With intoxicated, faded stars like Daniel Baldwin and Haley Joel Osment recently hogging all the celebrity DUI news, we'd begun to lose hope that we'd ever see a $20-million-per-picture-quality name on the police blotter again. But like any good savior, Mel Gibson ignored our lack of faith and came through for us during a crisis of belief by throwing down a few too many last night and tearing around Malibu at "excessively fast speed," a boozy joy ride that earned him a misdemeanor charge and a $5,000 bond. Thank you, Mel. It's just nice to know that we still have someone we can believe in when we are beset on all sides by lesser Baldwins and former child actors.

PrivacyWatch celebrity sightings are submitted by our readers. Send yours to tips[AT]defamer.com (please put "sighting" or "PrivacyWatch" in the subject line) and let everyone know about the time you saw Ed Harris weather the indignity of having to tell the airport limo driver holding the "E. Harris" sign that he's the guy.

Time again to pause and listen to the celestial trumpet blasts accompanying our weekly expression of love for this week's sponsors, who are trailed everywhere by a retinue of adorable cherubs. If you'd like to advertise on Defamer and receive the Lord's blessing for your movie, automobile, or flavored premium vodka, see this page.

• The Lance Bass DVD Collection [DVD NewsRoom]

ICM acquisition of BWCS is called a "perfect" fit, especially once they get rid of all those superfluous agents that might that fit a little too tight for comfort. [Variety, THR]
CBS will cough up the $550,000 indecency fine for showing Janet Jackson's nipple at the Super Bowl, but only because they have to pay the penalty to fight the ruling in court. [THR]
The WGA and America's Next Top Model writers continue to strike outside the show's offices, while The CW continues to dodge their unionization request by telling the strikers to kill a few months talking to the National Labor Relations Board. [Variety]
· Ed Helms will reunite with Daily Show buddy Steve Carell in a recurring role on The Office. [THR]
ABC's American Idol knockoff The One pulls such amazingly low ratings that's it's canceled a mere week after its anemic debut. We'd like to think this means that viewers are tired of AI clones, but we know that seven more series like this will probably rise to take its place. [Variety]

Today's chatter around the agency blood-coolers is that yesterday's announced ICM purchase of Broder Webb Chervin Silbermann has already resulted in the first wave of redundant heads rolling down Wilshire Boulevard. We've heard that a large chunk of the ICM TV department has already been hacked out to make room for the BWCS crew, with a (so far unconfirmed) layoff roll call so far of Scott Arnovitz, Nancy Etz, Tanya Lopez, Patty Detroit, Steve Simons, Babette Perry, Stacey Lubliner, Jill Gillett, and Dan Norton, if you must have the names being circulated around. And as long as we're spreading unconfirmed rumors, we're told executions are being conducted by e-mail, a classy, warm touch. Aren't mergers fun? Updates, confirmations, and other tales of downsizing woe as they become available...

There are just so many times an actor can be directed to "pretend the dangling, green tennis ball is a fearsome Dragonunicorncyclops lunging at you!" before he starts to feel a little underchallenged in his craft. It should come as no surprise, then, that Daniel Radcliffe, the 17-year-old who plays Harry Potter, has decided to take on the lead role in Equus, a "serious" play on London's West End, which, from the sounds of it, will offer plenty of opportunities to stretch his instrument:

The Smoking Gun has obtained a letter from Morgan Creek CEO James G. Robinson to "dehydrated" star Lindsay Lohan, in which the exasperated producer opens up a can of mind-blowing whoop-ass on Lohan for her antics on the set of George Rule. The letter, hand-delivered to Lohan HQ at the Chateau Marmont, essentially calls bullshit on the actress's "bogus excuses" for skipping out on work ("heat exhaustion" and "not feeling well" no longer fly at The Creek), and threatens that the company will "pursu[e] full monetary damages" the next time she pulls a no-show or any other shenanigans related to her "ongoing all night heavy partying." Well, damn. When he puts it like that, a little harmless partying that results in missed work days, production delays, and the occasional hospital visit sounds so, like, serious and junk.

The internet-enabled, reptile-riddled thrill ride of Snakes on a Plane buzz finally touches down on the runway of mainstream pop culture inevitability with this week's Entertainment Weekly cover story, featuring a greatest hits collection boasting all the "People either want to see that, or they don't," and "I've had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane!" standards everyone sporting a $3,900 necklace have been humming to themselves over the past year. While we wait patiently for the coming In Touch Weekly spread about how Samuel L. Jackson carefully coordinated his diamond stud earrings with the collection of serpents featured in a particular scene, here are some highlights from the EW piece:

We thought we'd be able to get out of our system all of the "absurd Hollywood life imitates semisatirical Hollywood art" observations regarding record-setting fake Entourage blockbuster Aquaman when The WB decided to make a pilot revolving around the second-tier, somewhat super-powered (Happy when wet! Above-average swimmer!) comic book hero. But then that Aquaman pilot became the fastest selling show on iTunes, some studio executives started getting crazy ideas about how the public obviously has an appetite for a character who spends him time chatting with trout, and we have this, as reported in today's LAT:

THR reports that ICM is finally throwing around some of the cash in its "$100 million war chest," swallowing up the smaller Broder Webb Chervin Silbermann shark-tank after five months of super-secret negotiations. The deal isn't exactly as sexy as the ICM-Endeavor or Endeavor-UTA rumors that were kicking around seemingly forever, but it should given the industry a small measure of relief from the blue balls it's been experiencing from months of chatter about talent agency mergers. Think of it as the clumsy handjob you settle for after no amount of whining gets you the oral you'd much prefer. Hey, dirty business like this demands dirty metaphors.

· MOCA's Art Talks might sound self-explanatory, but we know you're tired: Go to MOCA, hear museum folk talk about art. [via Cheapskatin' LA]
· The Drkrm Gallery presents Beefcake Babylon: The Iconography of Sword and Sandal Epics, with original posters and memorabilia from the gladiator films that accelerated your sexual awakening and inspired your sometimes offputting tendency to yell "I am Spartacus!" while climaxing.
· Music round-up: Sleepy Jackson do an in-store session at Amoeba Music in Hollywood (for free, duh); Hawthorne Heights at Troubadour; Hell Ya! Night at the Echo with Audrye Sessions, Polus, and Glacier Hiking.

Andrew Lloyd Webber, the famed British musical theater composer who gave the world Cats and Phantom of the Opera —and will pay dearly for it in the hereafter—was all atwitter when Scarlett Johansson showed interest in playing the lead role of Maria in a London revival of The Sound of Music he was producing. It promised to be a spectacular production, full of Webberian flourishes like actual-size spinning mountaintops and real Nazis, but Johansson ultimately decided to pull out, sending the sour composer stomping off to The Times to complain about her "people" and "demands":

The second installment of Defamer PartyWatch brings us to ground zero of many an inter-starlet, deck-chair-flinging, tabloid-baiting incident: poolside at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, for a reception celebrating the premiere of music video director Marc Webb's short film, L.A. Suite. Staff photoslave Amy Rodrigue was again on hand to capture the scene, using the potent combination of her keen eye for composition and keen nose for free alcohol fumes to find people drunk enough not to notice they're being photographed for Defamer. (Should you care to have your party or event's guests photographed and preserved for all time on the blogowebosphere, you know where to send the invites: tips@defamer.com.) But enough introduction—images of those significantly more fabulous and less housebound than your editors follow after the jump:

No matter how hard we try, we just can't dodge stories about how some of our sweltering city's most celebrated citizens are beating the botulinum-incinerating heat. An operative sends in this report of another notorious partier seeking the air-conditioned safety of a local Starbucks before her accessory-dog burst into flames:

The heat may wilt crops, fell cattle, and stack bodies two to a gurney, but still Lindsay Lohan parties on. This really isn't going to help her get past the idea that she's indestructible.

Always eager to rise to the challenges of the incredibly competitive gossip rag marketplace, Us Weekly attempts to get a leg up on People by preparing for the very real possibility that our first look at Suri Cruise won't arrive for 20 years, hiring a forensic imaging specialist to visualize what the suspiciously unseen infant may look like two decades hence. Unsurprisingly, the magazine's "expert" subscribes to a more optimistic vision of the future than we do; in our estimation, the already 50-foot-tall baby will have matured to a full 200 feet by the time she exits her teens, and will live in a airport hangar-sized bunker that long-suffering father Tom has built beneath his compound. (She will, however, be just as hot as she appears in Us Weekly's mock-up, due to the quality of the DNA selected by Cruise's talented team of geneticists before their giantism-inducing mishap.)

There was a moment during Britney Spears' Dateline NBC interview when the singer, in the midst of rhapsodizing about her profound love for housecleaning and laundry, leaned into Matt Lauer and shared, "Yes, I have a maid that comes once a week, but she slacks a little bit." Now, another household staff member, a pool boy with musical aspirations, says he has also fallen victim to Frau Spears' exacting standards:

We really hate to seem obsessive about this Lindsay Lohan "dehydration" business, but a good, solid Lohan collapse-and-emergency-hospitalization really only happens every six months or so, and thus we have to savor it knowing we might have to wait until winter for the next episode. In the interest of providing a total accounting of Lohan's whereabouts over the pre- and post-dehydration periods, paparazzi agency x17 has pieced together the swoon-prone actress' recent schedule:

Now that Angelina Jolie's getting back in the acting game, Brad Pitt knows he better fill up his calendar so that he's not left home watching the kids. Pitt will star in David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button after he wraps up his time pallin' around with the Cloonster on Ocean's Thirteen, then may move on to Universal's State of Play. [Variety]
Imagine's Brian Grazer will produce the family comedy Mr. Machine with Napoleon Dynamite and his brothers for Universal, a project described as "a throwback to the family comedies of the 1980s," and which "revolves around three brainy slackers who build a robot that wants to take over the world." [THR]
Hilary Swank Out Of Ideas: Oscar double-fister Swank will star in a remake of the French thriller Labyrinth, playing yet another cinematic crazy person who might know something about a serial killer. [Variety]
· Fox simultaneously licenses every episode of Arrested Development to MSN, HDNet, and G4, proving they are willing to embrace every AD-related opportunity short of actually producing new episodes. [THR]
· A big high-five to our friends at TVGasm, whose Chenbot mugs are a big hit with automaton Big Brother host Julie Chen and sugar daddy/boss Les Moonves. Another fun fact: Chen calls him "Leslie." [Variety]