Hey, did you know that Nicole Kidman has a movie opening today? Well, she does! Don't drag that razor blade across your quivering forearm in punishment just yet—we'd forgotten all about Bewitched too, until we stumbled across this utterly fascinating wire story, in which Kidman reveals the rigorous physical preparation for her role and whether or not she'd like to be granted witch powers for a day:

· DVDs of TV shows did $2.8 million in sales in 2004; at least $2 billion of that came from viewers who don't realize that Friends and Seinfeld reruns play on free TV roughly fourteen times a day. [Variety]
· Casting directors overwhelmingly vote to join the Teamsters to give themselves extra leverage in their negotiations with movie and television producers. The funniest guy in each production office in Hollywood immediately begins telling the hilarious joke, "What did Jesus tell the newly-unionized casting director? Don't do anything until I get back." [THR]
· Vivaldi is the new poker: Indie production company Mechaniks puts a Vivaldi biopic into development, even though Columbia and Imagine have a similar project in their pipeline. [Variety]
· Hustle and Flow's writer/director Craig Brewer will reteam with H&F producing buddies John Singleton and Stephanie Allain and write/direct Black Snake Moan, the story of bluesman Blind Lemon Jefferson. Christina Ricci is already attached to the pic, with Samuel L. Jackson and—get ready for it—Justin Timberlake in talks to join. [THR]
· Carsey-Werner might be close to shuttering its television production studio, seriously imperiling our hopes for a That 70s Show/Cosby Show hybrid spin-off featuring Danny Masterson and Raven Simone. [Variety]

Radar Online reports that Russell Crowe's lawyer was responsible for the great advice that led Crowe's publicist to issue perhaps the most entertaining press release in the history of actor-related assault, in which Crowe's infamous bashing of a hotel clerk with a telephone was blamed on the employee's poor customer service skills:

· As we all probably know by now—i.e., we would've heard about the universe being sucked into a manhole outside The Late Show's Ed Sullivan Theate—Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes didn't wed last night in front of Letterman. But our CrazyTalk was right about the judge (and it appears sister site Gawker was talking to the same squirrel), because Letterman considerately made one available in the green room in case the crazy-in-fake-love couple wanted to tie the knot right then and there. They also turned down a chance to consummate their love in a dressing room filled with rose petals and an instructional Kama Sutra mural painted on the wall. Maybe they'll hit the love-room next time they have something to promote.
· Cruise also dropped in on The Today Show, where he taught Matt Lauer a thing or two about the evils of psychiatry: "You don’t even know what Ritalin is! If you read the papers on how they came up with the drug, the dosage… You should be more responsible in knowing what it is. I am responsible. I know these things." You heard the man: He knows things. (While we were sleeping off some coast-to-coast jetlag—why did we get out bed again?—Gawker helpfully transcribed the exchange.) Also: The AP has already documented the Today Show fracas.
· Wrapping up our team coverage, Gizmodo takes a look at the e-meter (you've heard the jokes, now see the gadget!). It turns out that the device is indeed somewhat more complicated than a couple of tin cans, some string, and a joy buzzer. But can a joy buzzer help free you from those troublesome body thetans? We think not.

Nielsen Research, the fine company whose television ratings system lets you know that people are crazy for J. Peterman and Joey McIntyre stumbling through a Viennese waltz, have deployed new "local people meters," which have finally discovered something called "minority viewers":

· Sayeth the Lohan: "I don't get involved in any drama." Of course, this I'm-above-it-all stance only applies to the displacement of bushmen by De Beers diamond miners, not something as monumentally important as the placement of one of her songs in her new movie or the guest list at a party at the Standard.
· "9:05 a.m. Relish life free from negative trappings of the reactive mind, God-like status of perfect mental, emotional, and physical health, and general infallibility. 9:29 a.m. Toast bagel."
· Please feel free to return to your regular, uninterrupted sleep patterns: Hermes has apologized to Oprah.
· A photography icon refuses to give an approving hand-job to the photography book Ben Stiller edited, nearly throwing the Earth off its celebrity ass-kissing axis. [via LA Observed]

· With a name like Say Hi To Your Mom (at the Echo), you win an automatic To Do list music round-up mention. Also: Youth Group play Spaceland tonight; when they're at the Henry Fonda three months from now, you can turn your nose up at your slow-adopting friends who are paying fifteen bucks to park in Hollywood.
· Jennifer Saginor signs Playground: A Childhood Lost and Found Inside the Playboy Mansion at Book Soup. Ask her about the time she saw Jimmy Caan beat up a monkey while simultaneously engaged in a Grotto orgy with Misses July through November 1975—it's a great anecdote.
· Indulge your inner hipster wino (we suspect he/she's lurking pretty close to the surface) at Silver Lake Wine's Thursday Night Flights. We think wine is involved, and you need some way to take the edge off while you wait for the next episode of Dancing with the Stars.

Given that many of you may have fainted dead away from the apparent obviousness of this blind item, let's end this charade and get to your guesses. But first, as always, the refresher course in One Randy-Candy Blind Vice:

Welcome to another edition of Defamer CrazyTalk™, in which we down three Vicodin-Red Bull cocktails and wait for a cute squirrel with a unicorn horn to tell us some completely unverifiable rumor that we nonetheless feel compelled to share with you, the reader who is admirably unconcerned with the potentially hilarious inaccuracy of said rumor. Ready for today's squirrel-gram? Good.

We blame today's NY Times piece on Being Bobby Brown, the troubled singer/bon vivant's new reality show, for the time that's about to disappear in a summerlong game of Bobby and Whitney-assisted Edward Fortyhands:

In today's LAT, Hollywood jill-of-all-trades Amanda Scheer Demme describes her vision for the "revamped" Roosevelt Hotel and the three new hotspot bars (the Tropicana, the Lobby Bar, and the upcoming Teddy's) housed under its historic roof:

There are a couple of different ways that a hot up-and-comer can get started with the arduous process of trading sexual favors for a career boost in the entertainment business. He can haunt the bars along Santa Monica Boulevard and look pretty until he catches the eye of closeted exec who told his heavily-in-denial wife that he's be home late because he's "busy putting the finishing touches on a deal." Or, if the ambitious thespian wants the world to know that he's not just another pretty face with a set of abs on which one can smash cinderblocks, he can post the gossamer poetry of desperation on Craigslist:

· The MPAA recognizes longtime chief Jack Valenti by renaming its DC headquarters in his honor. Valenti celebrates the occasion in appropriate (and surprisingly touching) fashion, scrawling his name on the building's cornerstone in the blood of a freshly-slaughtered fourteen-year-old who'd illegally downloaded a bootlegged copy of Batman Begins. Valenti then hastily renamed the building the "Jack Valenti 'Take That, Pirate Motherfuckers' Centre at Respecting Copyrights Plaza," removed his shirt, and challenged all comers to a best-of-three-falls Ultimate Fighting bout. [THR]
· "Stringer fingers electronics slump"— We really want to imagine this headline's intentionally filthy, but are having a hard time imagining a body part that corresponds to "electronics slump." [Variety]
· Martha Stewart plays it coy, refuses to reveal her Apprentice dismissal catchphrase. Our vote goes to "Bite the doily," but she should feel free to invent a punctuating hand gesture. [THR]
· Fox reality incubus Mike Darnell takes American Idol to the next, logical step, planning a spin-off in which celebrities warble out-of-key karaoke songs for charity. [Variety]
· The Jeff Zucker suicide watch begins in earnest, as the tarnished NBC golden boy admits that his network took an even bigger pounding than expected following the upfronts. CBS rival Les Moonves buys his entire staff cupcakes to celebrate. [THR]

Wherein we invite our readers to stare at the words randomly arranged in humpy E! gossip spin-artist Ted Casablanca's weekly blind item, feign comprehension, and make a wild guess as to the carefully obscured identity of this week's naughty celebrity. Tiptoe through the delicate field of daisies that is One Randy-Candy Blind Vice:

Now that Jennifer Aniston's (mostly) out of the picture and Brads Pitt and Grey have engineered the long-expected move of Pitt's Plan B production company to Grey's New Paramount™, the two pals can finally shrug off Aniston's icy stare and tell the world how they feel about each other:

Today's Rush & Molloy column in the NY Daily News reports that the War of the Worlds folks have finally tired of "journalists" and their insistently suppressive prose and banned all print media from tonight's premiere in New York City. Well, not all print media, as they've granted something of a exclusive to People magazine, whose planned twenty-page spread of Tom Cruise personally feeding an entire nursery full of crack-addicted kittens from a medicine dropper probably had nothing at all to do with their Most Favored Rag status.

· This one's a serious candidate for Headline of the Year. The story's not bad, either.
· Lohan spotted near books, reading declared "over."
· Robert Redford's face: from slack as a shar-pei's scrotum to tight as a drum in just five years.
· We always thought MJ would be sued over a vicious genital mutilation by Bubbles before some mundane dog bite.
· "Unit #836B3-Z4-delta-9KEC5: Jew ar to nize. I tought jew were so guud in Teaching Mrs. Tingle." Tom Cruise takes Katie Holmes to meet his former business partner.

· If you e-mail the address found in this Craigslist post before 6 pm, you can see comedians Dane Cook (who recently did The Cruise all over Jimmy Kimmel's couch, before The Cruise was over) and Sarah Silverman (we won't let ourselves think about what she's done on that couch) perform at the Hollywood Improv tonight for free. We know you like some free.
· Another free activity: The Downtown LA Outdoor Movie Series presents the doc Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey at the California Plaza...downtown, obvs. And if you think you don't even know what a theremin is, maybe you need to spend a little time at Theremin World.
· Wednesday Night Has Music, Too: Longview at the Troubadour; The Like at Spaceland (are they legal yet?); Giant Drag at Boardners.

Less than a week after stunt coordinators picketed outside the offices of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for the inclusion of an Oscar category recognizing their craft, the Academy board of governors has flipped the proverbial bird at their efforts:

Do you sometimes feel that after a half an hour in front of The Insider or flipping through US Weekly, you feel "foggy" or unable to focus even on the most simple, non-celebrity-related memories? While you might have previously attributed that feeling to a little piece of your soul dying, some "scientist types" say that the parts of your brain responsible for forming memories might be riddled with cells that only fire when confronted with images of your favorite celebrities: