STOP THE PRESSES



Yaphet Koto is running for President.

From this profile of various independent candidates:

Yaphet Kotto, for those of you who don't spend hours browsing IMDb, is a moderately successful actor. He played the bad guy in Live and Let Die, the Federal Agent Alonzo Mosely chasing after Robert De Niro in Midnight Run, one of the running men in Running Man and was the first guy to be killed by the full-grown alien in Alien.

He's dabbled in elections before – he supported Forbes magazine heir (and current Rudy Giuliani advisor) Steve Forbes's run for the presidency in 1996. He was also, according to his campaign, co-chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality in New York in the Sixties.

Now, if you believe the Federal Election Commission and a website called yaphetkotto.org, he's ready to follow his Running Man co-star Arnold Schwarzenegger into frontline politics.

Mr Kotto, however, is nowhere to be found. "I haven't represented him in 12 years," says his one-time agent. The Screen Actors' guild gives me a number for him that doesn't work, and his website goes down.

So why has the mysterious Mr Kotto registered to stand? "At this pivotal and dangerous time in our nation's history," says a release from his campaign, "there is a widespread, commonly held apprehension that our country is heading in the wrong direction, and the equally powerful sense that there is nothing that any one of us can do to stop it." Yes, I read it in that deep film-trailer voice too.

Few would have bet on B-movie star Ronald Reagan making it to the Oval Office, so stranger things have happened. The only thing that can stop him is, on past evidence, a determined Roger Moore as James Bond and/or an alien with acid for blood. Or, of course, fellow deep-voiced authority-figure actor Fred Thompson, who may also be running as a candidate for the Republicans.

www.yaphetkotto.org