Anzuoni
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LOS ANGELES - Those wishing they were behind the making of the movie of the morally dicey and artistically banal novel Fifty Shades of Grey, insist on floating Ryan Gosling's name to play the part of the main character, Christian Grey.
But it's highly unlikely the Canadian Oscar-nominee has even been approached to play the part of the one-dimensional sociopath title character.
It's even more unlikely -- probably in the impossible category -- that one of the most popular actors on the planet would stoop to act in the potentially career-killing role in the first place.
Gosling's name became attached to the project -- and stories have been surfacing daily about it -- after Universal/Focus Studios paid $5 million in April for the movie rights to the popular summer novel about a young university girl named Anastasia who becomes involved with a wealthy and handsome gentleman who wants to make her his sex slave.
Anastasia's character tic is she's always on the lookout for an elastic for her unruly hair and her dialogue consists of a lot of "oh mys." As for Grey, who is supposed to run a multi-billion dollar company, he never actually does one minute of work -- except to make his "Red Room of Pain" a fashionable place to mildly torture women.
These kinds of casting games -- Angelina Jolie's name was actually put out to play the part of the young Anastasia -- are common in Hollywood.
And they mean nothing.
There is no Fifty Shades of Grey movie.
Not at all. Not a script. Not a director, not a casting agent. At this point, the movie studio is casting for writers to potentially turn the movie into a film -- that's it.
Unemployed bad-boy novelist Bret Easton Ellis -- he of the horror novel American Psycho -- has been wanting in bad on the project since it was announced. But his name was scratched off by Universal as a potential screenwriter, a move that E! Entertainment said turned Ellis into "Fifty Shades of Bitter."
Despite Ellis not having anything to do with the project, he's the main one who keeps tweeting about casting.
On Aug. 5, he again tweeted his fantasy cast: "Fifty Shades of Grey: Last reading I saw Ryan Gosling and Carey Mulligan," he wrote.
Cool dude Gosling, busy putting the finishing touches on Gangster Squad, rarely responds to rumours.
But actress Emma Watson -- initially named for the Anastasia part by Ellis -- had plenty to say about the casting nonsense surrounding the semi-pornographic novel.
Watson said she was "baffled" about seeing "60 articles on the Internet" last month that she had already been cast.
"I haven't read the book, I haven't read a script, nothing. There are so many movies you become attached to when I've literally never even received a phone call," Watson told Entertainment Weekly.
"I told them just because there are 60 articles on the Internet doesn't mean it's any less true than if there are three or four. The thing is I'm not going to go out there every time someone attaches me to a film to say no or release a statement."
Neither, apparently, is Gosling.
