The forthcoming evisceration of New Line Cinema announced yesterday by founding bosses Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne was expected for a while now, but where the pieces would fall was anyone's guess. It still is to some degree, but as the grim news settles in and Time Warner overlord Jeff Bewkes' intentions come to light, we can start parsing the good, bad and the ugly wrought from New Line's demise:
As the bra-burning women's rights activists etched into our heads, being a feminist means having a choice: you can either choose to bake pies alongside June Cleaver, or you can choose to spray whip cream on your tits and shake your moneymaker in front of salivating men. But whichever path you choose to trek, you can always win an Oscar! Just like Diablo Cody (the artist formerly known as Brook Busey-Hunt, aka Candy Girl)! As you might expect, Diablo's triumph is proving to be an inspiration for aspiring pole dancers everywhere. As one stripper wrote on her blog, "I can't tell you how excited I am by [Cody] being shot out of the fame cannon and into the dazzling sky." Us too! But just in case Diablo's win wasn't enough to inspire these lacy ladies to put away their chaps for good, just wait til they read Cody's MySpace response to Tuesday's nudie pic revelations:
· Is it wrong to think that John Mayer is maybe, just maybe, a really funny guy at heart? Whenever he's on TMZ fucking with the papps, he makes us laugh. See you later tonight at Relapse, John! [TMZ]
· Part Two of The A.V. Club's series of essays called The New Cult Canon focuses on Morvern Callar. I thought that movie was kinda boring the first time I saw it, but now I'm going to have to revisit. [A.V. Club]
· Our all-time favorite episode of True Life is the one called "I Have A Summer Share." You know, the one that follows a slew of jabronis spending their summer on the Jersey Shore? The latest Post Show creation, Douchebag Beach, reminds us very much of that famous episode. Good stuff. [Douchebag Beach]
· The title of this article says it all — "I'm the idiot who bought an HD-DVD player: A Casualty of the Format War tells all." Another excellent piece from the multi-talented Josh Levin. [Slate]
· Lastly, the trailer for the new Mike Myers jawn, The Love Guru, debuted earlier today. Despite the appearance of a few gags that seem very similar to what we saw in the three Austin Powers films, we must say this movie actually looks promising. [/Film]
Thrilled that the Starbucks three-hour company-wide training retreat has made her favored Venti Frappuccinos frothier and more whipped-cream-topped than ever before, Britney Spears headed back to her favorite coffee-beverage emporium for a pick-me-up on this unseasonably warm L.A. afternoon. There, she greeted the increasingly emboldened 600-700 person paparazzo army gathered outside her car with a secret weapon: a new security guard, three-parts Farleyesque motivational speaker to one-part American Gladiator. Unfortunately, the overzealous security detail's photographer-tossing techniques and bellowing voice didn't do the singer's hangover any favors, and she was forced to point out for her employee, "You're screaming in my ear. Will you shut the fuck up?" to the wildly appreciative cheers and jeers of the gathered mob.
TED, the schmoozeathon taking place in Monterey right now, prides itself on staying exclusive and bringing together only the best of Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and Manhattan. TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington is deeply unhappy that he's not invited. So much so that he staged a falling-out with Frenchepreneur Loic Le Meur, a gloating TED attendee. But he's really going to boil when he reads this: The complete list of TED's 1,198 attendees, each of whom he is now personally committed to hate. Arrington's new enemies list includes Al Gore, Amy Tan, Arianna Huffington, Ben Affleck, Cameron Diaz, Forest Whitaker, Isaac Mizrahi, Jeff Bezos, John Cusack, Maria Bartiromo, Marissa Mayer, Max Levchin, Meg Ryan, Peter Thiel, Roger McNamee, Si Newhouse IV, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, Steve Case, Steve Wozniak, Thomas Dolby, Tim O'Reilly, and Will Smith. The rest are here.
By now, you've likely seen the viral video in which the suddenly omnipresent Gary Busey castigates a child reporter on the red carpet for failing to speak loudly enough to penetrate the hardened layer of ear wax that he has built up over the years. But what you probably haven't seen is the response of said child reporter Gracie Stagg, who is milking the moment for all it's worth, just like a miniature Martin Bashir.
· Wendy Molyneux presents her new book Everything Is Wrong with You: The Modern Woman's Guide to Finding Self Confidence Through Self Loathing at Book Soup.
· Janet Jackson slums it at the Virgin Megastore, Mezzanine Owls at the Echo and British Sea Power will be at Spaceland.
· It's Animation Nite at the Echo Park Film Center, eh! Tonight's offering features talents from our brothers and sisters up north in Halifax, Canada.
The last time we saw Screech, he was waving a dildo around on Celebrity Fit Club. The time before that? It was in his self-released sex tape. With a resume like that, you'd think that Dustin Diamond's next gig would be as a jizzmopper at The Cathouse or something. But you'd be wrong. In what will surely go down as one of the most mocked marketing decisions of this still young year, Screech was just signed to be the pitchman of "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter."
We should probably preface this by saying that we have nothing against Joplinian (Janis, not Scott) American Idol contestant Amanda Overmeyer. For starters, she's like this bull-dykey, hog-riding, hard-rocking nurse. That's kind of awesome. When she was told she made it to the final 24, she did not dissolve into a weepy puddle of gratitude. Her "thing America doesn't know about me" is that she enjoys the activity of reading (i.e., not communicating with the other mongoloid contestants). And she chose a freaking Kansas song for last night's top ten girls' competition. Watching this performance, however, we couldn't help thinking that Overmeyer was one of those Angel of Death nurses, the song was the patient, and her interpretation was the fatal amount of morphine slipped surreptitiously into an I.V. when no one is looking. R.I.P., "Carry On Wayward Son."
Having just returned from a trip to Iraq, Angelina Jolie has penned an opinion piece for The Washington Post, in which she assessed her findings on how the war has devastated the people of that region: "More than 2 million people are refugees inside their own country — without homes, jobs and, to a terrible degree, without medicine, food or clean water. Ethnic cleansing and other acts of unspeakable violence have driven them into a vast and very dangerous no-man's land. Many of the survivors huddle in mosques, in abandoned buildings with no electricity, in tents or in one-room huts made of straw and mud." By way of fairness, the paper has opened up their op/ed section to Jennifer Aniston too, whose own column, "Whole Foods: Why Can't They Stay Open Until 11?" should appear early next week. [WashPo]
In a fluky show of solidarity, an Oscar winner and an Oscar presenter/hopeful/soon-to-be-exile spent the week demonstrating the full spectrum of women's power behind the camera. First, Reese Witherspoon hit the press circuit for Penelope, the new indie featuring Christina Ricci as a girl cursed with a pig nose and co-star Witherspoon in her debut as a producer. Stepping up from the more nominal executive producing duties she adopted for Legally Blonde 2, Witherspoon oversaw everything from development to distribution for her Type A Films shingle:
This just in! Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne, the heads of troubled™ studio New Line, having learned the hard way of what comes of placing too many eggs into flying-reptile and fighting-polar-bear baskets, have just issued an e-mail to all of their employees. In it, they announce with resignation that the plucky mid-sized studio is now "a unit" of faceless entertainment multiconglomerate Warner Bros. The Co-CEOs will also be stepping down, and with the New New Line being a "much smaller operation than in the past," we suspect many staffers will be doing the same, whether they want to or not. The full e-mail begins below, and continues after the jump.
We must say, when we envisioned a scenario in which AMPTP president and chief negotiator Nick Counter took WGAw president Patric Verrone into his strong yet tender embrace on the balcony of the famed Warner Bros. water tower, and kissed his striketime adversary truly, madly, deeply on the lips to the exuberant cheers of thousands of working writers and execs below, it was pure fantasy.
· More strike tzuris: Studios won't greenlight any movie that can't complete shooting by the ominous June 30 SAG contract expiration date. [Variety]
· Cable networks continue to snap up movies that haven't even had a theatrical release yet: After USA paid $40 million for broadcast right to Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, Turner Broadcasting paid an undisclosed (read: your mind cannot conceive of this number) sum for a slew of Warner Bros. blockbusters, including The Dark Knight, Get Smart, and 10,000 B.C.. Said a Turner rep, "We here at TBS and TNT are committed to bringing our watchers the highest caliber of entertainment we have yet to lay our eyes on." [Variety]
There's no two ways about it, Americans love obsessing over celebrity nip slips, vadge flashes and sex tapes (even if it is Gene Simmons...shudder). But the British tabs, being as posh as they are, have taken a more conservative approach to body part fascination: knees. While photos of the bony joints attached to Kate Moss, Eva Longoria, Jennifer Lopez and Courteney Cox may not tighten your trousers, the names they've come up with for each gal's wheely kneelies give the NY Post a run for its money in the hed-writing department. Photos of The Sun's picks for Worst Knees, along with their snappy yet barely decipherable titles ("Eva Longoria's Tunnock's Teacakes Kneecaps"!), after the jump.
While we here at Defamer are perfectly happy recognizing Oprah Winfrey as the supreme deity that she is, her rare missteps (if you want to call Beloved a misstep—but personally, we loved it, O exalted one!) obviously part of some Bigger Oprah Picture that has yet to reveal itself to us, not all are as worshipful. In reviewing her 8-episode Oprah's Big Give reality show for ABC, THR's Ray Richmond gives Winfrey a knee-capping sure to cause a torrent of hellfire and substandard panini presses to rain down upon their offices. Some of the most sacrilegious highlights:
With interests including Halston, A Small World and, well, the Weinstein Company, the post-Miramax Weinstein brothers have proven their uncanny ability to diversify, crash and burn as well as any moguls this side of Charles Keating. No reversal of fortune is complete, however, without a boutique DVD label and a few classics freshly extracted from Harvey Weinstein's TiVo:
A peek inside the "Hollywood Science Fiction or Grim Glimpse At Our Own, Apocalyptic Future?" file today reveals two exciting, end-of-the- world-hastening news items seemingly plucked from the stack of scripts on Michael Bay's nightstand:
· Scientists have finally nailed how and when the world will end: "The sun will slowly expand into a red giant, pushing the Earth farther out into space, but not far enough." The good news is that that is almost 8 billion years away. The bad news is that all life on Earth will have been extinguished long before that, as "the slowly expanding sun boils off the oceans and reduces our planet to an uninhabitable cinder." [Fox News]
Seemingly unstoppable late night force Jay Leno has already demonstrated that he needs no writers to conquer his time slot: Audiences looking for non-addictive insomnia cures and lovemaking soundtracks clearly prefer Leno's middling presence and chirpy joke-delivery over his more cantankerous competitors. For whatever reason, however, the management at NBC decided four years ago that Leno required an expiration date, unfeelingly stamping the host on the forehead with a "BEST BEFORE 2009" notice, and designating Conan O'Brien as his successor. Now, a full two years before his contract expires, rival networks and studios are unfurling their green, high-currency plumage, and doing the late-night mating dance for the still viable talk show host. The NY Times reports:
We were somewhat pleased when Selma Blair started a relationship with that guy Britney Spears joined the mile-high club with in her Toxic video. He had that whole Jason Lewis-y, empty-headed thing going on that seemed just the right antidote to her ex, shaved-head rocker Ahmet Zappa. But according to the NY Daily News, Selma's found a new not-so-bright bulb to hook up with: a waiter. And straight out of an episode of guilty pleasure Cheaters (or the new BJ-infested Big Brother), boyfriend Matt Felker recently walked in on the illicit couple during a fairly intimate lap-sitting session. Says the News' source:
