Were those 82 horrifying minutes of incarceration not punishment enough for expectant mom Nicole Richie? She'll now have to endure 18 months of anti-drunk-driving education, much of which she'll spend sending in the back of the room, rolling her eyes and complaining to a classmate, "Hell-oooo? Don't these idiots know I was on pot and Vicodin when I drove the wrong way on the 134, not booze? Can you wake me up when we get that part?" [People]
Mexican audiences will be able to find out what all the bear-on-bear fireman fuss was about, as Los declaro marido y ... Larry—aka I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry—is finally getting a release there. (It rolled into Spain a few weeks ago, with the far catchier title Os Declaro Marido Y Marido, and an accompanying feeder-fetish website that hearkens to other classics of the genre.) In Mexico City to promote the opening, Adam Sandler appears to have fallen for the oldest wire reporter trick in the book—answering "Sure, why not?" to a seemingly innocuous but strategically phrased question, then waking up to headlines outlining your passionate commitment to fighting for gay rights:
With all the attention being paid to the damage done to Steven Spielberg's ego when Viacom CEO Phillippe Dauman said those two terrible little words, Var's Anne Thompson reminds the Paramount powers-that-be that they'd better start kissing the DreamWorks tattoo on Stacey Snider's ass right quick if they want to save the relationship. [Variety]
While we'd like to think that every impoverished child Angelina Jolie encounters on her world travels will eventually find him or herself a member of the seemingly always-expanding Pitt-Jolie clan, she cannot, in fact, adopt them all.
We apologize for questioning the sincerity of that marketing executive who insisted that the fountain at Hollywood and Highland was running red with good, clean Showtime color-branding, not the cruor of a relatable serial killer's victims. As you can plainly see in LAist's photo (there are more here) of the tinted water gently cascading behind the network's "promo scene" tape, anyone who came away with the impression that the fountain was filled with blood was obviously bringing his or her own violent baggage to the experience.
The compiling compulsives at Forbes have once again amassed a list of famous people graded according to their gross annual income, this time focusing the wealth-as-worth index on Hollywood's lucrative TV sector. (No, you aren't having deja vu—TV Guide did a similar list a few months ago, but Forbes's editors are far better equipped to type out 9-figure salaries without having their fingers tremble.) On it, you'll spot the familiar faces of any number of trap-jawed cooks and follicly deficient self-help gurus, birthed in test tubes at Harpo Laboratories and currently reaping the generous rewards of multi-year syndie strip deals.
· Ladytron at Hollywood and Highland; The Broken West at Echoplex; Mute Math and Eisley at Avalon; James Blunt at Spaceland.
· The National Geographic Film Festival at the Egyptian screens Sonam...The Fortunate One for its opening night. We never thought we'd see the words "love, lust, and repentance" in connection with yak herders, but there you have it.
· The AMPAS's three-part seminar on the film scoring process features a discussion on "alternative scores" tonight, featuring composers of movies like Silverado, Capote, and Sideways.
It's not for nothing that youth-skewed cable network The Disney Channel has long been referred to by their competition as "Mickey's Little Tramp Factory," having churned out a steady stream of them since its 1983 launch. Its latest vixenish graduate, High School Musical star Vanessa Hudgens, was recently caught traipsing nakedly across the internets and into the hard drives of countless hormonally charged tweens and pervy MySpace users posing as such.
On last night's episode of Kid Nation, the pint-sized utopia-builders of CBS Bonanza City learned the sobering lesson that among the dozens of off-camera adults retained by the network so that their bold social experiment didn't quickly devolve into a prepubescent Jonestown (watch out for that Michael kid—the way that he can make the entire Nation applaud his every utterance is disquieting), not a single one was there to slaughter their chickens for them, requiring that at least one grade-schooler was going to get a crash course in the art of poultry butchering.
Francis Ford Coppola's Argentine office was looted by armed bandits, who made off with a computer containing the screenplay for an upcoming Matt Dillon project that doesn't sound very interesting. There's a bad indie movie premise in here somewhere, to eventually be titled Robbing Coppola. [CNN.com]
· Rob Reiner officially endorses Hillary Clinton, immediately embracing her campaign's talking points on Barack Obama: "Based on the experience I have had in politics, and I have been on the front lines in a lot of these fights, I came around to realizing that we do need the most experienced and most qualified person to run the country." [Variety]
· The much-anticipated premiere-night Nielsen deathmatch between NBC's Bionic Woman remake and ABC's Grey's Anatomy spin-off is won by Bionic; meanwhile, Kid Nation dropped off from its unspectacular debut numbers of last week. [THR]
· Mark your calendars, Michael Bay fans, because giant fucking robots are coming again, eventually: Paramount and DreamWorks have staked out June 26th, 2009 for Transformers 2. And the project stays even if Spielberg and his pals go. [Variety]
· Bonnie Hunt is getting a daytime talk show. [THR]
· And on the development battlefront, NBC and ABC set up competing, Famesque projects about young people chasing their performing arts dreams in NY. [Variety]
Reluctant martyr for all bullied gay TV doctors T.R. Knight returned to The Ellen DeGeneres Show today, eight months after sitting in the very same seat to jumpstart his Evil Gay Mastermind plot to undo his McThreateningy co-star, Isaiah Washington. In that time, T.R. appears to have relaxed a great deal, having had some time to acclimate to his new out status and fully savor the bottomless pit of emptiness that accompanies entering the L.A. gay dating pool.
Ignoring for a moment that someone in the Gawker Media ad sales department is currently rolling around in the pile of ensanguined Showtime cash they were paid to spatter some blood on Mr. Defamer's face (apparently, he got a little roughed up during Peter Krause's guest stint), we note an even gorier campaign the network is using to raise awareness of Dexter: Over at Hollywood and Highland today, Showtime is dumping a bunch of red dye into the mall's fountain, hoping that tourists don't mistake the innocent promotion of their company's signature color with some kind of disturbing attempt to turn the font into some kind of burbling cauldron in which the lovable serial killer boils his deserving victims down to their bones.
Finally, Bravo has announced a premiere date for the return of Project Runway: November 14th. In anticipation of that long-overdue event, BravoTV.com has posted photos of the new batch of contestants—a rogues gallery of dandies and divas that led to an impromptu round of "guess the token straight male" here at Gawker HQ.
