"Now I ask you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury—is that the face of an innocent duck?"

Our pals at Gawker gleefully informed us (they even photoblogged it) that the world's most accomplished, crazy-in-fake-love couch abuser finally found a sofa on which he had yet to practice his craft, exuberantly trampling the cushions over at The View this morning, much to the delight of his clucking-hen hosts. They even obligingly lashed Cruise to the couch with a seatbelt. Funny! But imagine our disappointment to discover that the West Coast feed of today's The View featured John Leguizamo, not the publicity-shy War of the Worlds star. What gives, The View? How can you deprive us of our precious?*

· WOTW takes in $102.5 million at the overseas box office; analysts attribute the success to the difficulty of properly translating the term "pseudo-science" into various languages. [Variety]
· TNT attempts to fill the void in the mobster cable series void left by the extended hiatus of The Sopranos, develops a "limited series" ("miniseries" is so 2003) based on the life of Chicago crime boss Sam Giancana. [TNT]
· The New Paramount and Warner Bros. are sharing director David Fincher on back-to-back movies, Zodiac and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, splitting the inevitable "gloom and rain" budget overruns. [Variety]
· Because the Nielsen boxes never sleep, even on a holiday: CBS's Boston Pops Fireworks Spectacular 2005 entertained more shut-ins than any other Monday night program. [THR]
· TV producer Lester Lewis pretends to be excited about working with Will & Grace creators David Kohan and Max Mutchnick on their new sitcom, Four Kings. [Variety]

Dear Twentieth Century Fox: If you're going to throw away promotional money using sky-writers to promote your soon-to-be-also-ran superhero movie in the skies of Hollywood, at least make sure that the pilot can properly render your logo.

With just 5,431 copies sold in its first month of release, Michael Eisner's Camp, the longtime Disney CEO's heartfelt remembrances of three-legged races, leisurely canoe rides, and his serial victimization by swirly-obsessed bullies, isn't exactly burning up the summer bestseller lists. At least the soon-to-be-massively-remaindered author is looking on the semi-bright side. From the LAT:

Today's Page Six is playing it coy (not exactly "Butterscotch Stallion" salad-tossing coy, but coy nonetheless) in today's blind items:

You've stood on the roof and watched the fireworks. Now it's time to return to the comforting drudgery of the work week, and time to pore over the holiday weekend's box office numbers:

In an effort to bring this week to a close as anticlimactic and disappointing as the end of War of the Worlds, we offer some rumors we've heard for you to chatter about over the barbecue this Fourth of July weekend (or as we like to call it, "Id4"):

Is there a better way to celebrate our return from technical difficulty hell than to thank this week's sponsors? No, there is not. Thanks, this week's sponsors! If you'd like to advertise on Defamer and siphon the disposable income directly from the wallets of Hollywood's hottest consumers, see this page.

The computer we've been working on seems to have 'blown up.' (Is that the technical term?) Our nonsense will resume as soon as we find one that works...in the meantime, please refresh the page every two minutes until we return. It's what Andy Dick would want you to do.

Please indulge this brief, unhinged thought: Maybe hacktastic director Brett Ratner isn't going to ruin the new X-Men movie. From Page Six:

Sure, we talked a good game about how excited we were for last night's premiere of Being Bobby Brown and the accompanying game of modified-rules Edward Fortyhands, but when the chips were down and rolls of duct tape purchased, did we come through? No, we did not. (We did, however, get absurdly drunk, but that is a story for another time.) Luckily, the Fourfour blog didn't punk out the way that we did. He's got a recap and screen shots (like the one above) from the episode, freezing pregnant moments of delicate beauty ("Don't smother my food with your boogies" is particularly poignant) in time.

Because this sounds like a good cause, and because watching the bloody spectacle of agency assistants getting drunk and trying to sing competitively would be worthwhile cause even if no charity was involved, today's To Do list consists of just one item. But if you're going to participate, please try and remember that it's a charity event, and strangling a colleague from CAA for not nailing the high notes of "Bohemian Rhapsody", while admirable under many circumstances, is probably not appropriate tonight. Enjoy:

Yesterday's box office numbers for War of the Worlds seem to indicate that (so far, at least) Tom Cruise's Turn Off The World Tour hasn't hurt the movie, which pulled in $21.4 million in North America and $13.35 million overseas in its first day.

Maybe it's the impending holiday weekend, maybe it's the difficulty of the first part of the item, or maybe you're just tired of these blow-related blind items, but calling the response to today's item "tepid" would be like saying Lindsay Lohan is "mildly interested in exploring the Hollywood social scene." Take another peek at One High-Flying Blind Vice before we continue with this charade:

And just like that, the stallion hurdled the fence and disappeared into the sunset.

No round-up of red-hot summer camp memoirs would be complete without the rising master of the form, lame duck Disney CEO Michael Eisner, whose visionary Camp will one day be considered the acme of the form. Unfortunately, this literary genius may be doomed to go unappreciated by his contemporaries, as a reviewer at USA Today dumps a bucketful of Kakutani-strength haterade all over Eisner's book:

· As previously reported (albeit as seen through the Cruise-lens), ABC has decided not to air Welcome to the Neighborhood, a reality show in which a snow-white neighborhood is shaken up when Gays, Pagans, and Asians move onto the cul-de-sac. [Variety]
· Everbody Loves Raymond In Near-Perpetuity: TBS shells out $650K per episode to keep Raymond rerunning through the network for the next eleven years. [THR]
· Did you know that The Dukes of Hazzard TV show was based on a movie called Moonrunners? Warner Bros. certainly does now, as it's agreed to pay $17.5 million to the movie's producer for copyright infringement. [Variety]
· Domino Harvey, the real-life version of Keira Knightley's bounty hunter character in the upcoming Domino, unexpectedly dies at 35. Does this mean reshoots? [Variety

Yes, we've seen the incredibly viral e-mail (you can read it here) puporting to explain the connection between Tom Cruise, Katie Holmes, and Matchbox 20 singer Rob Thomas. And this is all we have to say about it (besides issuing a inevitably futile request that people stop sending it to us): We immediately distrust any mass-emailed message that begins thusly: "A friend of mine just got back from LA and heard this scoop about Tom & Katie from someone who works at Universal..." Firstly, LA is full of nothing but filthy, filthy liars who would like nothing better than to destroy the man responsible for "Push." We live there, we should know. Secondly, as soon as we hear that the singer's received a mysterious delivery of cupcakes, you'll be the first to know. We fear that this e-mail of dubious truth value is obscuring something far more worthy of discussion: Tom Cruise's unshakeable faith in aliens.
· Fellow Scientologist John Travolta's Scientologist wife, who once bounced up and down on Tom Cruise's prone body while very convincingly screaming, "Don't. Ever. Stop. Fucking. Me!" in the early moments of Jerry Maguire, is unsurprisingly supportive of Cruise's evangelical efforts. [second item]
· "'We have always tried to resolve disputes short of litigation. That was not always possible in earlier years when we were forced to go to court to defend our rights and the rights of our parishioners to freely practice their religion. But as we have won more and more victories, we have had to resort to the courts much less. Nowadays it is a very rare occurrence.'" Has Scientology suddenly gone soft? Salon continues its four-part series. [You may watch an ad to read the story.]
· And just because every story has a Cruise angle, if you look hard enough: Cruise has always maintained that he doesn't see race, so he wouldn't even have understood the premise behind the recently-pulled reality show Welcome to the Neighborhood.

Wherein we invite our readers to submit themselves to the possibly unsafe implements of humpy E! gossip manicurist Ted Casablanca's online salon and guess the identity of his weekly blind item. This week: Closeted gays at altitude and still! more! coketastic young actresses. Take the Nestea plunge into One High-Flying Blind Vice: