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 let everyone know about the time you spotted Love Connection's Chuck Woolery in bad need of a pedicure:
[Ed.note—The trades aren't publishing today, but we're going to scrape up some links from their websites anyway, just out of habit.] · Networks may be screwing TV's "golden goose" by pushing streaming online versions of their primetime shows, eroding viewership for the "free programming" offered by traditional, totally annoying reruns. [Variety]
· ABC concedes Thursday night to CBS by offering only reruns against the Eye's all-original line-up. The Office and 30 Rock finally return for NBC, but the network finishes fourth on the night. [THR]
· A look back on each network's midseason shows finds that most of the late-launching series are—not to put too fine a point on it—pieces of crap that weren't good enough to make the fall schedule. [Variety]
· Var's Peter Bart compares the "melodrama" of the imminent Tribune sale to Viacom's clusterfucky acquisition of DreamWorks. [Variety]
As you may have gleaned from the sudden proliferation of stories about why Entourage feels so real (hint: they go to actual restaurants frequented by the kinds of people the show lightly satirizes!) or taking deeper looks into the series' puzzling self-censorship, the show's fourth season premiere finally arrives this Sunday, just in time to provide agents running out of abusive material with fresh insults to hurl at their homosexual assistants. The NY Times reviews the upcoming episodes, in which Entourage's exploration of the homoerotic undercurrent of its characters' emotionally complex bro-on-bro love seems even more pronounced than in previous seasons:
Forgive us if you detect a slight quiver as we emotionally deliver the news that Andy Cohen, Bravo's dishy blogging executive and now breakout webcast star of BravoTV.com's Watch What Happens, has achieved a gigantic milestone in the life of any frustrated TV suit with a burning hunger for the limelight: Not just a Page Six item, but a Page Six item where his boldfaced name sits alongside the column's honorary cougar and a Hollywood A+-lister:
Recently realizing that his weekly, post-Gelson's-run debriefing of the fifteen trusty Level-IV Sustenance-Acquisition Techs who keep his compound stocked with foodstuffs always seems to include troubling reports of new magazine cover stories detailing his stifling control of a frustrated war-bride on the verge of escape, Tom Cruise paused from determining exactly how many links to add to Katie Holmes' ankle chains as a reward for three consecutive days of good behavior, sighed, and decided it might be time to start to start fostering a public illusion about his wife's limited independence. After grudgingly approving a small-time acting job for Holmes, he's now instructed evil agency CAA to direct her to her "own" public relations firm, according to FoxNews.com gossip Roger Friedman:
· One billion Indian citizens raise their voices in harmony and declare: "Sanjaya's not our fucking fault! We swear!"
· TMZ, as you would expect, is all over the story about the porn star who signed a boob.
· This couch was once on American Idol. Therefore, you must own it.
· This is a partial list of Angelina Jolie's tattoos, because we know you're been wondering about such matters lately.
· A CNN.com plea for NBC to kill Studio 60.
· Is this the cutest thing you've ever seen? Trick question, because this is. We think we just pooped ourselves a little, so overcome are we by adorableness.
Carlos Mencia verbal bitchslapper and crusader on behalf of plundered stand-ups everywhere Joe Rogan checked in with the folks over at Cracked.com, covering a variety of topics, including his thoughts on fame himself—something he now enjoys in large quantities thanks to six seasons as host of the groundbreaking televised goat-testicle-eating contest, Fear Factor:
Things we don't know: What exactly our filthy-minded reader thought they were going to find by searching for that dirty, awful—just awful!—word; how Netflix's search engine ties notable films and/or individuals to specific keywords. Things we do know: This is an incredibly unfair way to treat two of the 20th century's greatest humanitarians. We sincerely hope that whatever technical glitch is responsible for this uglinees will be cleared up by morning.
Because no aging actor's tumble into middle-age and the looming specter of obsolescence is complete without the forming of a musical vanity project available for booking at your next wedding, bar mitzvah or corporate event, it should surprise no one that Kevin Costner has a band, dubbed, for maximum movie star name recognition potential, the Kevin Costner Band. Spoiled perhaps by the white-gloved treatment to which he is accustomed from the LA-based Hollywood agents and managers handling his film career, Costner is suing the East Coast music promotions company he hired for failing to put his signature Costner sound on every iPod in America:
· Music round-up: Ken Andrews at the Troubadour; Nurse With Wound at Amoeba (free, of course); Les Sans Culottes at Spaceland.
· Saul Austerlitz signs Money For Nothing: A History of the Music Video from the Beatles to The White Stripes at Book Soup.
· Legendary music producer Joe Boyd, who's worked with the likes of Clapton, Nick Drake, and Pink Floyd, will discuss his memoir White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s at the Skirball, as well as his "instrumental role" in Dylan going electric, a folk desecration your hippie parents still haven't gotten over.
Perhaps the most notable of the 3,000 sitcom pilots born out of ABC's "Greenlight 'em all and let God sort 'em out" comedy development strategy for the 2007 fall TV season is Cavemen, the prospective series based on a series of commercials featuring insurance carrier Geico's second-most popular characters (the Gecko's agent at CAA is just too big an asshole to even deal with), a gang of put-upon Neanderthals thrust into a modern world that unfairly stereotypes them as uncultured brutes. But what really attracted ABC president Steven McPherson to the project, other than the utter glee that will accompany every caveman eye-roll in reaction to a supporting character's snooty insinuation that he probably doesn't know the difference between a salad fork and the jagged rock he used to kill his dinner? It's all about the cutting social commentary! This is some next-level shit, says McPherson in response to a THR question that politely refers to the sitcomfomercial concept as "nontraditional":
Before you jump out of your seats to call Photoshop foul on this heartwarming candid of Timberlakian Idol finalists Blake Lewis and Chris Richardson snuggling up backstage as co-contestant Sanjaya Malakar lurked just feet away, lustily soaking in every boy-on-boy caress from behind a massive pair of bug-eyed Christian Dior sunglasses, a keen-eyed Towleroad reader has already spotted the original on a wire photo site. (Just kidding! Here's the real, unaltered image.) Still, we were impressed enough with the quality of this specimen to share it with our readers, to say nothing of its implied tenderness; the slash-Photoshop-fic artist could have easily gone the hardcore route, as did the author of that other tampered Idol image currently circulating the internets, of Melinda Doolittle as a latex-clad dominatrix disciplining a naked, ball-gagged Ryan Seacrest. (At least we think it was tampered.)
We suppose that fairness would dictate that we at least read the damning review condensed into such efficient, ticket-buying deterrence by CNN.com's tireless Story Highlights editors before making a knee-jerk judgment to skip a movie, but in this case, we think Hilary Swank would be better served if we just quit after that last bullet point and Netflixed up some Freedom Writers instead.
Virtually any morning flip through the trades reveals a delightful succession of full-page reacharounds celebrating this milestone or that meaningless award, but today's special All-Star Tribute to the Final Season of The Sopranos edition of Variety provided a special occasion for the industry's finest talent agencies to engage in a particularly vigorous round of congratulatory handjobbery. So which agency loves its Sopranos earners the most?
· These people and movies will be in the mix at Cannes this year: Martin Scorsese, The Golden Compass, the Coen Brothers, U2. Get excited for all the fun stuff your boss is gonna get to do in France! [Variety]
· Judd Apatow is getting into the David Krumholtz business in a big way, signing up the actor to write and star in Attorneys at Raw and to co-star in Jake Kasdan's musical biopic spoof Walk Hard. [THR]
· This year's Tribeca Film Festival premiere of Spiderman 3 is shaping up to be even bigger n' crasser than last year's M:i:III Tom Cruise city-crossing, multivehicle stuntacular, with simultaneous screenings in all five boroughs and a marching band angering residents of Peter Parker's Queens neighborhood. [Variety]
· An average of 25 million viewers tune in to watch the the hot one with the legs and the bald one with the funny hats outlast the rocker chick whose name we can never remember on American Idol. (It should go without saying that Sanjaya was nowhere near elimination.) [THR]
· Dealing with Pirates 3's dad-snorting PR crisis will be among Buena Vista's Head Flack in Charge Dennis Rice's last acts at Disney, as he's been brainwashed and stolen away by Tom Cruise to trick the world into believing that United Artists is a real movie studio, and not just an elaborate front for producing training films for Celebrity Centre e-meter repairmen. [Variety]
Michael Jackson, currently touched down in Vegas and developing his plans for a 50-foot-tall, laser-shooting robot equipped with luxury, crotch-level suites for high rollers, has found himself distracted with the possibility of yet more legal entanglements, as he mulls taking action against the owners of a warehouse full of repossessed Jackson family memorabilia who plan on putting up the contents for auction:
