· Dennis Hopper, Nathan Lane, Kelsey Grammer, Stanley Tucci, and George Lopez join the cast of Swing Vote, the "populist" comedy in which a presidential election hilariously rests on Kevin Costner's ballot. [Variety]
· Despite the occasional drop-in by environmentally conscious Hollywood megastar Cameron Diaz (wow, we're really picking on her today, aren't we?), NBC's coverage of the Live Earth concerts draws even worse ratings than the network's typical summertime Saturday night slate of reruns and NHL playoff games. [THR]
· Hoping to spur weak sales, Sony drops the price of the Playstation 3 by $100. Fuck you, early adopters! [Variety]
· Jennifer Esposito will star opposite Val Kilmer in the indie drama Conspiracy, gaining a lifetime of junket-enlivening anecdotes about what it's like to work with Hollywood's most lovably batshit castmate. [THR]
· Here's a link to a detailed summary of the WGA's annual report on guild member compensation in 2006. Enthralling? You bet! [Variety]

Hurry, for you have only nine or so hours to come up with the $5,400 it currently takes to win a dinner with Spinal Tap. Proceeds will benefit Live Earth, which promises to donate your bid to film Cameron Diaz promos with better production values for the organization's next event. [eBay]

With the heady buzz generated by creating the hybrid sitcomfomercial art form out of the best parts of half-hour TV comedy and thirty-second auto-insurance advertising finally dissipating, pioneering network ABC is starting to second-guess the programming instincts that led them to make the Geico-inspired Cavemen one of the linchpins of their Fall schedule. According to THR, they've initiated the dreaded "retooling" process, using the primitive series-salvaging implements of "recasting" and "pilot reshoots" to rescue their Neanderthal-powered racism allegory from looming Nielsen disaster:

Above, Cameron Diaz selflessly decides to dispose of a stack of scripts for projects she's passed on by dumping them in a recycling bin. It may not seem like a lot, but if every $15 million-per-picture actress were to do the same, the cumulative effect would be enough to neutralize a weekend's worth of emissions produced by a lesser-enlightened starlet's commute to and from Winston's in a Range Rover. Answer the call.

Can actress Linda Fiorentino's relationship with an FBI agent and friendship with the Pellicanos inject some much-needed excitement into the wildly disappointing Hollywood Wiretapping Trial of the Century? Answer: No, probably not. [Radar]

We suspect that we may never tire of reading stories about how new NBC co-chairman/rock-star Ben Silverman plans to remake the last-place network in his own fun-loving, party-positive, hey-let's-have-that-meeting-at-The-Standard's-pool! image, especially when such pieces continue to yield details like this one from today's NY Times article on Hollywood's high-fivingest new executive:

It's time to accept that Hollywood's Fourth of July vacation is finally over and the rest of the summer awaits; try and put off daydreaming about your Labor Day hiatus long enough to review the weekend box office numbers:

· Transformers: An effects wiz lives to tell the Michael Bay tale. Tuesday is its bitch. Shia: Now and forever. The web tirade. With Michael Bay's My Little Pony, pretty much what you see is what you get.
· The Week in Britney: Serving up dope rhymes. Confronting her daddy issues and bottled demons with one new man.
· Sprinklicious....arrhghghg...
· Lindsay Lohan turns 21, with a distressing lack of stomach-pumping, but some fierce upper-body strength.
· And the Emmy goes to one of the ten shows in this pile.
· Isaiah Washington explains to Larry King the true meaning of the pink f-bomb, and how badly he craves the touch of another man.
· Seemingly undernourished "starlet" gets knocked up by "musician."

· Slate's fake action movie one-liner contest has plenty of inspired entries, but it's hard to beat the minimalist masterpiece that is "Welcome to America, douche bag."
· The next time your dinner party host insists that you not lend a hand with the dishes, you might want to take a moment to ask yourselves when the last time you saw their wife and kids was.
· We don't know about you, but we couldn't be more jazzed for Live Earth: the environmental-awareness-raising rock n' roll phenomenon nobody wants!
· And with one annoying, puzzle-filled website, we have officially ceased to care about J.J. Abrams' mysterious new project.

Taking inspiration from a successful campaign in which Jericho fans buried the CBS executives responsible for canceling the struggling Debbie Downer of a series under a mountain of salted peanuts, fans of NBC's The Black Donnellys have similarly bought up enough Zesta crackers to feed a developing nation, and diverted the shipment to HBO, where they think the "edgy" Paul Haggis series has a better chance of survival. From the Show Tracker blog:

Props to the Thighmaster for pointing out that Transformers' fantasy-object/greasemonkey Megan Fox was the same Megan Fox who gave a visibly delighted Brian Austin Green a manual lap adjustment in public. [Egotastic]

Friday
· Music round-up: Baltimore DJ Ronnie Darko spins at Fridays Off the 405 at The Getty, The Shore play at Silver Lake's El Cid, and Miranda Lee Richards is at the Hotel Café.
· The 2007 Summer Festival at the Huntington Library and Botanical Gardens kicks off with a classical program including the U.S. premiere of Vietnamese composer Phuc Linh's "Suite for Winds and Strings."

The Apprentice, the ratings-challenged crown jewel of aerodynamically coiffed real estate baron Donald Trump's reality TV empire, is rumored to have been renewed by NBC for another season. [Reuters]

Michael Bay's My Little Pony may only be a cheeky fan homage, but once the six-day, 11-figure Transformers totals are tallied up, we wouldn't be surprised to see this story—about an alien race of equine dwarves with brushable manes and names like Licketysplit and Baby Rainribbon arriving via rainbow-wormhole to blow a bunch of shit up—fast-tracked into production.

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) and tell everyone about the night Mr. Belding tore up "Don't Stop Believin'" in front of a packed Metal Skool crowd.

Join us as we cover ourselves in Crisco and chase this week's advertisers around the bedroom, hoping they won't be able to escape our slippery attempts at expressing our affection for long. If you'd like to advertise on Defamer and get the greasy hug you so richly deserve, see this page.

Special thanks to: American Apparel, Crunch, Hans Klok, Sony Pictures Interview, Live from Abbey Road, MSN Live Earth, Mandalay Bay, Psych, Reyka Vodka, The Green Book, Wicked Musical, Wilco, You Kill Me

· Casting genius or casting insanity? You make the call*: Jim Carrey will play Scrooge and all three ghosts in a 3-D/motion-capture Robert Zemeckis reimagination of A Christmas Carol for Disney. [*And we bet we know what you're going to say!] [Variety]
· Some more details about Cloverfield, the supertopsecret Paramount/JJ Abrams project introduced to the world by means of a mysterious trailer playing before Transformers. [THR]
· After making meaningless Tuesday box office history, Transformers took in $29.1 million on Wednesday to claim a record of somewhat greater import: The Biggest Fourth of July Ever. [Variety]
· The folks at Nielsen continue to measure summer TV ratings, even on nights when virtually no one is watching. [THR]
· Paramount tries to save Angelina Jolie box office failure A Mighty Heart by cutting its number of screens in half, hoping that this will somehow help the movie build word-of-mouth and extend its run in some markets. [Variety]

Having severed all ties to her mother in iambic pentameter, then confounded her fans by explaining away her umbrella rampage as an overzealous Method exercise, an increasingly scrambled Britney Spears would appear to be in desperate need of someone she can trust. She may have found that in AA counselor John Sundahl, hotly rumored to be a front-running candidate for Ill-Fated Marriage #3. (Not to be confused with her first rehab boyfriend, a guitarist from a lesser known rock band who rode the alleged affair for all the publicity it was worth.) Those rumors now appear to be true, as Sundahl briefly lapsed on the "anonymous" part of the AA equation to gush about the relationship in Page Six:

It was only a matter of time before Paris Hilton's lyrical words were set to music. [FunnyOrDie.com]

After unburying himself from the avalanche of unwanted Emmy For Your Consideration screeners that had immobilized him for four days, a Defamer reader, still weak and dehydrated from his ordeal, considerately photographed the pile which had nearly killed him and delivered the images to our inbox with the message, "Did someone really think I was going to watch all this shit?" Indeed, it's hard to believe that the people who sent along DVDs for Why I Wore Lipstick to My Mastectomy or Brotherhood actually intended that recipients watch them; instead, they were probably considerately included in mass-mailings to prime voters' disc shredders (like the one pictured after the jump) for the intense usage of Emmy nomination season.