Suddenly find yourself standing on the sidewalk with a cardboard box overflowing with your belongings, wondering how your boss could have taken your helpful suggestion that he seeks treatment for his "obsessive-asshole personality disorder" the wrong way? The Defamer Job Board is here to help you get things figured out.
· At the TCAs, non-rock-star NBC co-chairman Marc Graboff repeats the hilarious party line on Kevin Reilly's non-firing "'He wasn't fired,' Graboff revealed, inspiring instant guffaws. 'What happened was when Ben [Silverman] became available, about three months after we made Kevin's new deal, we jumped at the opportunity to bring Ben on board to the company. We thought he would be able to be the person that was going to take us to the next level. Kevin, when that happened, realized or determined, frankly, that there was just no role for him at the company and decided to move on.'" In fairness, it does get a little hard to do your job when the new guy keeps interrupting your meetings to replace another piece of your office furniture with his own. [THR]
· Acquisitive News Corp. mogul Rupert Murdoch moves closer to buying Dow Jones and adding the Wall Street Journal to his ever-growing pile of media playthings. [Variety]
· Producers open their negotiations with the WGA by offering the guild a choice: either get down on your knees and put off the issue of internet compensation until a study about new media can be completed or bend over and let us recoup whatever costs we think are fair before we pay you any residuals. Talks have been convened until Wednesday to give the writers time to craft a counterproposal that doesn't start with the words "Go fuck yourself, greedy maniacs." [THR]
· Says Var on the tenor of those initial negotiations: "The gloves have already come off." But, as noted above, not the pants. Yet. [Variety]
· Hell's Kitchen still inexplicably popular. [Variety]
Despite Fred Goldman's best efforts, there really is no stopping internet leaks of If I Did It, O.J. Simpson's first-person meditation on life, love, and how one might have gone about slashing two people to death in a jealous rage, if one were inclined to do so. But who really has the time or patience to download a copy and slog through its sociopathic, pedestrian prose when the WOW guys have arranged for Sparkle, honors graduate of the John Wayne Gacy Jr. Clown Academy, to read the book's first chapter for you. [Warning: If you suffer from even the mildest clown and/or freed-murderer phobias, don't worry in the least! Sparkle is a delight!] Click on the image above for the fun to start.
Names our inbox tells us are out at ICM following the Ed Limato Defenstration: DJ Talbot, Matt Eskander, and Richard Konigsberg. Developing as others are cast out of Century City windows either voluntarily or involuntarily.
With the final episodes of ill-fated sociopolitical drama Studio 60 on The Sunset Strip now all ignominiously burned off by the network that renounced its onetime anointed Nielsen Messiah, showrunner Aaron Sorkin is ready to reflect upon the possible reasons that his much-hyped peak behind the scenes at a curiously humorless late night sketch comedy show failed. (In case you missed it, our recap of the series finale is here to help you get some closure.) While Sorkin is willing to admit to making "too many mistakes for it to survive," he posits that Our Obsession With Hugely Successful, Famously Troubled Man Behind The Curtain might have gotten in the way of the public's enjoyment of his characters' lively banter about the ethics of employing hostage-reclaiming mercenaries in Afghanistan or concerning potentially fatal pregnancy complications. Reports the LAT's Patrick Goldstein after a sit-down with Sorkin:
Not everyone is as tickled as the residents of Springfield, VT over their victory in The Simpsons Movie premiere contest—particularly Democratic Rep. Peter DeFazio of Oregon, who, in a letter to the memory-deficient head of the Department of Justice that begins, "Heidely ho, Attorney General Gonzalez," demands to know how his own state's nominee could have lost to a town with a population of a mere 9000.
To celebrate the occasion of Lindsay Lohan's second graduation from a luxurious local rehabilitation program since February (it's been a busy year, to be sure), soon-to-be exhausted publicist Leslie Sloane Zelnick released a statement indicating that her client would be voluntarily donning a SCRAM alcohol-monitoring bracelet as a symbol of her newfound commitment to never again passing out in the front seat of a friend's car while looking like a cadaver stolen from the Teddy's School of Forensic Medicine. ABC News today familiarizes Lohan's fans with the device that will soon be featured in numerous Us Weekly "Stars...They're Proud Of Their Tenuous Sobriety, Just Like Us!" spreads and quickly become the must-have accessory for Young, Troubled Hollywood, and which, according to an early adopter of the fashion trend, has an undeniable retro-cool vibe:
It seemed inevitable that Andy Dick, notorious crosser of personal boundaries, public stroker of real-estate heiresses, and lusty biter of cocaine-deficient reporters, would eventually catch a beat-down as those weary of his antics were pushed over the edge by one too many unbidden tongue-baths. According to Page Six, that reprisal finally came last week at the Laugh Factory from the unlikiest of sources: Jon Lovitz, no one's idea of a head-smashing enforcer, who was none too pleased at being on the receiving end of a Dick death-hex:
· Openly gay publicist Howard Bragman "adores" star client Isaiah Washington, who might have "more gay friends than I do."
· Amy Winehouse might have two functioning livers, but Lily Allen has a third nipple.
· Ah, Hollywood, where even the formerly mobbed-up can make a nice living and knock up Victoria's Secret models.
· Welcome back, Potter.
The fallout continues from last week's royal debacle, in which the BBC was forced to publicly apologize to The Scariest Lady on the Planet, aka Queen Elizabeth II, for having rearranged footage to make it seem as though she had stormed out of a photo session with Annie Leibovitz. A Year with the Queen producers RDF Media e-mailed the director-general of the BBC, accepting full responsibility for what they refer to as "a serious error of judgment." Somehow, not even the divvying of blame among sub-production entities has done much to lessen the Queen's wrath, as The WOW Report's Fenton Bailey reprints an e-mail he received from a BBC contact:
The Defamer Special Correspondent on Tarted Up High School Theme Parties Sponsored by the Sons of Hollywood Legends just filed this report on the event thrown by Jason Reitman for his producing partner at the Highlands on Saturday night, where all known fire codes relating to the concentration of slutty schoolgirls in one venue were apparently broken:
We suspect generations of USC film marketing majors will be required to study The Simpsons Movie campaign, whose out-of-the-Slurpee-container approach to creating buzz for the feature film debut of the familiar yellow clan scores points for both its originality and ambition. But not even retrofitting select 7-Eleven locations across the nation into living Temples of Apu can match the sheer audacity of drawing a giant, donut wielding Homer beside a centuries-old fertility symbol carved into the landscape of Dorset, England.
· Music round-up: Spoon at the Little Radio Warehouse; Delta Spirit and Vampire Weekend at the Troubadour; The Happy Hallows at the Viper Room.
· The Landmark theater hosts the latest Reel Talk screening with critic Stephen Farber, who'll be showing Milos Forman's Goya's Ghosts, followed by a discussion with producer Paul Zaentz.
· Brently Heilbron's Veterans for Peace benefit at Tangier is "a satiric USO-type show," starring various Groundlings, National Lampooners, and Mad TV cast members.
The search for actor Mandy Patinkin, whose recent. mysterious failure to appear at the table read of whatever second-tier CBS procedural he stars on engaged all of Hollywood in a desperate manhunt for the missing thespian late last week, is over. The good news: Patinkin seems to be OK, and both his network and studio have thus refrained from assassinating his character in the press over the no-show. The bad news: "creative differences"—the "it's not you, it's me" of insincere Hollywood excuses—have driven him off the series. Says Broadcasting & Cable:
In the latest installment of its penetrating investigative series on the erotic landscape of premium cable's leading brand in the post-Sex-and-the-City era, "HBO: Where's All The Fucking?," a breakthrough: after previously throwing a spotlight on the distressing lack of onscreen coitus in Entourage, the Times now reveals that the network has been secretly devoting all of its ugly-bumping resources to the development of new series Tell Me You Love Me, which promises to entice viewers with levels of pay-TV screwing surpassed only by the raunchiest of expense-account-verboten hotel-room offerings:
As if the announcement that NBC would be adopting exiled, mad-as-hell-and-not- going-to be-manipulated-by-deceptively-adorable- gay-puppetmasters-anymore Grey's Anatomy doctor Isaiah Washington into the Peacock Family wasn't enough to tantalize the TV scribes huddled at today's Television Critics Association event, new network "cool dad" Ben Silverman will soon reveal that he's welcoming prodigal son Donald Trump, who's recently been busying himself with creating the world's finest, most luxurious line of buttocks-pampering office chairs, back into the clan. Reports TVWeek.com's TCA blog:
There's just over a month to go until Star Jones's return to TV, a full year after an ugly power play saw her squeezed out of her co-host chair at The View and publicly shamed by daytime potentate Barbara Walters. Of course, the pudgy, pampered Star of yore is virtually unrecognizable from the Star of today—streamlined, bespectacled, and ready for the serious business of yammering on interminably with D-list celebrities on Court TV. Jones is finally opening up about her dramatic physical transformation in an essay she penned for Glamour magazine:
