Earlier in the week we reported a rumor that Hollywood was eyeing Bradley Cooper to play Barry Allen a.k.a. The Flash. Turns out someone was shooting off at the mouth again and deserves a stern smack in it. Super Hero Hype caught up with Cooper and got his reaction to the whole Flash casting fiasco:

"I’ve never heard anything about it ever in my life," Cooper responded, laughing that the idea of his casting has become so prevalent online.

"It’s funny," he added.

Funny? There’s nothing funny about lying. Rumors make us bloggers look like hopped up gossip whores, running all over the world wide web, spreading hearsay into the eyes and ears and mouths of the masses. The Internet won’t stand for it! …Oh wait, yes it will.

_{Artist’s Rendering of Bradley Cooper as The Flash}

Bradley Cooper is busy on the set of The Hangover 2, but that hasn’t stopped the Hollywood rumor mill from speculating about his next project. And somehow, this unseen, all-knowing group has determined that Warner Bros. is eyeing Cooper to play Barry Allen. For those of you who lost your virginity before the age of 25, Barry Allen is also known as The Flash.

According to the Silver Age origin story (or should I say, "according to Wikipedia"), the character of The Flash was born when lightning struck a shelf full of chemicals, causing them to explode onto police scientist Barry Allen. Rather than killing Allen, like most chemical explosions would tend to do, the accident gave him the gift of super speed, which he then put to us fighting crime.

A chemist once gave my friend the gift of "super speed," but all he ended up fighting was a plate glass window and some oncoming traffic. He lost. (Latino Review)

Green Lantern producer and co-writer Greg Berlanti offered up some info about how he’s handling the gritty world of The Flash. Also, The Flash is going to be gritty now.

Flash’ as we’re getting into it is interesting, too. Though Barry Allen was a little lighter in the comic, I think because of the nature that he was a CSI and moved in this world of crime before this stuff happened. I think it’s tonally somewhere in between ‘GL’ and ‘Dark Knight.’ It’s actually a little bit darker than when we were working on (‘GL’), because you’re dealing with somebody who is already a crimefighter in a world of those kinds of criminals and that kind of murder and homicide. I find you talk a lot about different films when you’re working on a film, and we spend a lot more time talking about ‘Se7en‘ or ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ as we construct that part of Barry’s world, then I thought when we got into it. It helps balance a guy in a red suit who runs really fast.

He’s totally right. I’ve always said that Se7en and The Silence of the Lambs were okay movies, but y’know what would make them great movies? The presence of the Flash. In fact, I feel that Zodiac‘s greatest failing was its absence of a red guy in a suit who runs really fast. That and the fact that pretty much nothing happened in it. (SuperheroHype)