Those who find themselves jonesing for the mildly homoerotic lifestyle porn of Entourage during its hiatus might be temporarily sated by the adventures of Group of Guys, the story of F, Theater, and Duck-Billed Platypus, three childhood pals just trying to mooch off mildly successful pal Vincent Pursuit's Smallville cameo. We'd call it a Bizarro version of Hollywood, except that this version of the industry is a lot more true to reality than the one where a doe-eyed Aquaman's hardest decision is whether to hit the bong before or after stopping by Book Soup for a groupie fuck.

Having completed the final stages of his home-based, outpatient recovery program ("Step 11: Turn off Oprah. Step 12: Congratulations! You are now a sober and tolerant asset to society..."), Mel Gibson has at last emerged from the cocoon-like confines of his Malibu estate and gotten back to business, with two recent appearances in the American heartland in support of his latest extinct language opus, Apocalypto:

· Music round-up: Junior Boys at the Troubadour; Sea Wolf at Spaceland; The Damnwells and Army of Me at the Knitting Factory.
· The Academy unleashes over three hours of documentary Oscar winners, showing Chagall, Robert Frost: A Lover's Quarrell with the World, Nine From Little Rock, and Jacques-Yves Cousteau's World Without Sun back-to-back-to-back-to-back tonight, More details here. [via Flavorpill]
· The UCB Theatre hosts its monthly open mic night, where comedy hopefuls can try to entertain a crowd comprised of fellow aspiring comics, random drunkards who stumbled in from nearby bars, or Celebrity Centre minions just trying to unwind from a hard day of polishing L. Ron Hubbard's gilded bust.

Defamer is committed to alerting the entertainment industry to any incipient acts of violence that might result from tensions between members of the favored-above-all, glamorous film caste and the small-screen untouchables who might be unacceptably inconvenienced by the needs of their megabudgeted movie projects, hoping to head off regrettable bloodshed with a civilized dialogue. While the Writers Guild loves to use sweatshop rhetoric for the conditions endured by nonunion writers, scribes on a WGA-certified TV production find themselves ready to overthrow the privileged neighbors robbing their office of the climate control mechanism that allows them to endure the punishing Valley heat. Oh, the humanity! Reports an operative on the Warner Bros. lot:

Back in June, Uwe Boll, the much-pilloried director of inept, video-game-based filmed entertainments (and, perhaps most damningly, a movie in which Tara Reid starred as a genius anthropologist), challenged a handful of his most vocal detractors to a public boxing match, promising that scenes from the fights would later be incoherently edited into future masterwork Postal. On Saturday night, the pugilistic director finally engaged his predictably glass-jawed critics in the much-anticipated fisticuffs up in Vancouver, utilizing his long-bottled rage to quickly dispatch all four combatants with a flurry of hacky fists. There's video of the melee above (via Ain't It Cool's report), and after the jump, the Defamer Special Correspondent on Runaway Bloodsport Production offers a blow-by-blow of the event. Enjoy.

After overhearing some suspiciously chatty, sniffling patron exiting Hyde talking excitedly about how he felt "like Strawberry Shortcake just peed down the back of my throat," TMZ.com's curiosity was aroused enough to try and find the source of this new buzz, confident that even the most cutting-edge club does not yet offer deviant, childhood-cartoon-character-based water sports. Today, they present the findings from their journey through the fruit-flavored underbelly of the local narcotics trade:

BravoTV.com's DeathWatch game is a contest promoting their Brilliant But Cancelled series, in which players are required to guess which of the new network series will meet the same, grisly fates as underwhelming Defamer commentators. An e-mail went out minutes ago announcing the first casualty of fall '06—Fox's bizarrely unfunny swingin' bachelor pad sitcom Happy Hour—though a retraction quickly followed:

Universal beats out DreamWorks, Warner Independent and the Weinsteins for the movie rights to Peter Morgan's play Frost/Nixon, whose ideas Ron Howard will eventually dilute for mass consumption and producer Brian Grazer will claim as his own. [Variety]
Cate Blanchett is attached to star in the adaptation of "graphic memoir" Cancer Vixen: A True Story, in which she will depict cartoonist Marisa Acocella Marchetto, who "wore killer shoes to chemo sessions and strove to get married on time." [THR]
Viacom is cutting the salary of skeletal executive presence Sumner Redstone to bring it in line with that of the officers he recently installed to run the company, but Redstone will be able to boost his base compensation considerably through bonuses for cutting ties with too-expensive movie stars or unexpectedly firing popular underlings. [Variety/AP]
Pirates of the Caribbean finishes first overseas for the 11th time in 12 weekends, boosted by continuing support in Pacific Island territories in which Johnny Depp is worshipped as the demihuman incarnation of Toronga, a million-year-old, gay-pirate god. [THR]
ABC's Sunday ratings were still strong despite moving Grey's Anatomy to Thursday, with Desperate Housewives drawing nearly 24 million viewers eager to see what mirthlessly outrageous antics the ladies of Wisteria Lane will be up to in their third season. [Variety]

Despite vague, image-rehabilitative intentions to visit the troops in Iraq, Lindsay Lohan will probably never get within 5,000 miles of the Baghdad Green Zone, especially not with her humanitarian mission to liberate every last drop of Grey Goose in Hollywood from their frosted-glass prisons still no more than halfway complete. But thanks to the Defamer Special Middle East Correspondent, we now know that Lohan is doing her part to ease some of the region's turmoil, appearing on the cover of this complimentary magazine [pictured] our far-flung operative discovered in his Amman hotel room to help call attention to Jordan's efforts to clear unexploded landmines and the plight of recent Lebanese refugees. After reading that Lohan's controversial change of hair color was actually a stirring protest against Iran's attempts to become a nuclear superpower, even the most ambivalent, celebrity-obsessed reader won't be able to resist joining the oft-dehydrated starlet's latest geopolitical crusade.

It turns out the fishy-smelling-but-just-amusing- enough-to-post-as-fact news item circulating throughout the European press about a month ago, in which Trey Parker and Matt Stone claimed that Saddam Hussein was being tortured with forced viewings of his animated manifestation rolling around in bed with Satan, was, in a shocking twist that we could never have anticipated from a source as earnest and trustworthy as the two creators of South Park, just a joke:

Stories of how crushed jilted UTA agent Nick Stevens was to discover that soulmate-client Jim Carrey defected to hated, baby-devouring rival CAA will probably continue to trickle in over the next few weeks, with new anecdotes of Carrey callously returning a once-cherished locket containing a tiny image of his beloved, longtime rep by mail, or of Stevens awaking in tears each morning after realizing that the days of Carrey rousing him with an ass-ventriloquism version of a reveille are over, freshly punctuating the sadness of a messy break-up. But business in Hollywood must carry on regardless of how many "Take me back! Love, Nick" Post-It love notes the star finds clinging to the windshield of his Range Rover, so today's NY Times does its part to illustrate the complicated realignment of comedy power following both the Carrey/Stevens divorce and that of Carrey's power-brokering managers, Jimmy Miller and Eric Gold in easy-to-understand, Venn diagram form. Mercifully, the Times refrained from including a circle depicting UTA clients poached by CAA, which would have done nothing but rub salt in the agency's still-suppurating wounds as it tries to come to terms with the end of the highly lucrative Carrey Era.

Remove your shoes and soak your feet in a tub full of the warm, soothing waters of the weekend box office numbers:

· Studio 60 premieres to a lukewarm reception, but that's nothing compared to the hilariously brutal reviews Defaker, its fake blog, is getting. Further confusing matters, SNL, the show it's based upon, fires three cast members. Prepare for your brain to literally turn to goop and run out your ears when you first listen to 30 Rock's fake podcast rag on Defaker.
· Anna Nicole Smith losing her 20-year-old son went from really sad to, like, really, really sad.
· Jim Carrey dives into CAA.
· Angelina Jolie snaps up a fill-in-the-orphans painting at the Banksy exhibit, but she's not the only celebrity who's gotten a serious case of Banksy Fever.
· The Geisha House photo affair only serves to highlight our Truism of the Week: "Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery."
· Mrs. Ponch comes to the rescue of her Consumer Reports-equipped husband. (Hey, our dad made us pay for our own damn tires.)
· Fox finds Jesus, while NBC finds a different kind of Jesus with a really put-on British accent.
· Makeshift crack pipes just got a little more fun.
· If this story about Paramount approaching Brad Pitt about taking over the Mission Impossible franchise is true, then there goes any chance of that The Vampire Lestat sequel re-pairing we had been holding our breaths for since 1994.
· Joe Eszterhas finally admits Showgirls sucks, but not as badly as Sharon Stone does.
· Steve-O turns the red carpet orange.

· CTV aired the wrong episode of Grey's Anatomy last night, leaving fans completely unable to figure out how they were supposed to feel about the Skinny Bitch/Dr. McDreamy relationship this week.
SNL's Lorne Michaels prefers to think of cast members he lets go as plants in an "overgrown garden" that have to be "pruned," not as "expendable actors that have to be shitcanned to make his budget." Yeah, we can see why he prefers the gardening angle.
· People asks: Is Kate Bosworth too thin? We answer: It depends. Can you see her ribs through a wool sweater yet?
NBC runs VeggieTales through its network juicer, squeezing out all the Jesus-y nutrients in the process.
· We foolishly thought the idea of judges is fundamentally incompatible with the idea of Paris Hilton, but Above the Law has somehow found a way to mash them together.
· We suggest the term "upper decker" to describe this kind of cheap-seats hummer.

In addition to our weekly commenter cancellations, a feature in which we think you've already taken an almost perverse pleasure, we're also launching another week-ending item in which you, the easily bored and strongly opinionated reader, can tell us about the kinds of things you'd like to see more of (or, as the case may be, less of) in the coming week. Want every post to be accompanied by a startlingly huge, officially approved Brian Grazer headshot, regardless of subject matter? Tell us. Think there's an area of Lindsay Lohan coverage that's being criminally neglected? Say so. Either drop us a line to tips@defamer.com enlightening us about your hopes and dreams for the coming week or duke it out in this post's comments if you're one of the lucky, chosen, unicorn-riding few. Sure, we'll probably just ignore most of the suggestions (especially if they're anti-Grazer-headshot rants), but you just might open our eyes to some things we've been too drunk (or hungover) to think of on our own.

A nosy Defamer operative spotted Entourage sidekick and bite-sized Nicky Hilton escort Kevin Connolly at a Burbank airport checkpoint this morning, where the actor got a brief tutorial on heightened security measures:

Friday
· Friday Night Music: Mission of Burma play the Troubadour, and Ben Kweller performs at the Avalon. (Hopefully this show won't be cut short by another raging nose bleed.)
· Celebrate the three official pastimes of the LA weekend as The Angela Hanley Gallery hosts "Drink Fight Fuck," a multimedia exhibition from three artists who put in their time in Akron's punk scene.
Saturday
· Saturday Night Music: Midnight Movies are at the Troubadour, dublab 7th Anniversary Party & John Coltrane Tribute celebrates what would have been Coltrane's 80th birthday at a secret location downtown (you'll find out after you rsvp), and several thousand aging children of the 80s commune as Human League and Psychedelic Furs take to the Hollywood Bowl stage.
· Adultcon—The Adult Convention begins its two-day stint at the Convention Center, where adults from all walks of life can exchange information on the latest advancements in adulthood. (You may also happen to spot lots of mostly-naked chicks with giant, fake tits walking around. Ignore them.)
· Preferred seating audience members gasp in horror as Axl Rose takes to the stage at KROQ's Inland Invasion tour, then are promptly brought to their knees as he welcomes them to the Hyundai Pavilion jungle. With Alice In Chains, Muse, and more.
Sunday
· Sunday Night Music: Massive Attack with TV on the Radio are at the Hollywood Bowl, De La Soul, Digital Underground,Young MC and others perform at the LA Coliseum for Nike Run Hit Wonder, and DJ Shadow is the Avalon.
· At the Steve Allen Theater, Before They Were Giants imagines a fictional encounter in the summer of 1974, when Francis Ford Coppola, Brian DePalma, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg spent a weekend together in a Malibu beachhouse (and passed around Sissy Spacek like a hash pipe).

A couple of weeks ago, we introduced some new features in our commenting system, one of which was the ability for those without a traditional commenter invitation to leave comments in a queue for editorial approval, with those we found sufficiently amusing or enlightening earning their authors entry into our dysfunctional, abusive commenter family. Unfortunately, now that we've let even more people into the fold, ones who aren't pulling their weight have to go to make room for those with a fresher, unhealthier desire to contribute. Just to make this ugly business a little more topically whimsical, let's think of each deleted commenter as a show being cancelled for failing to live up to our vague, often irrational expectations. This week's cancellations:

TMZ.com's tireless dedication to the video documentation of the comings and goings of various celebrities from our city's many fine drinking establishments has once again yielded one of those priceless, only-in-front-of-an-exclusive-hotspot moments, as the webarazzi's all-seeing cameras captured a brief mix-up in which Jeremy Piven accidentally climbed inside another patron's vehicle at Hyde's valet stand. We know! In the clip, Piven quickly realizes that he's seated in the wrong Range Rover (Hollywood tip: merely telling a parking attendant "to bring around the Range Rover" is a tragically vague instruction likely to result in such an embarassing snafu), barely avoids a half-hearted hug-it-out from the car's rightful, too-handsy owner, and is eventually placed in his own SUV, which even the most addled valet should have been able to identify in the first place by its telltale, hood-mounted Emmy statuette and vanity PIVWEELZ plates. We're sure the proprieters of Hyde will take the necessary steps to ensure that such a mortifying error never happens again.

With NBC being pulled from all sides over the crucifixion number in their upcoming broadcast of Madonna's Confessions Tour—the Catholic League on one side urging the network not to air what they interpret to be a reckless act of blasphemy, the Official Madonna Fan Club on the other insisting the entire disco-torture sequence would fall apart without it—Madonna has finally spoken out on her exact intentions: