Just what you've been craving on a Friday morning— a picture of someone with way too much money making someone with a lot less money do something vaguely demeaning. But do we sense a subtle relief in the guard's face, perhaps a little twinkle in the eye at having pulled Shoe Carry Detail instead of Wiping Detail? (If you must see that Timberlake is indeed barefoot and strolling on the beach, click on the picture.)
The LAT reports that Miramax could lay off as much as 20% of its workforce after gobbling up its entire annual production budget like Harvey Weinstein at a buffet full of donuts stuffed with 20-dollar bills. We just hope that our friends at the 'Max got those resumes together in time. With a hundred or so fewer paychecks on the rolls, will the Weinstein brothers be able to buy back their company from Disney on the cheap? Maybe they can knock a little more off the buy-back price if Harvey and Bob start brown-bagging their lunches. [Ed. note—Get it? Harvey and Bob are fat guys!]
—Madonna does some more wacky Kabbalah-related shit; wake us when she opens a Kabbalah Centre on the moon.
—Finally, a rep denies that Jennifer Aniston is pregnant; call us when she gives birth to triplets named Donkey, Streisand, and Forklift in a few months.
—Michael Jackson paid a huge sum to settle a sex-abuse suit in 1993; gives us a jingle when we have evidence of hush-money paid to an underage llama for that magical, yet one-sided, night underneath the Neverland Ferris wheel.
—Woody Allen still alive and making movies. Fucking prove it.
Maybe we weren't kidding about Paramount head Sherry Lansing buying the rights to the stories of the two lot security guards who helped police capture a Hollywood killer. This email (sent to us by a spy) from Lansing and outgoing, beloved Viacom chairman Jonathan Dolgen reveals that the grateful studio will to fete its heroes early next week.
Here are your answers to Ted Casalblanca's "One Mood-Altering Blind Vice." Some egghead once said something about collective intelligence being superior to individual intelligence, but we never really paid attention, as we were busy studying complicated patterns in our dislodged ear wax.
This week's Entertainment Weekly catches the buzz of internet hottness barometer Reuters and their May 27th Rance article, sending an investigative reporter deep onto the front page of Rance's blog to evaluate the prevailing theories about the supposedly A-list actor's mystery diary of doom. EW's conclusions on the leading contenders are after the jump. It can't be long before he's flushed out of his Bel Air mansion with his iBook in the air as a harried assistant tries to throw a coat over his head...
The LA.comfidential blog continues its frenzy of blind items, as ominous-sounding, anonymous-posting "Admin" posts one that's a little hard to ignore. The digest: "Sex on the beach...barely legal starlet...sex...photo...from behind...porn...'likes to watch'..." OK, we're really stripping the item of all context, but if you see enough of these blind items you start to develop a kind of carnal tunnel-vision. We're not really soliciting guesses, just shaking our heads at these crazy, famous kids with their amateur sex photography, which is always consequence-free and stays strictly between the consenting adults involved.
What's worse, working for Miramax or getting canned by Miramax? We all know that it's not not exactly known for being the happiest of places, but pretty soon there might be a lot fewer people for Harvey and Bob Weinstein to make miserable. A spy hears whispers inside the company that layoffs are coming soon. As in, "tomorrow" soon. And they're supposedly coming in large numbers, with 100 harried employees possibly getting the axe. But the spy was too busy to elaborate past this: "Everybody's working on their resumes. Gotta get back to mine too!" Does "ability to withstand humilation by physically intimidating studio head" count as a "Special Skill"?
Today at Defamer, we take our mission of bringing you the A-list of celebrity trash to a ridiculously literal extreme. After showing you what ends up in Larry King's Hefty Steel-Sacks, we now bring you Sean Penn's somewhat disappointing detritus, courtesy of an anonymous source who attended the "Star Trash" art installation in NYC: some Budweiser bottles, a pack of Dunhills, the odd rat trap (click the picture to get a better look).
LA Weekly "Deadline Hollywood" columnist Nikki Finke persists in being the bane of besieged Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter's dapper existence. In this week's column, Finke adds a few tidbits to the disappointing non-scandal: Clinton flack Dee-Dee Myers' supposed suggestion that Carter hire a crisis manager to ride out the Scandal Lite, and a paranoid fantasy that a "Republican operative" is trying to take him down. (That "operative" turned out to be a literary agent at Endeavor, so perhaps Carter should fear him for a different reason.) Really, you need to read the column, in which Finke also recounts how a NYT Washington reporter calls her a "cunt" for continuing to sniff around Carter. Whew. You'd think they'd be a tad more demure about what's under the Gray Lady's granny panties.
We cribbed this pic of CNN talk show host/original Skeletor inspiration Larry King's garbage (from an art exhibit on celebrity trash) from bitchy, snarkmongering New York sister "blog" Gawker. If you want to read about the shitstorm—really, it's more of a drizzle—check out the Page Six story. But we think that the most embarrassing thing in Larry King's trash is, by far, that copy of Los Angeles Confidential magazine. How mortifying. Let's just hope he kept it handy in case he suffered a Depends failure.
In honor of our raging hangover, enjoy this picture (taken by one our favorite, wrong-coast readers) of Ben Stiller, splayed on the pavement outside David Letterman's Ed Sullivan Theater. Really, is there nothing Stiller won't do to promote DodgeBall? Should we expect him to roll around on the carpet on Jay Leno, after insisting that the anvil-headed late night milquetoast kick him in the jewels to prove a point about how much it hurts to get racked by one of those red balls?
In his diary for Slate, writer David Amsden chronicles taking a 17-year-old girl to her high-school prom. In this excerpt, he explains his motivations for pursuing the story; his rationalizations could serve as a syllabus for Jailbait Theory 101, as he invokes the names of the Olsen Twins and Lindsay Lohan. You know, we always suspected that Vanity Fair was somehow to blame:
Still more promotional culinary fun courtesy of the News Cafe on the Fox lot... Today's delicious tie-ins involve tonight's shows premiering under Fox's new, revolutionary (the studio's lot is dotted with self-congratulatory signage flogging their "revolution") year-round schedule: skanktastic reality offering The Simple Life 2: Road Trip, sitcom Quintuplets, and black-people-scare-uptight-white-folks-com Method & Red. (Click the picture to see the full-size image of one of today's menus.) "Truck Stop Vegetarian Chili" doesn't sound very authentic...maybe in the interest of verisimilitude, Fox's marketing department can persuade Paris to blow someone in a dirty bathroom.
Gotta get this out there quickly...in about 30 minutes, Ryan Seacrest will be carrying the Olympic torch across the 4th Street Bridge from downtown to East LA. This may be asking for too much on too short notice, but pics of this potentially history-altering event would be very much appreciated. And if the torch accidentally ignites some of Seacrest's hair product, well, that would make for quite a photo op, wouldn't it?
The DodgeBall backlash continues, but now we have to wonder if this is really Ben Stiller backlash. E! Online has an entire article on Stiller's recent overexposure. complete with cute graphics measuring precisely how sick they are of him in each of his recent or upcoming films (ranging from "Still Love Him" to "Stiller Overkill.") Not that anyone listens to the folks at E! other than to craft creative deaths for Joan Rivers, but this can't be good for Stiller. When even E!, the network whose mission is to stick its fingers into the anal cavities of celebrities and tout their befouled digits as popsicles, is sick of you, maybe it's time to take a little breather.
Screenwriter John August is in London, working on the "last details" of the updated Charlie and the Chocolate Factory movie. This brief travelogue illustrates some of the horrors our peers may encounter when leaving our fluffy cocoon for less star-studded destinations:
