Ron Howard fast tracks Angels & Demons

That smell you can just about make out is the smoke coming from Akiva Goldsman’s keyboard as he feverishly bashes out a shooting draft for Ron Howard’s Da Vinci Code follow-up Angels & Demons before he and almost every other writer in Hollywood down pencils and goes on strike.

While Angels & Demons was actually penned by Dan Brown before he even wrote The Da Vinci Code, Goldsman is re-tooling it as a sequel. And Howard’s in such a hustle to get Angels started that he’s pulling a Spielberg and fitting in the film’s shoot while he’s still supervising post-production on Frost/Nixon.

Columbia, still seeing dollar signs after the first Da Vinci Code made mundo dosh, has organised a February start in Europe, with Tom Hanks already on board to suffer through another awful haircut as Robert Langdon. The plot will find him investigating a mystery that spins around a secret society and a conspiracy rooted in the Catholic Church. So, business as usual, then…