Over at Slate, NPR's Kim Masters offers a fairly lengthy recounting of the many problems that plagued the set of Michael Mann's Miami Vice, such as a) its crazy, exacting director, b) disastrous weather events that threatened production (who could have seen that coming while filming in Miami during hurricane season?), and c) a shooting while on location in the Dominican Republic. The article's money shot is the revelation that the aforementioned gunplay convinced Jamie Foxx, the film's egomaniac, award-winning star, that his new Oscar-derived superpowers did not include the ability to deflect bullets with his bare abs—a realization that sent him fleeing for the safety of the United States and forced Mann to shoot an ending that could accommodate Foxx's diva-like refusal to be assassinated on foreign soil. Reports Masters:

For those of you who gazed in horror upon the gum-snapping octopod on Dateline NBC that appeared to have devoured Britney Spears, your fears/hopes are unfounded: According to her upcoming Harper's Bazaar interview (the one in which she continues her ongoing campaign to lead a normal life out of the eye of the press by posing naked and pregnant on the cover), Spears says she can hardly wait to regain her taut, serpent-charming midriff and go back on tour:

· D.J. Waldie talks about/scribbles a personal note to fans inside his book Where We Are Now: Notes From Los Angeles at Village Books in Pacific Palisades. In other book-discussing news, Harry Medved appears at the Barnes and Noble in Santa Monica to promote Hollywood Escapes: The Hollywood Guide to Southern California's Great Outdoors.
· Music round-up: Anya Marina at the Hotel Caf ; Dick Dale and Agent Orange at the Santa Monica Pier; Dashboard Confessional with Say Anything and Ben Lee at the Gibson Amphitheatre; Samantha Ronson at the Viper Room.
· The Mods & Rockers Film Festival, "a celebration of the entire rock 'n' roll film culture and the fresh attitudes that emerged from rock's primeval beginnings in 1956," opens tonight at the Egyptian. [via flavorpill]

As if having a name that immediately conjures up Santa Claus's twee, frostnipped nose wasn't adorable enough, recently deceased comedian Red Buttons once described himself as 'the only Yiddish leprechaun,' an image so delightful, it was highlighted in the above subhed from his CNN.com obit. We can only hope there are no disagreements among his surviving relatives over the pot o' gelt he left behind.

Yesterday, Us Weekly's blog teased the magazine's story on Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes' recent trip to Telluride, where Holmes revealed to a reporter that possibly nonexistent offspring Suri was "doing great!" [exuberance hers], a brief status update meant to reinforce the public's belief that the baby actually exists. The complete Us story provides some quotes from Telluride residents who claim to have seen (or know someone who claims to have seen) the possibly mythical creature that has captured a skeptical country's imagination:

Project Runway's third season premiered last night with yet another colorful assortment of fashion weirdos to delight and amaze us while torturing each other. (We particularly warmed to Malan, the performer/designer who, if the fashion thing doesn't pan out, has a long, illustrious career ahead of him playing really gay vampires and snooty maitre d's.) The models were assigned without much fanfare, however, and we can only hope future episodes will go back to subjecting them to the amusing, white-T-shirted-slave auctions of seasons past. According to the NY Daily News, one model lucky enough to make it to the final three (and thus revealing her identity is a SPOILER—you've been warned), found her good luck to be cut short when she found herself sporting the front end of a speeding bus:

About two hours ago, a cement truck overturned and slid off a road in the Hollywood Hills (map here, just because maps are fun), where it now dangles, threatening to crush several homes. We now take you to the scene of the incident, where the Defamer Special Correspondent on Holy Shit, There's A Teetering Cement Truck In My Backyard gives us an update on how this might affect the real estate values and/or exercising patterns of local celebrities:

At Tuesday's launch party at the Chateau Marmont penthouse for Variety editor Peter Bart's new book, Paramount's Brad Grey (pictured at right, standing on an apple box) demonstrates that if a studio head looks into an actress's eyes (played here by Nia Vardalos) and expresses seemingly sincere enthusiasm about her next project, she will not notice the hand slowly moving towards her breasts for a casual grope that will last for the duration of their encounter.

It seems every generation is cursed to its own iteration of the Black Dahlia nightmare: starry-eyed Midwestern girl steps off a bus with big hopes, but through a toxic combination of naivete and bad luck, falls victim in the worst possible way to the Hollywood dream machine. On February 16, 2003, "churchoing Michigan native" Kristi Johnson told her roommates that she was on her way to an audition; someone had approached her at Century City and promised her a role in the next James Bond movie. Her body was found 16 days later by hikers in a Hollywood Ravine, bound by shoelaces and covered with a sleeping bag. Police already had their prime suspect in custody:

· Thanks to Beverly Hills-fleeing agencies CAA and ICM and reemerging studio MGM, Hollywood has returned to Century City. But there goes the neighborhood already: Entertainment lawyers have descended to suck the life from he newly vital area. Anon, to Burbank, where the suits won't dare follow! [Variety]
· DreamWorks Animation takes advantage of the obscure federal subsidy for the bulk-casting of current and former SNL players in a movie, signing up Amy Poehler, Cheri Oteri, and Maya Rudolph for Shrek the Third. With the savings realized from the package deal, they've also secured the services of the hilarious Amy Sedaris. [THR]
· Media bigshots like Rupert Murdoch, Bob Iger, Sumner Redstone, Tom Freston, and Les Moonves gather at the annual Sun Valley Mogulpalooza, where they will spend their brief vacation whitewater rafting, competing in savage pool-based chickenfights (the Moonves-Redstone pairing is utterly unstoppable), and partaking of the always popular session of bow-hunting human prey. (Again, no one can touch Moonves' compound bow skills.) [Variety]
· Each time the European Union stymies the merger of the music divisions of international conglomerates, the baby Jesus cries. [THR]
· After two months of negotiations, House's Hugh Laurie boosts his per episode fee over $275,000, a modest recompense for his valiant efforts at selling the exact same "no one believes the diagnosis of the prickly, brilliant doctor, then he is proven correct" story week after week. [Variety]

At last year's TCA press tour, 1980s screen-acting eminence Steve Guttenberg thrilled some deeply bored TV-beat journalists by offering them some colorful copy (read: highly entertaining, though utterly batshit, ramblings) about the state of his career. Yesterday, perhaps sensing that a repeat performance of his now-trademarked brand of stream-of-consciousness insanity might earn him some more publicity, the actor unloaded with both addled barrels, giving a delighted Zap2it.com reporter enough white-hot crazy to melt his tape recorder. Thus spake The G t:

Long before she devoted much of her time to crisscrossing the world to feed individual grains of rice to famine-afflicted infants with a tweezer, and before she was occupied with the even more vital task of bringing to term the most genetically perfect child ever conceived, Angelina Jolie was an actress. Now that the Chosen One has been expelled from her blessed womb and can embark on her own global missions of mercy, Jolie is ready to once again ply her trade. Unsurprisingly, the role she's chosen for her return to the screen is a weightier one than last summer's fucking-and-fighting blockbuster with eventual impregnator/orphan molder Brad Pitt, which while a fine piece of work in the I-can't-decide-whether-to- rip-off-your-shirt-or-shoot-you-in-the-face genre, would hardly be an appropriate choice for the World's Most Socially Conscious Hollywood Citizen now. According to Variety, Jolie will play Mariane Pearl, the widow of kidnapped and cruelly executed journalist Daniel Pearl, and to keep her next career step in the family, partner Pitt's Plan B is producing. And in another family bonus, the project's likely location shoots in Pakistan should afford Jolie plenty of window-shopping time at the country's overflowing orphanages, where a suitable, race/gender/nationality-coordinated addition to her multicultural brood can easily be selected.

Those of you who tuned in to Comedy Central on Sunday night to get a look at the first installment of the three-part Chappelle's Show "Lost Episodes" and squealed with delight as Dave Chappelle drop-kicked a white baby (as we did, because we hate tiny honkies!) may be excited to discover that someone has leaked the second and third shows onto the internets. Blogger Jackson West (a sometime contributor to sister site Fleshbot) has links to the torrents if you can't wait two weeks to see the last of Chappelle's abandoned children, as well as an intimation by a source at Comedy Central that the network leaked the source disk for reasons (DVD promotion? A loathing of broadcast advertising income? ) that are inscrutable to us. "Enjoy yourself, bitches" indeed.

· Reason #11,343 To Love Hollywood Unconditionally: Even if you are possibly afflicted with a disease that will make you look a 14-year-old forever, Playmates will still fuck you if you're been in a hit movie or on a long-running TV series.
· Snakes on a Plane in the news double-feature: Mice on a Plane and, um, Snake on a Plane.
· We know that there's been much fretting about the possible devaluation of Miracle Baby photos, but the people at Break.com have lost their minds if they think someone couldn't sell a video of Suri for more than a measly $100K.
· Ex-Rocketboomer Amanda Congdon opens up to Time.com about her insecurity that people just loved her for her rack: "I feel like a lot of the reports over the past few days have been very sexist — just referring to my popularity as Amanda and her [male] fans. But it's not always just the guys who write to me. I'm not perfect, but I have a lot more to offer than my looks."

Mark Wahlberg, colorless star of the silver screen and Entourage's inspiration, was once just Marky Mark, a Calvin Klein underwear gigolo and hip-hop-lite star with big aspirations. A shopper at the Venice Beach Out of the Closet thrift store stumbled upon a VHS demo reel, which, aside from mispelling his name on the label (easily the error of the dubbing facility entrusted to make copies), appears to be a shoddily, self-assembled time capsule of the star's collected masterworks up to that time. It's now available to the highest bidder:

Breaking up with someone is always a delicately executed affair: You don't want to insult the dismissee by callously dropping a text message alerting them to their newly single status, but a romantic, candlelit dinner capped with the presentation of a cake iced to read "Happy Dumping" can quickly cross the line into overdoing-it territory. Thank heavens, then, for aging actresses with past reputations of being interminably difficult bitches, and the basic cable reality shows they tend to host. On Breaking Up With Shannen Doherty, you can now part ways with that special, dead weight in your life by having the one-time Aaron Spelling muse do it for you in front of an intimate audience composed of Oxygen network's viewership:

While Tom Cruise holes up in his compound and selfishly withholds all information about his alleged offspring from the world, Hollywood veteran and proud older dad Michael Douglas can't wait to let the world know about all the wonderful things his kid is up to:

· Outfest and the Ford Amphitheatre join film festival/film venue forces to kick off the Ford's outdoor screening series with a West Side Story sing-along. Hold on, what's gay about singing along to West Side Story?
· Hammer Conversations dips Jenny Shimizu chocolate into Giant Robot's Eric Nakamura's peanut butter at the Hammer and delights the crowd with the resulting tasty treat. Shimizu, you'll remember, is rightly famous for pulling off the near-impossible feat of having sex with Angelina Jolie.
· Music round-up: Warped Tour at Dodger Stadium; Blues Traveler at House of Blues; Jill Sobule at Largo; Jettson at Knitting Factory.

E! president Ted Harbert is a simple guy with simple desires: He merely wants peace between Nicole Richie and Paris Hilton so that they can actually appear on-screen together on their show without the intervention of editors, wants a buzzy scripted show for his hit-desolate schedule, and, most important of all, just wants his octogenarian mom to get on board with his vision for the network. Blogs TV Week from the TCAs, where TV executives pretend to tolerate the existence of the swarming media assigned to record their every word:

We at Defamer realize that once Hollywood-obsessed visitors on the loose in our fine city are done gaping at the celebrated names lining the Walk of Fame, measuring their appendages against those of the stars immortalized in the concrete in front of Grauman's Chinese Theatre (note to male tourists: avoid laying your genitals in Bruce Willis' infamous penis-imprint—you'll thank us later), and have escaped the Tickle Me Elmo who won't stop shoving them until they hand over five dollars for a Polaroid, they may be at a loss for further activities to fill the rest of their time here. Accordingly, we are happy to share an exciting opportunity offered by a pair of Craigslist-enabled entrepreneurs promising a one-of-a-kind experience for the adventure-hungry traveler: