Low Culture points us to this quote from Paramount exec/chief excuse-maker Wayne Llewellyn, who offers a theory for Alfie's dismal box office results:

Without a Paddle/Stroker Ace star Burt Reynolds is preemptively suing (indeed, shades of Bill Falafelhands) a former girlfriend whom he says is planning to blackmail him with accusations of verbal and physical abuse. It's the standard he said/she said court filing, but our favorite parts of such papers (excepting, of course, discussion of Joey's potential serial rape career in legal documents) are the dueling descriptions of plaintiff and defendant, i.e. "Reynolds has received international acclaim and won numerous awards" vs. "Seals [the ex-girlfriend] had little to no formal education and was working as a bar maid." We guess Reynolds' lawyers nixed the line about how "her ass really didn't look that great in jeans, anyway" before the suit was filed.

At least the article covers the obligatory "actors are extremely qualified to play shrinks because they've all spent years in therapy trying to fix the fucked up personal issues that lead them to act in the first place" angle.

If still photography of Tara Reid's epic boob slip or the resulting discussion about the skill of her plastic surgeon weren't enough to turn you off to the whole sordid affair, there is now video available of Reid's infamous red carpet moment. Watch as the strap of her dress tumbles off her shoulder! Cringe as wave upon wave of flashbulbs snap away, capturing the moment forever! Sigh with relief as a publicist finally rectifies the wardrobe failure! Cringe as Reid fruitlessly appeals to see exactly what the photographic firing squad caught on film, knowing that pictures did indeed escape into the outside world! But don't watch the video more than once—no matter how many times you go back, you never get to see the other breast.

Britney Spears' recent writing bug has really gotten out of hand. During a recent shopping trip on Melrose, she was so gripped with creative fervor that she scrawled some "Graffiti of Truth" on a wall at a vintage t-shirt shop. Someone ought to sneak a camera into the employee bathroom, just in case she penned a secret epilogue to her latest masterpiece. We'd hate for any of her words to be lost to literary history. That would be so un-wicked.

No agents are actually moving anywhere in this installment of The Agent Dance (at least not yet!), but we relish any opportunity to put Ari Emanuel's smiling face next to a story about an agent fight that he had no part in. Page Six gives the blow-by-blow of a dust-up between ICM power player Carol Bodie and ten-percenter underling Jim Osborne:

· Howard Keel, movie musical song-and-dance man and Dallas star, dies at age 85. If Jamie Foxx really wants an Oscar, maybe he should option the rights. [THR]
· George Clooney will star in and direct the Edward R. Murrow/Joe McCarthy showdown pic Goodnight. And Good Luck for his and Steven Soderbergh's Section 8 production company. Clooney also co-wrote the script and plans to be very hands-on at the craft service table when production begins. [Variety, sub. req'd.]
· Desperate Housewives keeps on bringing in larger ratings numbers; we suspect this streak is fueled by a weekly human sacrifice at Disney headquarters. Fox's beloved Arrested Development does just O.K., preventing everyone involved from getting too comfortable in their offices. [THR]
· Author Gabriel Garcia Marquez finally caves in after years of resisting movie offers, as New Line purchases rights to Love in the Time of Cholera. At least they didn't wait for him to die and buy off his relatives. [Variety, sub. req'd.]
· HBO and Alan Ball confirm that the upcoming 12-episode fifth season of Six Feet Under will be the last. Unless HBO throws a shitload of money at everyone to squeeze out one more season. Or spins off Nate. [THR]

Erstwhile superagent Mike Ovitz's testimony in The Hollywood Trial of the Century has provoked copy-friendly outrage within the highly-principled world of the talent representation community. Naturally, there's a delicate balance between "honesty" and an "extreme fear of defenestration."

Hey, have you heard that The O.C. is back for its new season? Even the LAT's Hot Property column isn't immune from Fox's unstoppable promotional machinery, announcing Rachel "Summer" Bilson's purchase of a new Hollywood Hills house for $1.2 million in pocket change. (Her business manager can probably write it off as an advertising expense now.) There's no mention of a pool, so when Mischa Barton comes over to run lines (pretend for a second that the kids are all real-life friends too), she has to make due finishing her soul-destroying primal screams with dumping patio furniture into the hottub.

The numbers that momentarily quell those Monday morning feelings of dread about plodding aimlessly through another work week:

Is there anything better on a Friday afternoon than a crazy rumor that we can't confirm? Now this might be the Glade-and-Sharpie cocktail we just huffed talking, but the plastic pumpkin left over from Halloween told us a rumor that Mischa Barton and Lindsay Lohan are going on vacation together. No word on where they're going, but they should be back in 28 days or so. We know! Totally nuts, right? Didn't Lohan just get back to work on Herbie: Fully Loaded after her hospital stay? Isn't Barton shooting The O.C.? And what are the odds they'd both take trips at the same time with their crazy schedules? Never mind. This Sharpie is spent and Mr. Pumpkin is threatening to eat our soul if we don't run out to the Office Depot for a refill. That crazy devil pun'kin!

Friday
1. David Foster Wallace reads as part of the UCLA Hammer's “Some Favorite Writers” series. It will be a little like hanging out with a rockstar, albeit one who writes page-long sentences and has a footnote fetish.
2. Pre-ATP Music round-up: U.N.K.L.E. at The Pearl in West Hollywood; Death Cab for Cutie at the Wiltern (good luck one night after The O.C. premiere!); Ted Leo & The Pharmacists at the El Rey.
Saturday:
3. All Tomorrow’s Parties begins with Modest Mouse as this year's curator. (For the indie-impaired, that means they picked the bands that are performing.) Too bad they didn’t have a say in the location, since waiting on a two-hour line to cram into the Queen Mary has a really unfortunate sobering effect. The easy solution: Drink more.
4. Attend an Evening at the Playboy Mansion to benefit the Special Olympics. Sure, it's a good cause, but shouldn't a trip to the Mansion have no redeeming value other than telling your friends you got slapped by five Bunnies in the Grotto?
Sunday:
5. All Tomorrow’s Parties continues. Still in Long Beach. And hopefully, still grievously drunk from Saturday's festivities.
6. Pink's Turns 65! 65 cent hot dogs! The line's going to run from La Brea and Melrose up into Studio City!
7. Boing Boing's blogging femme-fatale Xeni Jardin and others read irreverent shorts (that Xeni swears like a drunken pirate!) at Vermin on the Mount at the Mountain in Chinatown.

We now momentarily pause to thank this week's sponsors, whose support nicely supplements the part-time income we earn de-bradding scripts in the CAA mailroom. If you're interested in hopping on the advertising bandwagon, see this,

The talented photo analysts at Awful Plastic Surgery turn their jeweler's eye for cosmetic alterations to the ubiquitous photos of Tara Reid's epic boob-unveiling and determine that she might not have gotten what she paid for:

Britney Spears has really caught the writing bug, huh? We like to imagine her peacefully lying in bed, then awakening bolt upright when inspiration strikes, scrambling for her bedside quill and parchment, clamoring to record her thoughts as spent cans of Red Bull clatter to the floor. It appears her peculiar muse has struck again:

By the end of the year, all movies will be animated. Enjoy your freedom to see live actors while it lasts.

· Proving the industry maxim that no number one film can go unsequelized, The Grudge 2 will become a reality. They've sign up the first pic's writer, Stephen Susco, to revisit the remake. [THR]
· Leonardo DiCaprio will produce/star in a thriller about mercenaries hired by governements to fight their wars. We imagine his preparation for the role will fall short of a quickie tour-of-duty "in the shit" of Falluja. Some people have no dedication to craft. [Variety, sub. req'd.]
· CBS does the utterly expected and picks up CSI: NY for 10 more episodes; Les Moonves seriously considers drafting Jerry Bruckheimer as his right-hand man in his plot to conquer the world. [Variety, sub. req'd.]
· Director Steven Soderbergh leads the charge against the excessive, ear-splitting decibels of movie theaters' "pre-show entertainment." They'd probably make more headway against in-theater noise pollution if they merely forced Michael Bay to retire. [THR]
· CBS dominates the Nielsens in the first night of November sweeps; The OC manages a decent opening despite Mischa Barton's ridiculous attempts to convey her character's inner struggle by shrieking like a wounded turkey. [THR]

We're endlessly fascinated by reports of the A-list exhausting all of their channels of influence and actually reporting for jury duty. A judge told Harrison Ford he "took it like a man" by bothering to show up at a Santa Monica court; Kelsey Grammer might just get a judicial reacharound for appearing in the 213.

A poster at MetaFilter poses a question to the community to research a writing assignment: Who are the most overrated stars in showbiz? The utterly unsurprising answer: All of them. After spending a while slogging through the responses, we're hard pressed to come up with a name that doesn't appear among the reasoned critiques of certain celebrity's talent-to-hype gaps: "Jerry Seinfeld—[Seinfeld voice]: Talent? What's that all about?" "JERRY FUCKING BRUCKHEIMER" "Helen Hunt. Helen fucking Hunt." We suggest that everyone in SAG immediately call their publicists to demand the next cover of US Weekly (and an accompanying four-page spread of a shopping trip on Rodeo Drive) to let the world know that their talent is exactly equal to their fame.

Usually, in red carpet photography lineups, the best the gawking class can do is hope that a fraction of a nipple breaks loose of its couture prison, or that a flashbulb renders a sheer dress temporarily translucent. But at P. Diddy's birthday party, Tara Reid's loose garment forever upped the ante in the slippage game, revealing all as the cameras happily snapped away. Next week, look for Paris Hilton to accept the challenge and "accidentally" detonate her panties at a press conference as a family of hairless beavers "coincidentally" parades through the melee. (Uncovered, NSFW version after the jump.)