Late last night, we received an anonymous email explaining the details behind an ugly incident that recently went down between two Vice Presidents at Showtime, an incident that ended up with one of the two Veeps getting fired. This email was initially distributed to a number of Showtime staffers but quickly made its way to the outside world (Nikki Finke is proclaiming it as being "the talk of Hollywood"). The full tale involves an intimate birthday dinner, an expense account gone wrong, an employee in a position of power known as "Mr. Untouchable" and a whole Valley full of tears. While names have been redacted to protect the (potentially) innocent, that doesn't make the juice any less tasty. Read the sordid tale of the people we'll call Thing 1, Thing 2 and Thing 3 after the jump!

For those unconvinced by the resemblance of Natalie Portman to Scarlett Johansson in W magazine's heavily produced cover shoot, here's an uncannily perfect clone of the actress: Slovak model Adriana Cernanova. Well, actually, she looks exactly like what would happen if ScarJo and Natalie Portman (NatPo?) mashed genitals together and managed to produce a child. She's a tad alien looking, but I suppose all really beautiful people are. (Adriana is the alien on the right, if you were wondering.)

We knew Jane Fonda was a dirty bird (Stephen Colbert KissGate, anyone?), but this morning on the Today Show, the actress let a little four-letter word slip that would even make notorious early morning F-Bomb dropper Diane Keaton blush. Chatting with Meredith Vieira and Vagina Monologues playwright Eve Ensler, Mer made the mistake of asking Hanoi Jane a question about how she initially got involved with the play. But before anyone could decipher her mouthful of an answer (and before confused producers could figure out which camera she felt like looking into at that particular moment), we heard one of the more distasteful terms for ladyflowers erupt from jumpy Jane's mouth.

· Enjoy Blue Reed, Abigail Breslin's cat, while you can. We have a feeling he's going to go mysteriously missing very soon, the only clue to his whereabouts a note in what seems to be Dakota Fanning's handwriting reading, "Stop!"
· Rainn Wilson's ass to steal the show at the Spirit Awards.
·Scarlett Johansson does Tom Waits.
· It was all but inevitable: Ice Road Truckers is going to be adapted into a feature, probably to star The Rock as the slip-sliding-big-rig-drivingest badass the Canadian tundra has ever seen

To be honest, we don't exactly "get" VH1's latest "comedy" Free Radio—it comes off like some ill-conceived, pitchroom fever dream in which network execs were somehow slipped peyote pills in their Diet Cokes before being sold on a cross between Yo on E! and The Office, as hosted by a young Gilbert Gottfried. Still, the show managed to score some impressive talent for the debut episode:

Now that we've entered the Hollywood phase of American Idol's tireless search for the Next Big Thing Who Will Be Dropped By A Record Label Within A Year, the tin-eared Small Town Gays and tone-deaf, razor-taloned hippies have all been culled from the competition, leaving us with precious few opportunities to enjoy the kind of ear-diddling disasters that are at the heart Idol's early-season bloodsport.

You know the story: White Witch meets Centaur 18 years her junior, is instantly smitten, and begins popping up in public with him, most recently at the BAFTA Awards. Only thing is, there's a King, 20 years her senior, with whom she has 10-year-old twins. King seems to be OK with Centaur. Centaur seems to be OK with King. Everyone shacks up at the castle, and tongues wag alongside Oscar red carpets, whispering, "Ohmigod! That's the boytoy half of Tilda Swinton's modern domestic arrangement!" [dailymail.co.uk]

· Music round-up: Willie Nelson at the Nokia Theatre; An Evening with Styx (!) at House of Blues; Andre Williams at Spaceland.
· The Egyptian Theatre sneak previews Diary of the Dead, George Romero's latest contribution to the zombie genre his Dead series has helped define. Romero will also be on hand for a post-screening Q&A about how shitty the CGI undead in I Am Legend looked.
· At the Hammer, director Elizabeth LeCompte and Fischerspooner's Casey Spooner discuss multimedia technology's influence on the performing arts.

Traversing the globe to bring you the latest Indy 4 photo leaks, we now head to Italian magazine L'espresso, for what we believe is the first known image of latter-day Jones in the presence of his single phobia, the dreaded snake. While our Italian is virtually nonexistent, a quick consultation with Google Translate tells us the headline "Poker d'assi per Indiana," in fact means, "Poker of axles for Indiana," suggesting that while he may be a little grayer, and run a little bit slower, everyone's favorite archaeological adventurer is still doing just fine in the Nazi-cargo-truck-dominating arena. [L'espresso via Slash Film]

How many times will it take for the tabloids to breathlessly declare wedding plans for Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt before they realize there's simply no there there? Officially marking the umpteenth time a "source" has claimed the power couple are leaving the Goldie/Kurt School of Long-Term Relationship Success, the National Enquirer is now stating that "Brad proposed again after they discovered they were having twins" and that Angelina "has decided to follow her heart." But before we start envisioning Angelina's maternity wedding dress or how the pair might exchange rings under an African canopy made of recycled diapers and clean needles, let's take a walk down memory lane to see how the tabloids have reported on Brangelina wedding claims over the years:

Sure, the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue spread showing Will Ferrell pawing at a bikini- clad Heidi Klum was a mildly titillating stab at selling the movie with skin, but we suppose the magazine's decency standards prevented New Line's marketing team from doing what they really needed to do to push Semi-Pro: strip Ferrell to his tube socks, blow out his thicket of chest hair, and hand him a genital-obscuring, ABA-regulation prop. Mercifully, basketball doesn't employ the kind of phallus-shaped equipment that might have tempted the studio to take the photo in a more tumescent direction.

Yesterday's surprise announcement that Steven Spielberg would not, in fact, be contributing to the Beijing summer games—having enacted the force genocide clause of his contract that allowed him to pull out if he found the host-country to be bankrolling a very unsportsmanlike systematic human slaughter—caused human rights groups the world over to sing the director's praises. (Amnesty International went so far as to issue a statement absolving the director "of all perceived misdeeds, including the last 7 minutes of War of the Worlds.")

Engulfed by automotive-safety-related controversy following a disturbing Consumer Reports exposé on their failure to wear seatbelts in a single scene in Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour, the Cyrus family was forced to apologize for giving millions of teens the false impression that Miley thinks it's totally hot to die in a car accident. It's totally not, says a regretful Billy Ray, so buckle up even if it's just a short minivan ride to your Hannah shows, rainbow parties, or whatever it is the kids are into these days: "We got caught up in the moment of filming, and we made a mistake and forgot to buckle our seatbelts. Seatbelt safety is extremely important." [People, Consumer Reports]

· 24 co-creator/primetime-torture advocate Joel Surnow is leaving the series to follow his muse, having previously ceded day-to-day control of the show to fellow executive producer Howard Gordon. Surnow explains his decision to officially pass on Jack Bauer's interrogation-speeding belt-sander to his colleagues: "I've done seven years, almost eight years at the same place with the same great group of people. During the strike I started thinking about different things I'd like to do independently, and decided it was time to see if there were other opportunities I wanted to pursue." [Variety]
· Hoping to pressure SAG leaders into opening negotiations with the studios long before the June 30th expiration of their contract, "several top stars" may launch a public campaign in hopes of preempting a second industry-crippling work stoppage, possibly in the form of a series of "Don't Be Fucking Crazy. No One Wants Another Strike For At Least Three Years" ads in the trades featuring actors like George Clooney, Ben Affleck and Teri Hatcher hugging moguls such as Peter Chernin and Les Moonves. [Variety]

Celebrity Rehab fans have by now become more than acquainted with Jeff Conaway—who, since the departure of a cameraphone-diddling Daniel Baldwin, has become the de facto father figure to the youngster-addicts. They too have met succubus girlfriend Vikki, whose every visit to the Pasadena facility inevitably ends in tears, screaming, and at least one wheelchair flying through a plate-glass window. Such turbulence is often the way with deeply creative partnerships, however, and as a reader pointed out, the two are so much more than just self-perpetuating co-dependants: They're an aspiring hip-hop superduo!

In a shocking—shocking!™—development destabilizing the world of preternaturally talented child actresses whom Hollywood will suck dry before their 18th birthdays and banish to SAG's Not-So-Cute Anymore Halfway House in Reseda, both Dakota and Elle Fanning have abruptly exited the film My Sister's Keeper, the project that would have represented the sisters' first cinematic collaboration since sharing a character in I Am Sam.

One day, probably not any time in the immediate future, we'll look back at the period known as Britney Spears's Turbulent Quarter-Century, and chuckle. A pushing-60 Britney will by then have squandered whatever fortunes she made as an adolescent musical-sex-doll, plus any additional income amassed from her 7-year engagement at Reno's Grand Sierra Indoor Water Park Resort and Casino. That will directly lead her to a stunning rejection of everything that came before:

Hearing the news that Nicole Kidman will play Valerie Plame in the upcoming big-screen version of PlameGate is like hearing your biggest crush is going to be at some party: yeah they're really cute and that's great news, but who else is gonna be there? As in, who's director Doug Liman gonna get to play Dubya (our vote: Will Ferrell, of course!)? Scooter Libby? Bob Novak? Cheney, for chrissakes? As the Jumper director told MTV News, his take on tackling what could go down as one of George Bush's biggest missteps might require more far-fetched casting choices than Cinematical's suggestion of Richard Gere for Novak. As Liman says, "I have a really, really insane take on how to tell it. It's so outrageous." You know what would be really outrageous? Casting the entire movie using members of the SNL family!

With the joyous news that the writers strike has unequivocally ended, an historic accord marked by Nick Counter and Patric Verrone appearing together on the balcony of the Warner Bros. water tower on Valentine's Day eve, as thousands below chant, "Kiss! Kiss! Kiss!" until the reluctant peacemakers finally acquiesce to a deafening roar of approval, it would seem everything is right again in the magical realm of Hollywoodland. Which makes this rumor all the more disconcerting: Could the NBC Universal ruler, whose upward-failing rise to power was prophesied in lesser-known New Testament appendix The Book of Jeff, really be mulling a lawsuit with the HFPA against the WGA for robbing them of a Golden Globes ceremony? Deadline Hollywood Daily says it could be so:

A (lucky!) redhead named Shannon Price agreed to marry and deflower Diff'rent Strokes star-turned-punchline Gary Coleman in what really we're hoping is an elaborate stunt to convince Vh1 execs to shoot a pilot episode for Strange Love 2: Short And Sweet. Taking a cue from the destructive relationship between Flavor Flav and Brigitte Nielsen, it seems that domestic abuse is just one of the many fun activities going on at Casa Coleman since married life began! The NY Post reports that Price told Inside Edition that: