On this gloomy Monday morning, take a moment to review the weekend's studio strike fund box office results, allowing yourself to momentarily ignore the coordinated chants of the picketers outside your place of employment.
· In a badly timed announcement of blockbuster-derived profits, Viacom crows about the "phenomenal success" of "new global brand Transformers" that helped lift their net income by 80 percent, forgetting to transfer the revenues to a balance-sheet loss column and publicly lament that "there's no money to be made in this dying business of ours." [Variety]
· Knowing that TV is, like film, a financial dead end (see bullet point above), Oprah is launching her own channel on the YouTubes. If that venture proves as successful as the media mogul hopes, the purchase of the entire internet could quickly follow. [THR]
Portfolio's Hollywood Deal blog writes touchingly of the once-strained relationship between Imagine Entertainment superproducer Brian Grazer and black sheep sibling Gavin, whose reciprocal appearances at each other's recent New York movie premieres (Brian's the troubled $100 million blockbuster he brought to the screen by sheer force of will; Gavin's, a somewhat less expensive , surrealistic Anthony Hopkins art project) were indicative of a closeness that long eluded brothers on the opposite end of the spectrum of Hollywood success. You need to read the entire story to appreciate their long journey towards reconciliation, but we've excerpted a couple of the piece's feel-good moments here:
· The trades discuss yesterday's big strike news that's allowing Hollywood its first glimmer of hope that a walkout might be avoided. (Please, no one say anything about the internet and digital downloads and ruin the town's brief buzz.) Also, THR unveils its stunning, strike-related news logo (at left). [THR, Variety]
· You know who hasn't had an unfunny family sitcom for far too long? Damon Wayans! Don't worry, ABC is busy filling this gaping hole in its primetime lineup. [THR]
PrivacyWatch celebrity sightings are submitted by our readers, and are posted several times a week, so send them in often. Submit yours to tips[AT]defamer.com (please put "sighting" or "PrivacyWatch" in the subject line so we don't lose them) and tell everyone about the time you spotted Scott Baio: 45, single, and ready to settle down with a new iMac.
When roughly $22 million worth of Russell Crowe and Denzel Washington fans show up at the multiplex on long-gestating, twice-aborted Universal feature American Gangster's opening weekend, not even the succession of credits reading "Produced by Brian Grazer," "Based On An Idea By Brian Grazer To Do A Movie About A Magazine Article About A Drug Kingpin From The 70s" and "A Ridley Scott Film Shepherded By Imagine Entertainment's Brian Grazer, Who Simply Refused To Let This Crazy Dream Die" will give moviegoers an adequate appreciation of the Herculean efforts undertaken by the spikey-haired superproducer to finally bring his passion project to the screen. The LAT chronicles the mogul's heroism in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles (budget overruns! eight-figure kill fees! cost-controlling script rewrites that ripped the very soul out of the story!), here recounting the dark moment when a momentarily defeated Grazer had to tell original director Antoine Fuqua that Gangster had been shelved:
We at Defamer realize that a layout issue in our recent redesign has somewhat reduced our ability to shock you with the unexpected deployment of Brian Grazer's official headshot (the Grazerhead™ to regular visitors), and so in the interest of putting you back on edge, we're bringing out the nukes: this screenshot of a shirtless Grazer, who was cornered by a TMZ video camera this weekend at the Polaroid Malibu Beach House after presumably trying to superproduce an anonymous blonde's phone number by casually mentioning that she'd be perfect for the Splash sequel he's been wanting to do for twenty years.
· The moviegoing public's hunger for threequels has proven so lucrative that studio executives have taken to using three hundred-dollar bills at a time to wipe themselves in celebration of their incredible run of summer success. [Variety]
· Will Hollywood's mad rush to get projects into the production pipeline before a possible strike result in movies which are shittier than normal? Answer: Yup, almost certainly. [THR]
· Warner Bros. is planning a live-action, big-screen version of the Hanna-Barbera cartoon Johnny Quest. Not that anyone asked us, but there's no way this gets made without Timberlake attached to star, right? [Variety]
· Just 2 million dedicated moviemaking fans tune in to Fox's absurdly low-rated—but still alive and kicking!—On The Lot on Tuesday night, as the show quickly approaches its goal of having a single viewer for each dollar in the competition's $1 million top prize. [THR]
· Imagine visionary Brian Grazer will superproduce the tentatively titled series The FBI for Fox, a project that should finally satisfy Grazer's burning desire to do "a thing about the CIA or the ATF or NSA or whichever one of those places with the cool initials will let me sleep on the floor of their offices for a few months so I can soak up the atmosphere. And maybe shoot a gun." [Variety]
Competing agencies scoff at CAA's surprisingly progressive program in which it pauses from scorching the bottoms of its assistants' feet with a hot fireplace poker long enough to allow them to pitch projects to clients (which recently resulted in a comedy sale to Imagine superproducer Brian Grazer), fearing that such humane shenanigans could interfere with the call-rollers' development into perfect killing machines. [THR]
· Universal Pictures extends its 21-year marriage with Imagine Entertainment, signing a five-year deal that gives the studio first-look access to the fascinating contents of superproducer Brian Grazer's mind through 2013, and which ends a rumored flirtation with those homewreckers at Paramount. [Variety]
· The AMPTP has issued a clarification about its recent "let's nuke the residuals system" musings, a proposal that the Writers Guild is expected to dismiss as merely "crazy," a downgrade from yesterday's "batshit insane." [THR]
PrivacyWatch celebrity sightings are submitted by our readers, and are posted several times a week, so send them in often. Submit yours to tips[AT]defamer.com (please put "sighting" or "PrivacyWatch" in the subject line) and tell everyone about the time you ogled Brian Grazer's rippling physique at a Greek restaurant in Malibu.
PrivacyWatch celebrity sightings are submitted by our readers, and are posted several times a week, so send them in often. Submit yours to tips[AT]defamer.com (please put "sighting" or "PrivacyWatch" in the subject line) and tell everyone about the time you spotted former Seinfeld star and noted stand-up nose-diver Michael Richards on a Third Street Promenade shopping spree:
Shortly after fainting from delight from reading the phrases "Brett Ratner is set to direct," "Brian Grazer is producing," and "film about the life of Playboy magazine founder Hugh Hefner" contained in the lede of today's Variety story on the progress of a Hef biopic, a quick-thinking intern revived us with smelling salts, allowing us to read about how Hollywood's most lovable fauxteur and its leading, newly single superproducer have come to team up on the dream project. Reports Var:
· Imagine's Brian Grazer will superproduce an adaptation of the graphic novel Cowboys and Aliens for DreamWorks and Universal, a project the spikey-haired seeker described as the "perfect realization of all the cowboys-meeting-aliens-related ideas I've been quietly developing since I was a hyperactive six years old locked in my bedroom with a chest full of toys." [Variety]
· Fox's show about people who think they can dance continues to shame their one about people who think they can direct movies, pulling in more than triple the viewers of the last On The Lot installment. [THR]
· Another famously overweight TV personality rumored to be under consideration to replace Bob Barker is Drew Carey. [Variety]
· Advertisers give a $2.4 billion upfront vote of confidence to Steve McPherson's vision for ABC, with one Madison avenue booster gushing, "Have you heard about this Cavemen thing? It's like a sitcom and car insurance commercial all rolled into one! Think of what they could do with that Coke ad with the polar bears." [THR]
· Stripping off his shirt and smearing his entire body in warpaint, CEO Howard Stringer whipped 7,000 employees into a frenzy at a shareholder ceremony in which he dramatically declared himself the "Sony Warrior." [Variety]
While the Grazers opted for the somewhat noisier method of announcing the end of their marriage in Page Six last Thursday, today Paramount emperor Brad Grey and his wife of 25 years whispered news of a trial separation to gossip dowager Liz Smith, perhaps hoping that the superannuated columnist would become distracted by filling various dishes placed around her home with hard candy and forget to publish the item. Unfortunately for the Greys, professionalism prevailed, and now all the industry mourns the loss of yet another high-profile relationship:
Realizing that even a Daily Inspiration from Fran Drescher ("Once you wake up and smell the coffee, it's hard to go back to sleep," counsels The Nanny, cryptically) and an online shopping spree for sassy "Wife Goes On" tanktops would probably not be enough to distract Gigi Levangie from the stress of today's announcement about the end of her marriage to one of the most powerful men in Hollywood, the USA Network's web team whipped up the therapeutic Whack-a-Grazer tool for their Starter Wife creator. With just a few mouse clicks, simulacra of her favorite Birkin bag, Motorola Razr, and Louboutin pumps would soon crash into the spikey-haired head of her virtual ex over and over again, speeding her on the path to marital catharsis.
· Ladies and gentleman, we give you the next Snakes on a Plane. Coming soon from director Barry Sonnenfeld: Space Chimps. We'll say it again: Space Chimps. One more time? OK, if we must: Space Chimps. Begin erecting your unauthorized fan sites...now. (And make sure to tell the studio it's only going to work if they make it a live action film.) [Variety]
· A Tennessee projectionist is fired for telling Ain't It Cool News how shitty the new Fantastic Four movie is a week or two before Fox was ready to deal with the inevitable flood of negative reviews awaiting its superhero sequel. [THR]
· We care so little about this meaningless milestone that we're loathe to even note it, but Pirates 3: Whatever It's Called reaches the $500 million mark internationally in a record 20 days, a week faster than Spider-Man 3: We're Not Even Going To Bother Giving It A Real Title. Congratulations, winning multimedia conglomerate that released a successful movie-related project! [Variety]
· Ben Silverman renames NBC Universal Television Studios as Universal Media Studios, a move intended to demonstrate that he's not too busy partying to enact superficial changes at his new company. [THR]
· Hollywood Out of Ideas, Hollow Man Edition: Universal and Imagine hire David Goyer to write and direct a new take on H.G. Wells' Invisible Man. Brian Grazer to superproduce. (Note: The Grazerhead is too tied up by regrettable personal business to make an appearance at this time.) [Variety]
Sad news: The marriage of superproducer Brian Grazer and novelist/screenwriter/grudging blogger Gigi Levangie, which provided the rich source material for parallel publishing and basic cable miniseries empires, is over (again), reports today's Page Six, a seismic development that is sure to crack the foundations of even the sturdiest of industry unions in sympathy, flooding the local dating scene with newly liberated Hollywood war brides. Publicists and anonymous sources agree that the split, which comes about a year after the couple's trial Cruising of last summer, was a friendly one:
· Local comedy monopolist Judd Apatow continues to integrate the industry's mirth-making entities into his rapidly expanding humor-producing conglomerate, collaborating with Jack Black, Knocked Up's Harold Ramis, Superbad's Michael Cera, and an Office writing team on Year One for Columbia. [Variety]
· The dust is finally starting to settle at a post-Albrechtgate HBO, with "longtime Albrecht right-hand man" Michael Lombardo reportedly being promoted to a new job overseeing all west coast operations. [THR]
· Jim Carrey will star in the dark comedy I Love You Phillip Morris (by Bad Santa's Glenn Ficarra and John Requa), an idea pitched as Catch Me if You Can meets Brokeback Mountain. There is no direct Judd Apatow involvement that we can discern, a fact that could doom the promising project to eventual turnaround. [Variety]
· Imagine superproducer Brian Grazer's unparalleled Bacon-attaching skills lead to ubiquitous actor Kevin joining the cast of Frost/Nixon, the big-screen adaptation of the Peter Morgan play. [THR]
· The U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals throws out the FCC's "capricious" rulings against Fox over Cher saying "fuck" and Nicole Richie "shit" during broadcasts of the 2002 and 2003 Billboard Music Awards, a landmark decision that reaffirms an awards show presenter's right to "accidentally" swear on live TV. [Variety]
