· Richard Linklater signs on to direct The Bad News Bears remake for Paramount, starring Billy Bob Thornton and written by the Bad Santa team. You know, it's like School of Rock but with Little League— which is troubling because we're pretty sure School of Rock was sold as The Bad News Bears with guitars. Still, we have high hopes for this one; Thornton as Mr. Buttermaker is a pretty inspired move. [THR]
· Hollywood Out of Ideas XIV: Warner Brothers has acquired the rights to remake Hawaii Five-O. Ocean's Twelve writer George Nolfi will adapt the material. [Variety, sub. req'd.]
· ABC gives go ahead to a Happy Days anniversary special. The show will feature outtakes, montages, and a whole bunch of has-beens repressing their jealousy that Richie Cunningham has made a fortune directing thoroughly mediocre, yet Oscar-winning, features. And isn't the Fonz dead? No? Oh, that was the Three's Company guy. [Variety, sub. req'd]
· The Next Great Champ does not impress in debut. Our world remains officially un-rocked. [THR]
· A study shows that people with DVRs lurve them and never want to return to the plebian realm of four-minute commercials breaks crammed with shitty beer ads. Yes, that information required a study. [THR]

Is the MGM sale finally done? Spies are telling us that Time Warner officially purchased MGM today, with internal discussion of the incredibly complicated integration (presumably the busy work of layoffs, fancy new corporate names for things, and shitergy opportunities) to start tomorrow.

Wherein we invite readers to rearrange the randomly-scattered words in humpy E! gossiper Ted Casablanca's weekly blind items into some fractured semblance of English, and, if no aneurysm results from the labor, submit guesses as to the concealed celebrity's identity. For the second straight week, Ted has returned from the gossip mountaintop with two blind items; feel free to guess one, both, or to collapse in the bitter, salty tears of failure and frustration. Enjoy One Hungry Blind Vice, both His and Hers.

In an interview with British talk show host Michael Parkinson, Tom Cruise once again proves that asking him questions about Scientology will trigger the "study tech" that involuntarily makes him deny that there's anything untoward about his devotion to all things L. Ron Hubbard. In fact, the very idea that people think there's anything weird about Scientology is completely ludicrous:

Because of the MPAA's nagging "Respect Copyrights" campaign, we all know that stuntman/propaganda puppet Manny Perry makes movies. But who watches movies? According to this trailer from the website Loading Ready Run, a lot of people fed up with the browbeating anti-piracy ads inflicted on people who have already paid for a movie ticket. Sadly, there are no pirate noises, but the message "Put an end to anti-piracy ads" still rings true. The movement lives!

—Check out the guns on Tom Cruise's latest infatuation. This highly-public (but ultimately failed) romantic overture ought to finally put all of those nasty rumors to bed.
—It's a struggle not to link the Fug girls every day in the Short Ends. Today, Ellen Barkin gets the business. Have these cold, fashion-vivisecting ladies forgotten about Sea of Love?
—L.A. journo Cathy Seipp recounts her experiences with the "famously difficult" Nikki Finke in the National Review Online. We particularly love the bit where Finke pretends they've never met.
—Writer/blogger Daniel Radosh proves that he can be bought. His price? Some pictures of hot, naked twins. The Movement must continue without him.
—The Employee of the Month blog rounds up today's seemingly-random spate of Nicole Kidman news. In all fairness, a sandwich might ruin her career.

In what is sure to result in a string of obvious breast jokes in the monologues of Jay Leno and Jimmy Kimmel, celebrity novelist/extreme silicone enthusiast Pamela Anderson has lent her image to a PETA-sponsored, anti-KFC billboard to be displayed in various major cities. Anderson and the PETA gang are four kinds of whooped up about KFC's treatment of chickens, which the fast-food chain insists on killing and converting into the crispy delights that we can only bring ourselves to eat when grievously drunk. The billboards are supposedly going up today in L.A., so if you happen to pass by one and have your digital camera handy, we'd love to see some pictures. It's unlikely to be the monument that the "Blowjob Over Sunset" was, but then again, there's a chance that Pam might fellate a rooster if it was for the greater animal good.

1. Check out the Kaiju Big Battel at Avalon tonight. Think strange robots and creatures from bad-sci movies wrestling in outer space. Also, you're really high. If that kind of thing doesn't float your boat, you can always sneak upstairs to the Spider Club and watch Lindsay Lohan make out with Fez.
2. Comedian D.L. Hughley joins the Planned Parenthood and National Poetry Slam Champion Sekou (tha misfit) for "Slam the Vote" at the Village at Ed Gould Plaza. Another voting event? We thought that the election was last week. But since there will probably be buckets full of free birth control at this one, we’re there.
3. Tonight's main event: Vanilla Ice at the Knitting Factory for FREE. Well, it's not entirely free. That little piece of your soul that you'd sacrifice in the name of ironic enjoyment has some value. Then again, getting to yell "Word to your mother!" at the top of your lungs over and over again might be worth it.

A design professional who claims to "do this for a living" offers some additional insights into the apparent failings of the Jersey Girl video box, which we deconstructed for you yesterday. (Click the thumbnail at left to see the full image.) We certainly lack credentials in this field, but we'll still take a stab at answering point #11: a) Biggs has no shame left after gaining his fame through the insertion of his penis into baked goods (it always comes back to pie-fucking, doesn't it? Wear it like a badge of honor, Biggs!), and b) Tyler's not actually looking at the consumer, she just has those spooky eyes that follow you wherever you go—don't tease, her mother was a model/groupie and her father, well, you know. Something about that combo indicates less-than-optimal prenatal care.

Will someone please, please go ahead and finally buy MGM and put us all out of our misery? It wasn't even a week ago that the trades reported that Time Warner was really, really, so totally close to locking up the sale. We were quite ready to stop fretting about MGM's fate, confident that TW could begin obsessively scribbling TWMGM, MGMTW. and Metro-Time-Goldwyn-Warner-Mayer on the back cover of its back-to-school marble notebook. But now Variety reports that early MGM paramour Sony is throwing pebbles at The Lion's window and begging for another chance, and our people on the inside passing us mash notes have no idea what's going on. Everyone's a little vulnerable right now, and MGM better quit fucking around before someone gets hurt.

A prick-eared reader tunes into half of an extremely loud Bruce Willis phone conversation, leaving us with a few questions: Who's on the other end of that call? Is it a good idea to hand your child a credit card while you chat away? Did Willis suffer hearing damage while shaking his ass in a gay, German disco?

If you don't want to know the fate of Mormon Jeopardy! superman Ken Jennings, stop reading...now. Blogger Jason Kottke has a spoiler from the set of Jennings' eventual defeat after 74 consecutive victories. We'll leave it to you to click through and see the total prize money from his incredible, amazingly annoying run, during which he may have become Alex Trebek's commonlaw brusband.

· Maybe this whole boxing reality show thing is just not going to work. The Next Great Champ and The Contender face another obstacle, as the LAT chooses a strange time to discover the entertainment business—they're attempting to reveal the show's winners by filing a petition under the California public records act. We're all for spoilers, but who cares? Let's see if the shows last a few weeks before we put on our "Scoop" hats, OK? [THR]
· Alias creator J.J. Abrams is teaming up with former SNL'r Cheri Oteri to develop a comedy project for ABC. Please, J.J., no latex outfits this time. You don't have the raw materials to pull that off again. [THR]
· Temporary Tom Cruise soulmate Penelope Cruz joins psychological thriller Chromophobia, where her impenetrable accent will hopefully be obscured by lots of screaming and her British castmates. [Variety, sub. req'd.]
· "Greg the Bunny" (the puppet and not the criminally short-lived Fox sitcom) will star in a special for IFC with the possibility of becoming a series. We'd start a letter-writing campaign on the bunny's behalf, but that sounds like a lot of work and we're incredibly lazy. [THR]
· Ron Livingston is in talks to star in Relative Strangers, a guy-searching-for-his-strange-biological-parents flick. Nice to see him getting back into the indie film fray. Everyone needs a nice paycheck once in a while, but Little Black Book? We just hope he didn't get any Brittany Murphy on him. [THR]

Dallas Mavericks owner/reality TV show host Mark Cuban calls out Donald Trump on his blog after Trump made some comments about Cuban's show, The Benefactor, on the Tonight Show last night. It's a classic "my Survivor knockoff is girthier than yours" scrap, which will only be settled when each billionaire whips out his televised manhood and plops it onto a Nielsen box for careful measuring.

In a interview with Dark Horizons, the always quotable, delightfully partisan Alec Baldwin describes a horrifying new publicity strategy being phased in at the movie studios, in which actors are actually placed inside the anal columns of the public. Obviously, this has to violate both the SAG collective bargaining agreement and the dictates of good hygiene.

In a letter to the editor in Variety, [Ed.note—Variety prints those? Who knew?] an "aspiring writer" responds to a Brian Lowry column about a Bravo show searching for undiscovered sitcom writers and defends his right to be humiliated on reality television if the payoff is a writing gig:

Normally, we limit our PrivacyWatch feature to celebrity sightings in the L.A. area. But when we hear about Jack Black, King Kong, and a very special subset of wrestling from a reader all the way in New Zealand, we'll certainly make an exception.

—Wrong-coasted sister site Gawker nearly blows the lid off a "Brad Pitt in rehab story." But who really knows what the abdominizing man from the "Hey, What Am I Smelling Right Now?" school of acting does with his downtime on movie sets?
—What happens when two heiresses are born into incredible wealth, but only one is gifted with actual talent? Find out as Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Paris Hilton face off at GorillaMask [via Adrants]
—CulturePulp's Michael Russell interviews cult-of-celebrity übersbitchslapper Cintra Wilson for the Bookslut blog.
—"Exhausted but Proud, Hugh Jackman Retires His Sequins" reads the NYT headline. Exactly what is the Gray Lady trying to say about the dancin' and singin' Broadway boy?
—A suspect Britney Spears panty flash, courtesy of the knuckle-shuffling batallion at Fleshbot.

It seems like only a couple days ago that we were lamenting Ben Affleck's seeming disappearance from the tabloids, and already we're being treated to all kind of stories involving Big B Aff. Don't call it a comeback. We hear that he's been hanging around the set of Alias with new fling Jennifer Garner, where her ex-boyfriend, Michael Vartan, is still employed. Sounds like a fun place to work! Affleck and Vartan can hang around J-Gar's trailer while she's shooting, trying to think up a cutesy combined name suitable for tabloid headlines. But we'll suggest "BenGar" as a solution, allowing the two guys to get back to the uncomfortable silences on the set. BenGar: Vaguely medicinal sounding and yet sufficiently annoying to stick in your head. Frankly, it's perfect.

1. See Paris Hilton in a book store—and not the kind that employ an army of stand-by moppers and have quarter-powered peek-a-boo booths in the back. Paris will sign her autobiography, Confessions of an Heiress: A Tongue-in-Chic Peek Behind the Pose, at the Brentano’s in Century City. We're pretty sure that title has more words in it than she has in her vocabulary, but it doesn't really take a talented writer to scribble her name.
2. The Silversun Pickups begin their free Tuesday night residency at the Echo for the month of September. Head on over and confirm that hipsters will see the same show week after week as long as there's no cover charge.
3. The Los Angeles International Short Film Festival kicks off tonight at the ArcLight. Good: Director Bryan "I'm doing the new Superman" Singer will be in attendance to receive an award. Better: Short films require a fraction of the attention span of feature-length festival entries.