An extremely hungover spy's tenacity in making sure we received a report from the Wednesday night scene at Concorde warmed our hearts so much that we almost forgive her for getting too drunk to follow around some Defamer favorites until they did something interesting.
· Tom Cruise dumped Mission: Impossible 3 to do War of the Worlds with Spielberg, but he'll still engage The Fantastic Four in a Fourth of July showdown. We'll soon update our projections accordingly. [THR]
· Johnny Knoxville continues to expand his dramatic repertoire with the lead role in Daltry Calhoun, a film that allows him to innovate in the confines of the ever-popular "unexpected parent" plot. We're guessing his take will be "unexpected parent who isn't afraid to stick things up his ass." [THR]
· Tom Arnold is developing an ABC comedy loosely based on his time as a stepfather to Roseanne's three children, proving once again that he owes his entire life to a hilariously failed marriage. We should all be so lucky. [THR]
· Bravo picks up what promises to be among the most trainwreckilicious reality shows of all time, Being Bobby Brown. Whitney! Bobby! Boozin'! Pill poppin'! Rehabbin'! Get the sense we're excited? Why can't we TiVo this right fucking now!? [THR]
· Rupert Murdoch's compensation rose 42% in the last fiscal year. And just when we were finally going to stop believing in God. [Variety, sub. req'd.]
Wherein we invite readers to guess the identities of the subjects of humpy E! gossipmonger Ted Casablanca's blind items, but only after performing the arduous intermediate step of converting Casablanca's mind-erasing prose into a form of English they can better understand. After two straight weeks of double blind items, Ted can only manage One Still-Burning Blind Vice—but at least there's an element of an Awful Truth blind item standby, The Supposedly Straight Actor Who Enjoys Gay Sex :
Ramones guitarist Johnny Ramone's taking his two minutes of power chords and going home. Ramone died of prostate cancer yesterday at his home here in L.A. We could talk about how the Ramones were so great that we're not even annoyed when we see a 15-year-old walking out of Urban Outfitters in their iconic t-shirt, but LAVoice's Mack Reed, writing about a planned Johnny memorial statue, says it better than we can:
The L.A.Weekly's Nikki Finke scores a long sit-down interview with the congenitally unfunny Jay Leno in the Tonight Show's green room and makes him talk politics. In trying to prove his liberal bonafides (which one would have as hard a time divining from his monologues as laughs) to the um, aggressively lefty Finke, he assures us that Karl Rove isn't leaking him material:
1. Now that your Prozac bottle is depressingly empty, embrace your blues at the BB King Blues Festival at the Hollywood Bowl. And no, this isn't the "White Stripes" blues, so there's no reason to fear swimming through a crowd of pouty hipsters.
2. You can watch movies like Dog Day Afternoon, Point Break, or even Sugar and Spice to learn different techniques for robbing a bank, or you pick up some tricks of the trade from real-life bank robber Joy Loya, who'll read from his memoir The Man Who Outgrew His Prison Cell: Confessions of a Bank Robber at Borders in Pasadena.
3. Celebrate Rosh Hashanah with an Atkins-friendly meal that even your Gentile personal trainer can get behind.
Let us be among the first to congratulate celebutante-doggystyler-author-fashionista-layabout Paris Hilton in parlaying all of her multihyphenate buzz into one of the most coveted fake awards in the magazine industry, as she was named US Weekly's Young Hollywood Star of the Year in the issue that has just crash-landed in a supermarket rack near you. Brava, Miss Paris! What exactly do you do again? Oh, that's right—the doggystyling thing. There are so many hyphens we forget by the end.
Jim Hill of Jim Hill Media drops a barrage of new Lindsay Lohan-related bombs on our unsuspecting heads with news from the set (and from behind the scenes) of Herbie: Fully Loaded, where's Lohan's supposed partying is spooking Disney into considering extreme measures—and not the kind where Michael Eisner buys her Irish Car Bombs just to see what happens.
· The Bourne Supremacy's Karl Urban is set to star in Universal's Doom, setting him up to challenge Milla Jovovich as the top video-game adaptation star. We'd love to know if that's how his managers sold him on the project. [THR]
· Martin Scorcese fails to see a doctor to get approved for insurance, gets sued for breach of contract. Clearly, God is punishing him for his involvement in the Italian-American bashing Shark Tale. [THR]
· New Line purchases the NBA-centered comedy script Heckled and goes after Vince Vaughn for the lead. We recently heard that Vaughn's people are trying to transition him back to drama work, so maybe the heckler New Line wants him to play can kill somebody if they're serious about signing him up. [THR]
· From the studio that brought you the smash international box office sensation Garfield: The Movie comes even more CGI inspiration, Alvin and the Chipmunks. The stunt-casting of Bill Murray probably helped Garfield avoid total disaster, so maybe Fox will try to one-up themselves and get Richard Gere to do a cameo? [THR]
The Defamer correspondent on fake photos of formerly-popular action stars in gay discos writes in to debunk the image of Bruce Willis engaging in some clean, shirtless fun in a German dance hall. "It's like two different bodies composed into one...and they left parts of another arm in his armpit. It's pretty blatant once you look at the "original"...sticks out like a...err....sore thumb." (You can click the thumbnail at left to see our expert's evidence.) Once again, some potential Photoshop trickery has caused us to question the very nature of what is "real" and what is "still really fucking funny."
The Insider, televised gossip-monger Pat O'Brien's Entertainment Tonight spin-off [Ed.note—ET spin-offs? We're getting in our time machine and killing ourselves ten years ago.], might be doing decent ratings numbers out of the gate, but its premiere left this reader, who's seen O'Brien in real-life action, unimpressed and skeeved:
We were strangely comforted to read that eye-gouging, effigy-burning, teen-queen blood feud between Hilary Duff and Lindsay Lohan still rages on. Duff stokes the flames in Blender: "Sometimes I feel like I really hate her, which is pretty extreme for me, because I don't hate anybody... She's always trying to spread stories about me, but the funny thing is, I know so many stories about her that I could tell you right now, but I'm not going to, because I don't think people should know."
American Idle notices a startling similarity between seminal corpse-desecration film Weekend at Bernie's and tonight's invalid-exploitation special on NBC, the Maria Shriver-hosted Siegfried & Roy: The Miracle. Someone tipped us off about the special shortly after the interview was conducted, and it still sounds like nothing more than a crass infomercial for Father of the Pride, which is to say there is absolutely no way we're going to miss it. We're most curious to find out if tiny NBC Uni head Jeff Zucker had Roy hollowed out so he could climb inside to answer Shriver's faux-concerned questions, or if he spared no expense and had a fully-functioning animatronic replica created for the occasion.
—Have a "religion" long enough, and eventually you're going to spawn a crazed killer. Funny, we'd always expected that person would have been Madonna after another failed Guy Ritchie collaboration or a backstage magic water shortage. [via Jew School]
—Some people with too much time on their hands declare that "You're fired" is the top catchphrase on TV. Unfortunately, there is no subcategory for "top looks of existential desperation," to recognize the work of the actors on the North Shore. Who are we kidding? They probably just have gas.
—Fanboy porn: A side-by-side comparison of changes made to the Star Wars DVD. You really can abuse yourself to it if you put in the effort.
—Check out IndieWire's excellent blog coverage of the Toronto Film Festival, because they went to Canada so you don't have to.
—Having been married to James "King of the World" Cameron can be hazardous to your mental health.
1. Drink beer out of ridiculously large glasses, eat brats so large your doctor would slap you, and indulge your dormant lederhosen fetish at the annual Oktoberfest at Alpine Village. Yeah, you'll have to travel a bit, but you'll thank us when you wake up next to an oompah band accordion player tomorrow morning.
2. Watch a fresh-faced, pre-Sarah Jessica Parker/pre-Nathan Lane Matthew Broderick, as the Santa Monica Pier hosts a free screening of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. And by all means, try to put all of Principal Rooney's recent problems out of your head.
3. For an alternate 80s experience, Tears for Fears is doing an in-store gig at Tower Sunset. Enjoy the musical nostalgia trip, but be forewarned: Chanting "Shout/Shout/Let it all out" may now carry unexpected consequences with the aging band.
We thought that the Kabbalah Centre's declaration that they were going to make the Israelis and Palestinian spontaneously engage in a group hug was easily going to be the most egregiously unhinged press release we'd encounter today. When are we going to learn? The Columbus Citizens Foundation, an organization committed to "preserving the rich Italian-American heritage," calls out Steven Spielberg and DreamWorks because the animated fishies in Shark Tale will brainwash kids into thinking all Italians are like the gesticulating, stab-happy Joe Pesci of GoodFellas.
