Hollywood ChantWatch, When There's No One Left To Kick Around Edition: According to a tipster, "I just rolled into NBC Burbank and the picketers are chanting 'Ellen ain't no friend o' mine/ She danced across our picket line!' as her PA's are ferrying audience members through the line. Pretty catchy, especially considering they're largely her writers out there." That chant is definitely cute enough, but given the accusations about DeGeneres's relationship with a previous writing staff that surfaced earlier today, we'd hoped that there would be at least one member of her current team disgruntled enough to really stir things up by taunting, "Ellen ain't no friend o' mine/We rewrote the fucking dog speech nineteen times!"

While his smirking mugshot, featuring low-grade Noltian hair and a short Van Dyke, isn't likely to send our commenters into a lather the way Shia LaBeouf's did, there's still something unmistakably titillating about Mickey Rourke's DUI booking photo. Perhaps it was the circumstances around the arrest, which could only have been more adorable had the actor been stopped winding through Miami streets early this morning on a miniature clown bicycle:

· Giving the thousands of writers who will descend upon the Fox lot for tomorrow's mass picket a little extra motivation, News Corp. president Peter Chernin claims that his network will save more money from unpaid deals, story, and pilot costs than it stands to lose during a strike. It remains to be seen whether or not Chernin will follow through on a threat to further taunt the WGA by playing a loop of American Idol's theme music at deafening volumes during tomorrow's gathering. [Variety]
·"In the digital domain, content still rules," said Sumner Redstone in a speech touting Viacom's bold commitment to exploring an internet space that he expects "won't yield enough revenue to pay writers for at least the next five or six decades of my life." [THR]

A tipster informs us that the Guild's roaming, set-disrupting WGA Strike Force, armed with whistles, bullhorns, and—always a a classy touch—a saxophone, just successfully shut down a Mad TV location shoot in Hollywood's DeLongpre Park, where the show was trying to get footage for a sketch called "The Worst Magician in the World." With the unkillable series featuring no recognizable stars to take hostage for the cause, however, the marauding writers will have to settle for the satisfaction of having temporarily hobbled Fox's ability to profit from the exploitation of David Copperfield's misery.

No sooner had we reserved some room in our increasingly spacious DVR boxes (now occupied by season passes for Meerkat Manor, C-Span 3's America's Most Smartest Lobbiest, and not much else) for Rosie O'Donnell's upcoming MSNBC talk show, it turns out network executives have pulled out of the project after O'Donnell blabbed about the deal on her blog and at a Miami book signing. A new poem at Rosie.com explains what happened:

Though Museum of the Moving Image honoree Tom Cruise escaped a NY dinner celebrating his cinematic accomplishments without being mercilessly roasted by his important friends (apparently, nobody there could be bothered to bring their best "Hitler haircut" or "he who smelt the mystery fart, dealt it" material), a former co-star did manage to shock the event's attendees with this disturbing anecdote from the set of Magnolia, as reported by Rush & Molloy:

Early strike hero Steve Carell, whose refusal to cross his writers on the picket line helped to shut down production of the show, may also find himself the victim of those who refuse to pay for valuable promotional work. In a timely, if unsolicited, e-mail promotion that found its way to our inbox this morning (excerpt pictured), Carell's cartoon likeness is being used by a Brazilian company hawking some kind of office-related product.

So reenergized was The View's headmistress Barbara Walters by the politically incorrect musings of Damon Wayans on yesterday's broadcast, she's already taken it upon herself to incorporate some of the controversy-courting changes herself:

A striker seems to have located a weak point in the Warner Bros. lot's defenses: an executive gate, where security guards have been instructed to try and quiet down the picketers who might annoy the studio bosses with their racket: "The Warner Bros. guard at the gate came out and approached me. 'Hey, I've been cool with you guys,' he said. 'But we have to watch the noise level in this area.' I have no idea why this person thought I would respect a social taboo against bothering the Warner Bros. executives inside with excessive noise while they work. But, damn, that was funny. Made my day. 'REALLY?' I bellowed like a complete jerk. 'SHE WAS JUST ASKING ME IF I WAS TIRED AND I LET HER KNOW I WAS OKAY. WHAT'S WRONG WITH THAT?'" Maps to the lot's soft, executive-adjacent underbelly are provided for those eager to participate in further headache-making activities. [Slumdance.com]

Deciding delivering smiles to the faces of the tourists who had traveled great distances just to dance in her aisles was more important than delivering platters of Nate'n Al's lox to her striking writers and marching alongside them, Ellen DeGeneres chose, like many other daytime talk shows, to cross picket lines. Deadline Hollywood Daily printed what she'll say about the issue on tomorrow's show—a declaration of the love she feels for the drones who put the funny words in her mouth that amounts to no less than 1/10,000th of the love she feels for regifted rat-dogs. Unmoved, however, is blogger Surgical Strikes, who worked as a writer's assistant on her sitcom The Ellen Show in 2001, and remembers a far different DeGeneres/writer relationship:

Completing a rite of passage that all late-night talk show hosts must eventually endure as their careers progress—something about the combination of a darkened room, the midnight hour, and a flickering TV screen seem to create unhealthy comedian/schizophrenic attachments—Conan O'Brien has earned the stalky affections of a Catholic priest from Boston, who was arrested in NY last Friday after sending unhinged letters on parish letterhead, threatening O'Brien's parents, and trying to crash a taping of his favorite show:

As the sun rises on Day Four, feet are sore from hours of pacing, bellies distended from the consumption of high-calorie snacks delivered to the picket lines by supporters trying to help writers maintain their blood-sugar levels, and throats raw from screaming chants awkwardly incorporating the names of picketed executives who may be listening on the other side of a studio lot's wall. The morning round-up:

· A striker on the Grey's Anatomy-boosted Prospect Studios picket line sent in this photo of Katherine Heigl proudly decrying AMPTP president Nick Counter's weinderdom. This is the picket sign by which all subsequent efforts will be judged.
· Fox has indefinitely postponed the premiere of 24. And considering all the strike-related scheduling changes, it looks like Kiefer Sutherland took on that extra jail time for nothing.
· Click here if you need a limoncello-flavored pick-me-up. Come on, just do it. Your ears will thank us, we promise.
· Refusing to cross the picket line, The Office's Steve Carell phoned in sick with an acute case of "enlarged balls."

If only all guests of The View carried on with the candor of a Damon Wayans, whose folksy take on such hot-button topics as Don Imus's return to radio ("When he called them 'nappy-headed hos,' I went, 'Wow. He's right!'"), and the lack of available women possessing the basic, barefoot culinary skills he demands in a partner, energized the typically moribund proceedings.

In our last dispatch from the Day Three picket lines for today, a reader reports on some high-profile drop-ins and some possible scab-related intrigue at Culver Studios: "I'm a SAG actor (a nobody) walking the WGA picket lines at Culver Studios today. Minnie Driver shows up with her dog Bubba to hang out with her writing staff. Eddie Izzard shows up and starts handing out blue wristbands that say 'All for One and One for All' that loop into a Gordian knot. He ordered these up himself and said 'they're not official.' Minnie takes off after a couple of hours and then Eddie goes "Norma Rae" on everyone. Lost in the shuffle was Josh Duhamel who didn't showboat at all. The buzz on the line is that the Las Vegas writers had spotted a former writer who was no longer on staff coming onto the lot. As I left, they had not stormed the lot yet."

One person unlikely to be showing up with snacks for picketing WGA members is former head-mouse-in-charge Michael Eisner, who finds the strike to be "insanity" and thinks the writers' energy would be better spent marching on Steve Jobs' headquarters, pelting passing cars with the iPod Touches being used to oppress them: "But you're investing in the Internet, so what gives? I'm doing it because I think it's fun, and because I think it's the future. But what I'm saying is that for today's writers to stop working for non-existent money is stupid. They are misguided. They should not have gone on strike. This is a stupid strike. The studios can't give them anything because there's nothing to give. But this is also the studios' fault — they've been talking about how great this business is, and now they have to open their books and explain that there's no business. The only one making money is Apple. They should be striking up in Cupertino, or wherever [Jobs] is." [Alleyinsider.com]

In an effort to document for posterity how some of the striking writers tasked with pacing the sidewalks outside of Hollywood's temporarily stalled dream-fabricating factories spent this third, historic day of picketing, we dispatched Defamer videographer Molly McAleer to the Paramount lot, hoping that her bribes of tasty donuts (the beer we offered was less well-received; we suppose the drinking has to wait until happy hour at Lucy's across the street) would encourage some of the protesting scribes to open up for the camera.

As a follow-up to this morning's post about a scuffle at Madeo between reigning hunks of two widely differing showbiz arenas—George Clooney and Fabio—we pass along this photo evidence, obtained by TMZ. In the pictures, the famed Lake Como resident is clearly seen delivering a middle-fingered salute in the direction of the male model, as annoyed that his extremely recognizable face might wind up on Fabio's Flickr page as he was that his nemesis's spoken-word album, "Fabio After Dark," had outsold his own, "A Few of George Clooney's Favorite Things," by a ratio of nearly two-to-one.

· Music round-up: The Hold Steady and Art Brut at the Henry Fonda; The Hives at Avalon; The Thrills at Spaceland.
· Slash—rock star, top hat model, author—returns to the Whiskey A Go-Go tonight to sign his memoir, an event put on by his new literary groupies at Book Soup.
· The Coen Brothers' latest, No Country for Old Men (featuring Creepiest Cinematic Hairstyle of the Year frontrunner Javier Bardem), gets a sneak preview at the Aero.

So maybe America's Most Smartest Model isn't the greatest reality show of all time. But it's on TV, it requires no Guild writers, and at least it has a goal in life—finding the most smartest model or whatever—so we think it deserves the occasional scrutiny of our ever-diminishing attention span, now hovering somewhere between that of a gifted four-year-old and a weimaraner's.