Please put down your pencils and turn in your bluebooks; if you don't know the answer to this week's Blind Item Guessing Game, no hastily scrawled, last-minute guess can save you. But before we get to your responses, indulge in another quickie with One Quelle Surprise Blind Vice:
Imagine a place so tiny and densely packed with scene-whores, celebrities, and assorted industry VIP types that not even light (or an agent who's suddenly run out of coke and needs to call his connection before the mactress he's keeping high gets tired of him) can escape. If you can picture such a black hole of pure Hollywood clusterfuckery, you have a pretty good handle on the scene at Hyde. Because we know there is little in this world more satisfying than knowing who you weren't hanging out with last night behind the velvet rope, enjoy these reports of who turned up at Hyde last night, according to a pair of operatives:
It's been fascinating (to us, at least) to watch the paparazzi/glossy industrial complex track Katie Holmes' every public movement since her trip to perpetual fiance/billion-year enslaver Tom Cruise's Telluride home the last week or so, a jaunt that did absolutely nothing to quiet speculation that Suri Cruise was ever more than a baby unicorn for the tabloid age or a beachball lashed to the onetime actress's midsection. The electronic homing device that paparazzi agency X17 slipped into well-known caffeine addict Holmes' coffee allowed their photographers to locate the peripatetic enigma-incubator on her Monday return to L.A., as they follow up the weekend's possible stroller sighting with some pictures of Holmes fleeing to the only place in the city where she truly feels safe, Barney's New York. The site furthermore passes along a rumor that the trip to her Retail Fortress of Solitude was motivated by an upsetting order that she hire a team of Scientology-approved nannies to tend to the still-unseen Suri, a bout of defiance we're sure she abandoned when she realized that she probably shouldn't lose any sleep over who pretends to babysit her imaginary offspring, despite how real it all feels sometimes.
Project Runway 3 contestant Keith Michael, whom internet sleuths deduced had copied several of his portfolio designs from existing collections, responded to the growing controversy by sending a note to Blogging Project Runway, who assure us of its authenticity. The short message contains a denial of any wrongdoing, and concludes with a hard-to-interpret assessment of the judges' qualifications. An excerpt:
· Superman Returns finds a record that Pirates hasn't yet claimed, winning the one-day, one-venue Chinese box office prize for hauling in $19,360 at a Shanghai Imax theater. [Variety]
Spike Lee signs an exclusive deal to develop a one-hour drama for NBC, prompting an NBC Universal TV Studio exec to gush, "And what's really exciting is to see his enthusiasm for television. He's already come in with so many powerful ideas," which in turn prompts us to wonder if his movie career's a little slow at the moment. [THR]
· Scarlett Johansson finally chews through her restraints in Woody Allen's dungeon, slipping through the wizened auteur's clutches to star in The Other Boleyn Girl for another director. [Variety]
In a much-needed triumph of tasteful corporate branding over tradition, the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen is renamed the HBO Comedy Festival. [THR]
The CW will begin its life as a network with a couple of days of reruns, giving slow viewers a chance to figure out where their favorite WB or UPN shows now live. [Variety]
Wherein we invite our readers to risk the loss of multiple digits by plunging their hands into the piranha-infested aquarium stocked by humpy E! gossip-Neptune Ted Casablanca, hoping to emerge grasping the solution to his weekly blind item. This morning, Ted weaves a tale of a gay husband (hmm. gay husbands seem to be going around today!) who finally shared his secret sodomy hobby with his willfully oblivious wife. Spritz yourself with the alluring scent of One Quelle Surprise Blind Vice:
As if she hasn't gone through enough already, embattled talk show casualty Star Jones may soon find herself having to part with a sizable portion of her earnings (and shoe collection), as MediaTakeOut.com is reporting that husband Al Reynolds was spotted slinking into the offices of a prominent New York divorce attorney:
Things got a little tense at a TCA panel for The CW's fall schedule yesterday afternoon when a reporter, obviously still disoriented by the network's media-distracting visual assault, violated a sacrosanct rule of the press tour: While a show's star is politely dodging questions about her issues with how her character had been written recently, you do not ask her new showrunner about the time he left his wife to write a play about how badly he wanted to copulate with Heidi Klum. Reports the LAT:
Carefully worded publicist protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, it would appear that Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan are one "accidentally" spilled poolside vodkatini from scooping out each other's eyes with expensively manicured nails and some choice weave-yanking, cankle-biting savagery. A Defamer operative had a chance encounter with The Character That Paris Hilton Plays in Malibu this weekend that suggests that the Firecrotch Feud is still very much in play
· "After something like 'Mallrats' or 'Jersey Girl,' the expectations are in the toilet. People are like, 'He's over, he's done.' So it's easier to be, like, 'Ta-da, I'm not.' It's a much more comfortable place to work from. When you have an escalating career, and every time you have to outdo yourself, I couldn't handle that kind of pressure. But having to outdo 'Jersey Girl'? Not very difficult." Kevin Smith talks a good game to the LAT about the liberation of diminished expectations and his refusal to test his creative limits, but we bet right after the interview was over, he went home, banged his hot wife, and then rolled around in the piles of cash he's made from trotting out Silent Bob every couple of years.
· Brad Pitt: Still not bored with fatherhood after six weeks. Give him time.
· Bluth fans, rejoice: AD reruns are coming to you in HD. Oh, you don't have HD? Then feel free to buy the DVDs.
· Amazingly, a shared interest in eyeliner, lacy underthings, and being in front of the camera whenever possible was not enough to keep Carmen Electra and Dave Navarro together forever.
· Paris Hilton finds skinny bitches who are not Paris Hilton to be "gross."
We feel dirty and used for even wanting to get to the bottom of what is obviously yet another viral advertising ploy because viral advertising makes us so very, very tired, but a reader alerted us to the appearance of a "mysterious" billboard on the corner of Sunset and Roxbury nearly identical to the one pictured, which is currently annoying the shit out of our NY-based siblings at Gawker. Boi From Troy has a blurry photo of our local version, and a commenter there additionally points out the totally expected fake-blog component of whatever it is that "Emily" and "Steven" are trying to sell us. Let us know what it's all about so we can launch an immediate, punitive boycott—unless, of course, a surprise twist reveals its connection to Snakes on a Plane, in which case we will succumb to our blogger's mandate to fall prostrate before it, and perhaps even post a YouTube video in which we sing clever songs about its virtue.
Today at the TCA press tour, officials from broadcast TV abomination The CW took a novel approach to promoting their new network: paralyzing the press by covering nearly every available surface with a shade of green so eye-popping that visually overstimulated reporters would be unable to discuss anything else. Reports the LAT:
BoingBoing directs us to a previously unseen 1999 video commissioned by Al Gore's presidential campaign and directed by none other than Being John Malkovich and Adaptation director Spike Jonze. (It was first made available in the debut issue of Wholphin DVD magazine.) Dispensing with his typical, whimsical visual style, Jonze created a fairly straightforward, day-in-the-life diary, painting a nuanced portrait of a very animated and non-robotic candidate. The World's Fair blog goes so far as to wonder if its release would have netted him the "precious few votes needed to win that election," though the scene in the third act in which Gore gets high on orchid dust and trips out to his own feet on a hotel room bed may have ultimately rendered the candidate just a little too "human" for his image-makers' tastes.
Oprah Winfrey, the patron saint of Vaguely Expounded Self-Actualization Techniques, felt the need to clarify once and for all the nature of her extremely cozy relationship to Oprah's Best Friend&trade, Gayle King. The two have long been rumored to be lesbian lovers, with Winfrey's longtime beau Stedman standing in as nothing more than her gender-reversed beard. In the August issue of O, The Oprah Magazine, Oprah explains the vast chasm of difference between calling someone "girlfriend," and...uh...calling someone "girlfriend."
· The Academy's "Great to be Nominated" screening series, which spotlights movies that received the most Oscar nominations without winning the Big One, features 1970's Airport at their Samuel Goldwyn Theater. Actress Jacqueline Bisset is scheduled to attend if she doesn't come up with something more important to do.
· Melanie Chartoff, Laraine Newman, Ann Randolph, and Terrie Silverman get together for an "evening of comedy and stories" to benefit the Women's Clinic and Family Counseling Center. Tickets are $100, but can you put a price on helping people? We suppose you can if you don't have a hundred bucks.
· Music round-up: Nicolai Dunger at the Echo; The Rakes at the Troubadour; Midnight Movies at Spaceland.
Promos for upcoming episodes of Project Runway hint at a controversy to come, in which Tim Gunn alludes to a crime of fashion so unforgivable that it leads to the unprecedented expulsion of a contestant from the series. It's precisely the kind of mystery best suited for the communal detective work of the internets: A tip on Television Without Pity accusing last week's challenge winner Keith Michael of having stolen several designs in his audition portfolio led commenters of bulletin board the Fashion Spot to do some digging. Amazingly, what emerged was that the thieving designer was also a lazy one: Michael's sketches are almost exact copies of the original runway photos lifted off fashion sites such as Style.com and Elle.com.
This announcement will probably be of interest to only a few of you, but over the weekend, Gawker Media Blog Overlord Nick Denton chained our tech team to a series of radiators and beat them mercilessly (he's partial to the cat-o'-nine-tails, if you must know) until he secured a promise that they'd make some improvements on the technology that makes this site work. The upgrades are already in place, but in the highly unlikely event that you encounter a bug in the site's layout, or operability, or whatever (example of one you don't need to tell us about: the comment links on the front page currently aren't reflecting if someone has left one or not), please do us a favor by e-mailing a report on the bug to tips@defamer.com, including information about your OS and browser versions, and if you're the kind who saves stray animals and doesn't scald your assistant with coffee for dropping calls, a screenshot of the fuck-up. Thank you in advance for performing free labor on our behalf, as per usual.
· Warner Bros. TV and Paramount have thrown giant piles of cash at M:i:III director/Lost creator JJ Abram to lock up his Bad Robot production company for TV and film development deals, respectively. Click through to the link at the end of this sentence to hear the sound of various WB and Paramount big-shots clapping themselves on the back for their amazing, visionary ability to write enormous checks. [Variety]
· Hoping to capitalize on the success of their hit Kyra Sedgwick series The Closer, TNT is in talks with Holly Hunter to go basic-cable slumming in the TNT pilot Grace, sort of a combination between Touched by an Angel and, um, The Closer. Hey, no one ever said there's a correlation between original thought and Nielsen ratings. [THR]
· Pirates 2 takes the ten-day box office record, but fails to set the mark for the biggest second weekend record, only notching a third-place finish in that category. You may now commence vomiting in shock at this disappointing shortfall. [Variety]
· Hold that reverse peristalsis! Pirates 2 rolls up $58 million this weekend at the international box office. [THR]
CBS's Nina Tassler admits that Grey's Anatomy's move to Thursdays may "ding" CSI, is immediately called into boss Les Moonves' office to have the soles of her feet beaten with a bamboo rod for showing even the slightest sign of weakness. [Variety]
Given the feud supposedly raging between Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg over the actor's appropriation of the War of the Worlds press tour as a pro-Scientology, anti-psychiatry infomercial (see this Page Six item citing an upcoming New Yorker article that apparently confirms the bad blood), Cruise's surprise appearance at the Chicago International Film Festival's ceremony to present the directing legend with a lifetime achievement award could have been a deeply uncomfortable moment; indeed, Spielberg's admitted speechlessness at Cruise's materialization on stage can be read as either pleasant surprise or mute horror at seeing his onetime star stroll on stage. as CBS2Chicago.com reports:
