Roy Scheider, the square-jawed, broken-nosed guy's guy in whose capable hands Amity Island residents and vacationers entrusted their lives, passed away yesterday in Little Rock at age 75, after a three-year fight with blood cancer. While he will forever be associated with Chief Brody, a man with a good sense for shark-hunting seafaring-vessel sizes, it was his tour-de-force song-and-dance turn in All That Jazz, playing a loose version of director Bob Fosse, that was his most accomplished and most personally favored role. If it weren't for that movie's bleak showstopper finale (above), we might never have even associated something as fleeting as mortality with someone as ruggedly substantial as Scheider. But, hey—if you gotta go, at least give 'em the old razzle dazzle on your way out.

The noble profession of documenting Britney Spears' every Starbucks run is, apparently, facing a crisis, as accusations are flying that some photo agencies are so desperate to get the best shot of Spears launching a frappucino at her camera-wielding tormentors that they're allowed themselves to be "infiltrated" by the Crips and Bloods. In response to reports about the ganging-up of his trade, X17's owner says that no real banger worth his colors can be bothered to chase the frequently hospitalized pop star around, and that the mainstream media ruffians protecting their red carpet turf are far more dangerous than any pap: "'They may dress like gang members with large pants and tattoos, but to say they're gang members right now, well, real gang members are not into Britney Spears,' said Frank Navarre, a Frenchman who owns the X17 agency. 'I think red carpet is worse. I used to do red carpet myself, and one guy broke my camera.'" [Rush & Molloy]

Remember, remember the ... 10th of February? There were no spectacular fireworks flying out of the Hollywood Scientology Center set to Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture" yesterday afternoon, but there were an awful lot of folks in Guy Fawkes masks protesting the somewhere-in-the-Pacific-Ocean-based organization. It was one of several such demonstrations held throughout the world yesterday. For those out of the internet-meme-activism loop:

With word arriving over the weekend that Saturday night's WGA Scribeapalooza II: Let's Call the Whole Thing Off event at the Shrine Auditorium sent TV showrunners back to work today and will return everyone else to their jobs on Wednesday pending the outcome of a strike-ending vote to be counted tomorrow night, Hollywood can safely upgrade its feelings of Cautious Optimism to full-blown This Waking Three-Month Nightmare Is Finally Over Euphoria.

As the fuzzy memories of drunkenly shaving MAMA into the back of your head following Kanye West's moving Grammy tributes to his mother slowly come into focus, have a look at the weekend box office numbers:

TMZ's Harvey Levin explained the all-you-can-watch gossip site's philosophy to a class of NYU students: "We're gonna cover Britney Spears the way David Gregory covers President Bush." A blogger called Connie has been inspired by such obsessive pursuit of trivial topics. In a post, yesterday, she applies TMZ's warts-and-all treatment to a Hollywood personality largely insulated from the attention of the gossip industry: Harvey Levin himself. Alec Baldwin, embarrassed by angry voicemails for his teenaged daughter that TMZ disseminated, outed Levin as gay last year. (Big deal: isn't every single gossip mogul?) Levin with lives with his boyfriend, a chiropracter, Dr. Andy Mauer. Sounds respectable, and dull. Except, as Connie helpfully points out, Dr. Andy has another qualification: huge muscles which won him spreads in physique magazines such as Muscle & Fitness, shown here; and chiropracter is often just a fancy word for masseur. Hot! (Background: here's an excellent profile of the Sultan of Sleaze, in Radar. And, after the jump, one of the television performances in which Levin, a failed actor, wrings his hands at the celebrity meltdowns from which he so profits.)

While most of you were either out tying one on or at home sleeping one off, WGA presidents Patric Verrone (West) and Michael Winship (East) were pounding Red Bulls and firing off a 3am email to their membership announcing that a tentative deal has been reached with the AMPTP. According to the email, the deal "protects a future in which the Internet becomes the primary means of both content creation and delivery." Huzzah! All of the deal points can be found in handy PDF format here; the email sent to guild members follows after the jump.

· Strike's over! Maybe! Or not! But Michael Eisner says it is! So it is! Maybe.
· One night only: O'Brien VS. Stewart VS. Colbert!!! (No minors.)
· OscarWatch: Vanity Fair party, canceled. Governor's Ball, delicious. OscarBots, set to "KILL." Begging for an answer. Fuck you very much, Academy.
· Vanity Fair Hollywood issue: Hopefully this batch will do better than that batch. Renee Zellweger channels Kim Novak. Seth Rogen ain't exactly your father's Cary Grant.
· Hollywood hits the Super Bowl ads. But where's The Happening, hot stuff?
· A big week for Paris: Letterman apologizes, Harvard anoints, and her 17 dogs crap all over the place.
· CAA eats one of its own to appease the mighty Oprah.
· Fear and Loathing in Britney Spears. Breaking down the Rolling Stone cover story.
· It's hard out there for a GOP, says Elisabeth Hasselbeck.
· A word of caution for McLovin.
· Heath Ledger and Brad Renfro both gone from drugs. Be careful out there, folks.
· Corey Haim is back, he's ready to work, and he's just blown a lot of dough on this full-page Variety ad. (And he's ready to make amends.)
· The man who socked Jesse Metcalfe.
· Anna Nicole Smith, dead one year to the day.
· And in rehab: Drunkst, Let's Get Crazy.

We've already acknowledged our powerlessness over the reality drug that is VH1's Celebrity Rehab, so we're not even going to preface this with any sort of disclaimer: This shit's some high-grade, Z-list mess-amphetamine we're dealing in here, and we're proud to declare ourselves a bitch to its pipe. Where to start! Daniel dismissed himself from the program, for, as best as we can make out, sending (ballet-class enthusiast!) Mary Carey suggestive cellphone images of his little Baldwin—a scandal that quickly wreaked untold havoc on the carefully controlled atmosphere of their burnout biodome. Semi-regular series villain Vicki, who seems less a human than a relapse-hastening she-gremlin sent down to producers from story editor heaven, was caught smuggling vodka in via Vitamin Water bottle during a visit to Jeff.

NBC's Friday Night Lights spent most of its first season enjoying official Critical Darling status while enduring ratings just north of zilch. However, during its second season, some early-season creative missteps began to erode the large base of critical support it once enjoyed. Making matters even worse, its ratings remained abysmal, which led the Peacock Emperor to make this now infamous pronouncement about the show: "Unfortunately, no one watches it. That's the thing with shows. People have to watch them." (Ed Note: SNAP!) These two factors have led to widespread speculation that tonight's episode of FNL will end up as being both the season and series finale. But wait, all is not lost. Those rabble rousers over at Best Week Ever have a plan to save the show! A plan that involves ... light bulbs?

With so little to go on as far as the identity of the squat, musclebound bruiser who gave Jesse Metcalfe a licking outside Boulevard 3 last night, we were thrilled to learn that In Touch has now officially unmasked the mystery clocker: It was Mams Taylor, who, as it turns out, is not an ugly stereotype of elderly African-American woman, but an aspiring rapper, and Taryn Manning's boyfriend of four months. Mams's MySpace page has been flooded with visitors since news spread of his vigilantism, praising him for expressing in flying knuckles what they could never quite put into words. His first statement on the incident is after the jump:

We've long wanted to take the leap and get a tattoo, but have had trouble settling on a design, having narrowed it down to the official crest of the International Order of Homojewnadians, a puking rainbow, and a burning KISS logo. But once we spotted the flaming Star of David accompanying an anti-Semitic message allegedly left by LA Ink's Kat Von D for Ami James, the Miami Ink boss who fired her (she denies it, but c'mon—look at that artistry), we think we finally found the perfect symbol to adorn that hairy spot right above our ass. Thanks, Kat! [TMZ]

Sad news to pass along. The LA County Coroner finally got around to announcing the official cause of death in the case of Brad Renfro's untimely passing. Unsurprisingly, an accidental overdose of heroin was to blame. Here's hoping that E! has hired some fact-checking interns in the last few weeks; we all remember the embarrassing gaffe from when the news of Renfro's death first broke. [Usmagazine.com]

We were just going to let the e-mail blast above speak for itself, but we know you're going to ask, so: There's so far been no indication we're going to get a sequel to the infamous Let's Go Crazy voicemails of 2005. You may now return to your usual Friday afternoon, non-rehab-announcement-related activities.

If you simply, absolutely must see what the final five Project Runway contestants (Sweet P, Christian, Rami, Jillian, and Chris) sent down the catwalk today at their New York's Fashion Week shows, there's plenty of photos at Getty Images. The only thing we're going to spoil for you, however, is contained in the photo above, featuring the show's beloved panel, and guest finale judge Victoria Beckham, rocking an orange kimono dress and steadfastly adhering to her 24-hour grimace policy. It's a portrait of such feroche fiercosity, forgive us while we react to it the only we know how—with a stream-of-consciousness regurgitation of every Runway cliché we can think of:

And The George "Fat Clooney" Clooney Memorial Oscar For Suffering In The Name of Award-Winning Art goes to No Country for Old Men's Javier Bardem, whose willingness to be saddled with Anton Chigurh's instantly iconic bowl-cut had serious psychological repercussions for the actor. Says co-star Josh Brolin: "He was depressed during the process...He felt like he wouldn't have sex for three months. Full-blown depression. I mean, bad. (He) didn't like the way he looked. He'd stay home for hours on end. He wouldn't go out."

It's time again to praise this week's sponsors, who'd never, ever let their mansions be overtaken by dozens of chihuahuas because of irresponsible pet-spaying practices. If you'd like to advertise on Defamer and prove your commitment to Bob Barker's lifelong crusade, see this page.

· Possibly sandwiched between the theoretically imminent end of the writers strike and a potential June 30 walkout by SAG, studios are rushing to get their high-profile projects into production during that slim window of opportunity, hoping to get enough movies in the can to fill out their late 2009 release schedules. Still on the studios' limbo lists due to deadline-rushed scripts: Angels & Demons, Thomas Crown Affair 2, Fame, The Grind and Death Wish. [Variety]
· After 17 wildly successful years helping to narcotize the youth of America with TRL, The Grind and 72-hour Real World/Road Rules Challenge marathons, MTV president Christina Norman unexpectedly steps down from her post, possibly to join forces with Oprah on the new OWN cable network that will eventually make everyone involved incredibly wealthy. [THR]