As of Friday, Jack, Chris, Ricky and Steven were the out-loud, out-proud designsketeers angling for the title and prize money that were confirmed by the network as openly gay. And as it's our site's policy not to speculate about sexuality, we left it at that. But today we've had a few more fellas come forward to join the gay party:
· Agenting's Evil Empire joins forces with its baseball equivalent, luring the New York Yankees into their nefarious embrace with the promise of brokering lucrative new corporate sponsorships and keeping the clubhouse buffet stocked with the most delicious babies the Bronx has to offer. [*Full disclosure: As a lifelong Yankees fan, this one really hurts.] [Variety]
· Now using fifth-grade English reading lists to fill out his development slate, NBC perfect storm Ben Silverman has ordered 13 episodes of a drama series based on Robin Crusoe. [THR]
With the once-boiling conflcit between cold-hearted Viacom CEO Phillippe Dauman and the insufficiently treasured DreamWorks team he offended with those two now-infamous little words (indeed, "completely immaterial" will soon totally replace "fuck you" in the Hollywood vernacular) momentarily reduced to a public simmer, there's now time to check in on the status of another intramural corporate spat that recently made headlines. According to today's LAT, Sumner and Shari Redstone, the feudingist first family in all of show business, called a truce in their ongoing succession battle long enough to celebrate a happy occasion over Labor Day:
The weekend brought tragic news, as David Hans "the Sultan of Sleaze" Schmidt—a modern day adventurer who braved dense refuse-bin jungles and abandoned U-Store-It crypts in search of priceless, celebrity-smut treasures—was found dead in his Arizona home of an apparent suicide, where he sat under house arrest waiting sentencing for attempting to extort Tom Cruise for $1 million. The LAT reviews some of Schmidt's greatest hits:
While you were out filling your body with the kind of mood-altering chemicals that could lead to a tragic drivers license suspension of your own on Friday night, David Letterman was luring recently rehabilitated probation-violator Paris Hilton into a Late Show ambush, promising Hilton a chance to promote her latest brand-extension efforts (another perfume and a straight-to-video acting credit—oh yeah, and some, like, charity thing or whatever) to a national audience of eager consumers.
We'd wish you a happy Monday, but we know you'd just see through that transparent attempt at merry-making on the bleak beginning of a seemingly unending work week. So: have a look at the weekend box office numbers, doing your best to ignore the five days of pain that await you:
· The Phil Spector mistrial would like to thank you for the add.
· Meg White's sex tape virtue is still intact, despite a brief scare.
· Live your every day like it could be George Clooney's last.
· Kid Nation recreates a pivotal scene in Babel, to chilling effect.
· Kiefer Sutherland really doesn't need to be dealing with this right now, but it's not going away.
· Ben Silverman weighs the odds of the greenlit series he's been meaning to watch.
· John McTiernan sentenced to four months for his Rollerball remake crimes.
· GLAAD insists there's still not enough gay characters on network TV. Not gay actors, though. There's plenty of them.
· Defamer is temporarily haunted by various Fisher & Sons Funeral Home ghosts. Bubbling cauldrons of spilled blood Showtime color-branding ensue.
· More CompletelyImmaterialGate fallout.
· Defamer makes it to Peter Harper's art opening.
· Hoff Resurrections: An E! show, and NBC's Knight Rider redux.
· Chili lunch thetans ruin a perfectly good moment of silence.
· If loving Judy is wrong, Jake Gyllenhaal doesn't want to be right.
· T.R. Knight as happy as humanly possible.
We'll admit to perhaps being in the tiniest amount of denial about this Kiefer Sutherland DUI situation, as we spent most of the week trying to convince ourselves that the story was just some kind of hallucinatory side effect of our own Tuesday morning hangover. But then news arrives about charges being officially filed today and it becomes a little harder to ignore the fact that America's most lovable, belt-sander-wielding, Geneva-convention-violating counterterrorist (see, there we go again, emotionally defending ourselves by imagining he's as invulnerable as Jack Bauer) could be in some real jeopardy:
Friday
· Music round-up: Girl Talk at Echoplex; The National at the Wiltern; Low at the Troubadour; Rob Dickinson at the Hotel Café.
· Garrett Morris' Downtown Comedy Club hosts the semifinals of the first annual California Comedy Festival.
· The Swerve Festival begins its weekend-long celebration of "West Coast creative culture and its community inspired by art, film, music and action sports" with an opening night screening of surfing doc Surfwise at the Vista, followed up by some spinning by DJ Kiino Villand.
While repeat DUI-offender Michelle Rodriguez's employment woes have been temporarily staved off, having won a role in James Cameron's hotly anticipated Avatar, her legal troubles continue to come up on her like a Spam-and-cheese sandwich after one too many after-work Scorpion Bowls. At issue is an L.A. parole violation for her drunk driving arrest in Hawaii, for which she was sentenced to 60 days in jail, and which, in typical celebrity justice fashion, turned into 4 hours and 27 minutes of hard time, and 30 mandated days of community service. Now prosecutors are claiming she came up short, and lied about the days she claimed she did work:
The "save John From Cincinnati ad" taken out in today's THR is probably a case of too little, too late as the quickly aborted surfing drama's sets have been struck, its cast scattered, and its creator already tasked with dreaming up a new world in which his characters can communicate in a language primarily comprised of expletives. But if we've learned anything from the Jericho's successful Nuts! campaign, it's that the only way that fans can have their voices heard is by annoying TV executives with non-stop deliveries to their places of business, hoping that the constant presence of handtruck-pushing men in brown shorts in their offices wears down their defenses.
Is ABC not sending out advance screeners of the primitively retooled Cavemen to critics because the network doesn't have any confidence in their product? Of course not! "'They're not ready,' the spokesman said. 'They want the "finishing touches" completed before critics take a peek, and that won't happen before the premiere. 'That's all there is to it.'" And if critics don't get a chance to depress Tuesday's debut-night numbers with their silly opinions, well, that's just a bonus of the network's obsessive—and not at all suspicious—perfectionism. [LAT ShowTracker]
Incarcerated Girls Gone Wild titty-flash magnate Joe Francis isn't afraid to get topical in spreading the word about MeetJoeFrancis.com, the handsomely designed internet presence he launched last week to keep the public up-to-date on his hopes, dreams, and fears while he continues his ongoing battle with a judicial system hell-bent on keeping him off the drunken-coed-clogged beaches of South Florida and Mexico.
PrivacyWatch celebrity sightings are submitted by our readers, and are posted several times a week, so send them in often. Submit yours to tips[AT]defamer.com (please put "sighting" or "PrivacyWatch" in the subject line so we don't lose them) and tell everyone about the time you saw the ghost of one of The Others studying documents in a deli.
Take a moment to share in our appreciation of this week's sponsors, whom we'd never ship off to New Mexico ghost towns to learn how to pluck poultry or slave away in the mercantile to earn a handful of nickels. If you'd like to advertise on Defamer and flourish under our loving guardianship, see this page
· The Writers Guild, SAG, AFTRA, and the Teamsters picketed FremantleMedia yesterday over the game show Temptation, a protest that followed four writers walking off the show last month because they are working way too hard on a Sale of the Century clone not to have Guild benefits: "'We worked 14 to 18 hours a day on 'Temptation' for two months,' said guild member Aaron Solomon, head writer for Temptation and one of the four who walked. 'The fact that Fremantle wouldn't negotiate with the WGAW felt like a slap in the face.'" [THR]
· The Office's hourlong premiere—which is sure to inspire a resurgence of rabies-awareness 5K fun runs at places of business all across the country, complete with stripper nurses and huge checks—tied its best-ever rating in the 18-49 demo. [THR]
In what must be the most trying and unheralded period of Britney Spears's career yet, any sort of achievement—even topping a UKTV Gold poll honoring the "most embarrassing dance sequence of all time"—must come as welcome news. Surely learning not even the mass cringing elicited by Elaine Benes's thumb-flinging pas de incontinence could approach that of her own VMAs performance should be enough to comfort Spears with the knowledge that 2007 wasn't a total wash.
