Some accounts place Robert De Niro's recent defection from CAA to Endeavor as a move at least a decade in the making. That inevitability didn't lessen the sting for an anonymous CAA operative, however, who chimed at Deadline Hollywood Daily on Thursday with a poetic reality check entitled, "Why Did Bobby Leave Us?"
LOS ANGELES — I'm the first to admit that I wanted to see the Web kill Hollywood. It just ain't happening. It's finally dawned on the studios that you can now pay artists even less to produce content, and pay YouTube absolutely nothing to distribute it. The problem is you have to sell your own ads — but the studios and networks, unlike indie content creators and Valley startups, have armies of ad sales people still at their command. And it's still a hits-based business. So while it's great to have all the creative freedom in the world, you're still going to have to wait tables and get coffee for producers while working, unpaid, on your own projects and pray to the ghost of Mae West that something ends up with mass appeal. What does success look like in the wake of the online video revolution?
What is with celebrities and their pregnancy tests these days? Halle Berry admitted on Oprah that she has a drawer at home full of 35 used pregnancy tests (jesus, is that even sanitary?). Now comes word that Charlie Sheen's fiancée. Brooke Mueller, is trying to get pregnant and is flaunting the pregnancy sticks around like a middle schooler showing off her first Dooney & Bourke. Reports Page Six:
Know how Walker Percy wanted to hate the manuscript some lady handed him, but he loved it and thus A Confederacy of Dunces got published? That's how I feel about this short film, in which a director and actor argue while recording commentary on their latest film. This is the sort of script I would have killed for when I was doing college plays. Full film is below.
Teri Hatcher has admitted that her performance on last night's Idol Gives Back was "nerve-wracking," and we couldn't agree more. Watching the bat-faced Housewife dry hump the mic stand and hearing her attempt to carry a damaged woman tune about men and how they love to cheat was a very painful experience. Though her DH co-star James Denton is eager to remind us that Hatcher once performed in Cabaret, we're eager to remind him that the likes of Ashley Parker Angel and Joey Fatone have too. As Teri proved last night, Broadway experience does not a talented singer make.
Reports today confirm that Natalie Portman will join would-be sexy nurse Scarlett Johansson as a first-time director in the short-film compilation New York, I Love You. First known as the movie where that Hasidic dude walked out on co-star Portman, then better known as the one where contributing director Anthony Minghella hand-picked replacement Shekhar Kapur before he died, NYILY is finding its latest momentum as the film featuring everyone from Brett Ratner to Orlando Bloom to Cloris Leachman pimping out for the city tourism board. "NYC & Co., the official marketing and tourism organization for the City of New York, is fully behind the pic, throwing its weight into sponsorship deals," writes Variety's Dade Hayes. "A major airline is in final talks to help ferry talent to and from the city and promote the film on its aircraft, for example." The producers, however, cite an "explicit auteur approach" that will keep the art front-and-center, promising Johansson the latitude to fire a maximum of 10 PA's as she learns to flex her megalomaniacal muscle behind the camera. [Variety]
Three Girls and Their Brother is a sharp, perceptive, and brilliantly written debut novel from acclaimed playwright Theresa Rebeck. "In her first novel, playwright Theresa Rebeck satirizes the publicity-driven world of instant celebrity. Three Girls and Their Brother is pointed and funny, an entertaining, cautionary story about the powerful and the preyed upon." -Boston Globe
CHECK OUT AN EXCERPT AND ENTER TO WIN A COPY OF THE BOOK.
While we haven't been avid listeners of Howard Stern since he made the switch to Sirius a few years back (call us crazy or even cheap, but we're morally opposed to paying for radio), we still follow the show pretty closely. And as anyone who has been paying attention knows, Stern sidekick Artie Lange has been on a self-destructive streak for the better part of the last nine or so months. His weight has been ballooning, his already prolific drug habit has only gotten worse and his on-air behavior has become more erratic than ever before. However, things reached Defcon 6 levels on today's show when Artie flew into a rage, got into a physical confrontation with his personal assistant and abruptly (and from the sounds of it, tearily) resigned from the show. Audio of the incident follows after the jump.
· The cast of MTV's Human Giant will be appearing in-store at Amoeba on tonight. If anyone goes, please be sure to pepper them with questions regarding the fate of Shutterbugs!
· Julie Freaking Andrews presents her autobiography, Home: A Memoir Of My Early Years, at the Borders in Westwood. Hopefully it's not a depressing tell-all where we find out that Mary was Poppin(s) pills.
· Icon/performance artist/she-who-bangs-Lou-Reed Laurie Anderson presents "Homeland" at Royce Hall.
· Los Angeles punk legends X will be at the Henry Fonda, Mia Doi Todd at the Echo and Go Betty Go will be tearing up the Bordello.
Despite her "power lesbian" publicist vehemently lashing out against all those pesky lesbian rumors, Ellen Page still has her work cut out for her when it comes to convincing us she doesn't (even on occasion) prefer girls. The Smart People star appeared on Leno last night to obediently promote the film, and even though Page got slightly more gussied up than usual in a tight-ish dress and heels, her inability to cross those legs comfortably coupled with an imitation of what someone looks like "lifting weights in the sunshine" did little to disspell our suspicions.
If it weren't for the petition featuring nearly 168,000 signers calling for his head, we'd probably leave well-enough alone when it comes to genre-hack whipping-boy Uwe Boll. But not even his own targets can resist his thickly accented self-defense, with similarly skill-challenged fauxters Eli Roth and Michael Bay — whom Boll labeled a "fucking retard" in a video released on Wednesday — publicly deflecting Boll's attacks over the last 24 hours. Naturally, with tens of thousands of dollars worth of free publicity at stake, Boll came back against all his haters in yet another stream-of-consciousness slam:
In addition to her initial back up plan to become the first attractive player in the WNBA, Anne Hathaway has also put together her own band. Hathaway got the idea to start up her own rock combo after losing a part to musician Norah Jones. Hathaway's band, 2 Can Play At That Game, is reported to have a similar sound to Letters to Cleo and hope to start playing shows very soon.
Just in case he hadn't officially lost all his "punk" cred already, Pete Wentz has successfully sealed the deal by getting engaged to lip sync queen Ashlee Simpson. And proving they're the ultimate modern couple, Ashlee made the announcement via (of all things) the website friendsorenemies.com in a post last night: "Yes, we are thrilled to share that we are happily engaged...We consider this to be a very private matter, and we wanted to be the first to tell you." Why exactly a "very private matter" is the sort of thing one willingly announces in the form of a blog post is beyond us, but one issue Pete feels more than comfortable discussing is his love of cross-dressing. As the bassist told Fox News recently,
A dirty little secret of the Sundance Film Festival is out over at indieWIRE, where editor Eugene Hernandez relays an anecdote that this year's award-winning (but undistributed) documentary Trouble the Water — about the odyssey of African-American survivors of Hurricane Katrina — might be off buyers' radar because its "too black":
What's a girl to do when the only headlines she's making involve DUIs and smoking the reefer? Why, pose for highly styled, candid-ish bikini shoot with the photo agency widely known for setting up highly styled, candid-ish bikini shoots of course! Mischa Barton put on her designer bikini best, got her hair did and brought along props like books and hats to the beach yesterday to act her way through a series of paparazzi shots, in an attempt to prove to the world that she can read (!) and pick her own wedgies (!).
At the prom themed after party for Prom Night, Brittany Snow proudly showed off the latest issue of Kewl Magazine which featured Snow on the cover. Snow seemed more concern about showing everybody her first magazine cover and their reaction to that as opposed to the film. Snow remarked to a friend, "How cool is it to be on the cover of Kewl? OMG, that's me!"
It's really a shame that the storylines we see on The Hills aren't as "real" as MTV claims they are, since the blonde cast's off-screen lives seem far more colorful than what we see on the show. This season we've trudged through (yawn) yet another ongoing catfight between Heidi and Lauren, and barely kept our eyes open while slowest speaker in the world Whitney learns how to cope with a new job. But rumors surfacing today involving real-life catfights between Lauren and roomie Audrina, plus not-so-blind items suggesting the entire cast is fed drugs by producers, make us wish this "unscripted" drama would throw out the scripts already.
All kinds of drama unfolded Wednesday in one of the more turbulent days of the Anthony Pellicano trial, with ex-journalist Anita Busch following fork-tongued Michael Ovitz to a slow death on the witness stand. As if you had to ask, the cross-examination showdown between Busch and Pellicano — whom the writer all but accused in court of infamously harrassing her out of writing articles about Ovitz after joining the LA Times — did not go smoothly:
Just when we'd finally erased those awkward on-set pictures of Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn kneeling in the sand from our memory, Cameron Diaz has swooped in to kiss a co-star on the beach and remind us. Photo agency JFX snapped photos of the boy-crazy Diaz manhandling long-forgotten former hunk Jason Patric into a makeout session on the set of their film My Sister's Keeper, while co-star Sofia Vassileva looked on. And normally we'd assume Diaz and Patric were simply filming a scene, but the severe lack of make-up and styling, not to mention the severe presence of Jason's plumber butt, suggest the cameras weren't rolling at the time.
Actor/Director David Schwimmer's significant other ran interference as he appeared to be in deep thought about his next career move. Yet she took job a bit too seriously when she snapped at a fan who approached them to talk about how much he had enjoyed Run Fatboy Run, as well as David's turn as Greenzo on 30 Rock. The girlfriend told the guy to back off and spew his negativity elsewhere. Schwimmer smiled to the fan, then quickly pulled his gal pal to the side and explain that people like that guy introduce positive vibes and not everyone is going to spew negative vibes.
