· Onetime NBC Messiah Aaron Sorkin has signed on for a three-picture deal with DreamWorks. First up is a script for The Trial of the Chicago 7, a period political piece about the clash between protestors and police at the 1968 Democratic convention that Sorkin was able to adapt from an unaired Studio 60 sketch in which Lobster Boy and new character Pigasus the Immortal argue over who might be the better Yippee candidate for president. [Variety]
· Katherine McPhee is, by far, the hottest American Idol runner-up in Hollywood right now, landing a role in the still-untitled Anna Faris comedy about the Playboy bunny who teaches some lame sorority girls how to unleash their inner tart. In an empowering way! [THR]

Abandoning the quaint saber-rattling that has marked the run-up to the official start of negotiations for a new contract with the Writers Guild on Monday, the studios have apparently decided to cast aside their clattering blades in favor of a new nuke-dangling strategy intended to let the greedy scribes know they're not afraid to flatten the entire town if that guarantees more reliable corporate profitability.

A promo clip released yesterday of BBC documentary A Year with the Queen showed Annie Leibovitz requesting that Queen Elizabeth II remove her crown for a picture. The Queen's response was to incapacitate her with a royal shoe pressed against her neck, threatening, "Ask that of me again and I shall crush your trachea like a bug," before storming out of the session in a huff. Not all was what it seemed, however, and producers have issued apologies to both parties for having creatively rearranged their footage for maximum diva-rampage potential. From BBC News:

Paris Hilton's shocking extracurricular past, revealed! [WorldNetDaily via SportsByBrooks]

"To have a new superstar for us to obsess about and analyze would be a welcome relief. But for Victoria to become one of those people, she will have to get some personality. At the moment, she's a slightly two-dimensional character for Americans." Too bad the diamond-studded dildo story turned out to be false, because that really would've have helped flesh out a pretty underwitten character. [Reuters]

Not long after dodging D-lister-piercing ordinance in the hot zone outside of the Roosevelt Hotel, TMZ.com's utterly fearless Starcatcher mobile video team once again found themselves knee-deep in the shit last night, documenting a vicious brawl that erupted outside an ESPYs afterparty at Skybar when a pair of gentlemen decided to audition for Rumer Willis bodyguard duty by engaging some paparazzi in hand-to-hand combat.

With the possibility of a humiliating de-sashing looming, embattled blackmail victim Miss New Jersey bravely subjected herself to the incrementally less severe humiliation of appearing on The Today Show to discuss each and every one of the purloined Facebook photos her tormentor threatened to release, disempowering those who sought to terrorize her. What you will see will shock you. Unless, of course, you ever went to college. Or have ever been drunk. Or have even a vague awareness of the photographs that took down Miss Nevada—who, quite frankly, seems like a lot more fun than her counterpart from the Garden State.

· And with the presentation of this on-the-set video of Harrison Ford dramatically gathering together the pieces of his costume for Indiana Jones 4, we officially bring to a close our Steven Spielberg's Narrowly Averted Rape Day festivities.
· As much as we once counted on him to bring a rational medical perspective to the insanity following Anna Nicole Smith's death, we must admit that CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta does seems like kind of a dick.
· Are we eeeeverrr going to find out if Nicole Richie has to go to jail for five minutes? We're getting a little impatient over here. It's been, like, days since one of those Simple Life girls got locked up.
· Tara Reid enters her Grey Gardens period, and the Fug girls are there.

So blinded were we by the ostentation of Paramount's eye-catching, two-page, "We made so much money last week that Brad Grey is buying everyone solid-gold robots" spread for Transformers that we completely missed this far more subtle ad lurking in pages of Variety this morning.

What happened when leading celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz—a bold artist known to throw fits when the prop baby DHL'd to her Vanity Fair cover shoot doesn't meet her exacting specifications—was assigned to shoot a legendarily frigid monarch? Things got tense, especially when the portraitist suggested to the Queen of England that she remove her crown, and BBC cameras were there to capture the entire exchange. From The Times Online:

Feeling that penis-enabled consumers of Hollywood product need a dismissive term to label the violence-laden, women-objectifying fare that frequently attacts them, humorist Gloria Steinem proposes (modestly, of course) the introduction of the term "prick flick" into the vernacular. [HuffPo]

Report: Britney Spears is abusing booze, food, and credit cards. Once we find out she's banging background dancers again, we'll know we've finally got the old Britney we know and love back. [The Scoop]

· Music round-up: Flight of the Conchords at the El Rey; Chris Cornell at the Wiltern; Queen Latifah (the jazz-singing version) at the Hollywood Bowl.
· Kids in the Hall alum Scott Thompson previews his one-man show at I.O. West.
· We can think of a place no more appropriately magical to celebrate the premiere of the new Harry Potter movie than Hollywood Blvd.'s own Mood.

90-year-old comedian Phyllis Diller concocts perfectly believable "I broke my back" excuse to avoid talking to Jay Leno. [usatoday.com]

And with nothing more complicated than a casual choice of wardrobe, John Waters produced a level of outrageousness at his premiere party for Hairspray that Captivity couldn't generate with a club jam-packed with half-naked SuicideGirls being tortured by guys in butcher smocks. To be fair, Waters did ask John Travolta to strip down to his underwear and submit to a public paddling by Mink Stole, but realized such a stunt might seem a little desperate even before a surprisingly game, yet distressingly sweat-slicked, Travolta was able to completely wriggle out of his shirt.

One of these days, the Lindsay Lohans of the world are going to figure out that MySpace pages aren't the supersecure form of communication they believe them to be. [Gatecrasher]

We were more than a little disturbed when a reader, having just read our post on the importance of remembering Steven Spielberg's Narrowly Averted Rape Day, alerted us to the existence of an anonymously produced film that would seem to run contrary to the spirit of this most joyous of Hollywood observances. Somewhat surprisingly, this Film Threat review of Raping Steven Spielberg calmed our fears about the project:

Forget about Tom Cruise's groundbreaking use of theme park money to seize control of his career from studios. The hottest thing going in film financing right now is PLO money, though you occasionally have to endure notes like, "Hmmmm, what if the terrorists were the good guys this time? You know, just to shake things up?" [Cindy Adams]

For New York residents in the early '80s, the only TV commercials more ubiquitous than the tourism campaign that would inspire the hearting of a great number of things were those of Crazy Eddie's—groundbreaking ads that entertained locals, while sensitizing them to the challenges faced by the mentally ill in accurately pricing stereo equipment. A recent confrontation on CNBC between the original "Crazy Eddie" Antar and the cousin who put him away for tax fraud inspired premium Limoncello maker Danny DeVito to bring his life to the screen:

Too squeamish to attend the Captivity premiere party that After Dark Films provocateur Courtney Solomon recently promised would be so debauched that it would likely bring about the total collapse of Western Civilization ourselves, we dispatched unshockable Defamer Special Correspondent on Looking Into The Eyes of Evil and Laughing Nick Malis to Privilege last night, hoping that he would emerge from the ritualistic promotional flaying with enough of his sanity intact to file a report on his experience. Luckily for us, he did survive the ordeal, though not without some psychological scarring associated with prolonged exposure to a carefully coordinated attempt to offend his sensibilities. His report follows, along with a link to our photo gallery of the event (which you can skip to by clicking here, if you're the impatient type.)