Paparazzi agency Splash's promise of CPR video might strike you as excessively opportunistic and morbid, but someone's got to step up and chase the ambulance (figuratively, in this case), even when it's most difficult to do so. What really disturbs us is that right at this moment, Splash and TMZ are probably just haggling over the price, with TMZ arguing they should get a substantial discount because you can't actually see Anna Nicole Smith's soul leaving her body.

· The always-reliable National Enquirer reports that Lindsay Lohan's doctors are concerned about her overworked liver, but isn't that exactly why they installed the back-up last week? With that extra organ up and running, she was able to resume her partying almost immediately.
· LAist thinks that Gwen Stefani might fill the suspicious hole in her touring schedule with a Coachella appearance. Do with this information what you will—we'll probably use it to give ourselves another excuse to skip two days of sweating in the desert this year.
· R.I.P. Yvonne "Lily Munster" De Carlo.
· Overeducated and Underemployed offers five easy tips on how not to pose with your newly won People's Choice Award. Sadly, this advice arrives too late to save Jennifer Aniston from looking like she's so lonely that she's going to sleep spooning her trophy for the next three months.
· Studio 60's resident Krazy Khristian on why the show isn't doing better, other than the fact that in any given episode, a senile writer from the blacklist era might show up to teach us all a lesson about history: "The engine was running so long on this baby before it ran out of the gate, I think it just overpowered people," she said. "It was like the audience was being held at gunpoint and the message was, 'You better watch the best damn show on television or else.' That's liable to turn anybody off."

This morning brings the sad news that director Robert Altman died last night at a local hospital. We'll leave it up to legitimate news organization to properly contextualize the legend's place in Hollywood history; we instead prefer to remember one of Altman's late career highlights, this stolen moment on the set of A Prairie Home Companion, in which grizzled auteur and unrefined talent finally bonded. We're sure that wherever Altman is now, the supple, 19-year-old thighs to caress while imparting the wisdom collected over more than half a century in show business are all attached to eager, disciplined actresses who never miss a call time or show up to work too hungover to remember their lines.

Simply illustrating the news of Jack Palance's passing with a photo collage of his incredible display of septuagenarian strength at the 1992 Academy Awards seemed much classier than trying to build an item around his most memorable line from the movie that won him the Oscar, "I crap bigger than you." Really, though, he crapped bigger than all of us.

Bruno Kirby's sudden death was certainly a shock to the Hollywood community yesterday, especially to those on the red carpet at the Pantages Theater for last night's opening of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels who were ambushed with the news by a KCAL news crew. Especially effective was their reporter's flawless set-up of Jennifer Tilly, who was allowed to get a couple of seconds into a cheerful account of her work with Kirby on Stuart Little before being cut off with the news of the actor's death, inducing an initial look (pictured) of equal parts confusion and hope she'd be beset by a high-fiving Ashton Kutcher and her still-living pal having a good laugh at the expense of her gullibility. The video is here, which makes a fine first installment for KCAL's planned running series of reports on What Famous People's Faces Look Like When They've Unexpectedly Received Word of a Colleague's
Passing.

• Popular Film Sidekick, Bruno Kirby, Dead At 57 [AP]

A fatal accident on the set of the Jamie Foxx and Jennifer Garner movie The Kingdom has claimed the life of Nick Papac, a 25-year-old assistant propmaster. It's a sad, terrible event, which Access Hollywood sensitively handles by bundling it with another nearly averted Kingdom tragedy: the female lead's heat-induced fainting spell:

Please note the newswire's careful repetition of the "former TV show host" identifier, a compassionate touch obviously included to prevent a series of tearful condolence phone calls to Catherine Zeta-Jones—whose much older husband, quite frankly, is probably one more sexagenarian facelift away from some tragic, fatal complications.

This, sadly, is the way it works in Hollywood. You can pile up credits in four different decades, but when you die, you're once again the meek honky that George Jefferson chased out of his apartment week after week, year after year.

As if you didn't already know the entire story from the Post's tasteful choice in headline, rapper Busta Rhymes' video shoot in Greenpoint ended with the murder of 29-year-old Israel Ramirez, who had the unfortunate job of managing Busta's varied pieces of jewelry. While authorities haven't made any arrests, they want to speak with Tony Yayo, a member of 50 Cent's G-Unit posse (obviously). Yayo apparently showed up to the shoot thinking he would appear in the video, but angrily left after he learned that he would not be making a cameo.

While the coroner's office awaits the results of a toxicology report about the cause of Chris Penn's death, the Santa Monica Daily Press poked around Penn's neighborhood and solicited quotes expressing a lack of surprise about the actor's sudden passing:

As you probably all know by now, actor Chris Penn passed yesterday. The above photo from a Reuters obit features "actor Chris Penn (R) and an unidentified actor." Without too much squinting, you should be able to discern that "unidentified actor" is obscure character actor Christian Slater, Penn's castmate in Masked and Anonymous, who was last seen trying to segue into the more lucrative field of cameraphone movie trailer piracy.

In perhaps the shortest Hollywood obit we've ever seen, the AP reports that Chris Penn has died:

Before we move on to today's news (and before the Reaper harvests another fresh soul of minor fame to complete his greedy Celebrity Rule of Three), we note the recent passing of actor Patrick Cranshaw, best known to a generation of frat boys as Blue (as in: "You're my boy, Blue!), Old School's lovable octogenarian pledge. Cranshaw was 86, sending us groping for a lesson besides the standby Hollywood admonition to "die young and leave a pretty corpse." This is all we've got: If you're Owen "The Butterscotch Stallion" Wilson's KY-wrestling tag-team partner at the Playboy Mansion, you become immortal; grapple slathered in that same lubricant in a Luke Wilson movie, and your days on this earth are numbered.

It's been a big week for anyone curious about the shadowy inner workings of Hollywood's most celebrated cabalistic institutions. First, the LAT gets inside the bizarro world of Scientology's desert Cruise-courting compound, and today comes a NY Times report on the suicide of Irish-born showbiz reporter and one-time Hollywood Foreign Press Association member Nick Douglas. The Golden Globe-mounting international starfucking consortium put Douglas on a 17-month probation for various petty violations, including walking out of an MGM party with some unopened beers (have we mentioned he's Irish-born?) and selling a Tom Selleck photo to a tabloid, forcing him to return to his native Dublin, where, denied of his life-affirming junkets and movie star photo-ops, some maintain he became so despondent he hanged himself to death. The report takes a look at some other regrettable past incidents involving members of the Foreign Press, including one involving HFPA president himself, Philip Berk:

Sadly, the real-life inspiration for Entourage's beloved bong-enthusiast and hanger-on Turtle has died from an asthma attack over the weekend:

The sudden passing of West Wing actor John Spencer leaves the show's writers with the logistical problem of finishing the season without him. USA Today uses the occasion to compile an exhaustive chart chronicling how past TV productions dealt with the sudden, inconvenient removal of a cast member by the icy finger of the Reaper:

A heart attack has claimed the life of actor John Spencer, who was nominated for an Emmy five times, winning once, for his work on the West Wing. His character coincidentally also had a heart attack, but survived:

A second well-respected indie movie producer in his 40s has died suddenly. Robert Newmyer, who has a long list of credits including sex, lies and videotape and Training Day, suffered a heart attack in a Toronto gym while visiting the set of Breach, a film he was producing starring Chris Cooper and Ryan Phillippe. An LA Times obituary explains how Drew Barrymore was partially responsible for a passionate career of movie making:

A number of readers e-mailed us yesterday to note Saw producer Gregg Hoffman's sudden death Sunday, and today the LAT (who profiled Hoffman and his partners a few weeks ago) has an obituary carrying the sad news: