Some days we wonder who Gigi Levangie Grazer is. Besides the sassy lass with great hair. Besides the wife of mega-producer Brian Grazer. Besides the writer of senseless soapy chicky-chick books. Who is she—on the inside?
· Warner Bros. is in talks with American Ferrara, Blake Lively, Amber Tamblyn and Alexis Bledel to reprise their roles in a much-clamored for sequel to The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, which will finally provide some answers to the many unanswered, peripatetic-jeans-related questions posed by the original. [Variety]
· But wait! Scandal! THR says that Ferrara, whose Ugly Betty stardom has made her outgrow her humble, traveling pants beginnings, is being forced back into the project by a sequel option. [THR]
· Warner Bros. buys the feature remake rights to the documentary Our Brand Is Crisis, about how James Carville's political consulting firm helped changed the course of the 2002 Bolivian presidential election, for George Clooney's Smoke House shingle to produce as one of the smallish directing and/or starring vehicles in which the actor likes to dabble between Ocean's 11 sequels. [Variety]
· ABC wins Sunday night despite Desperate Housewives hitting an all-time viewership low. Time to kill off Eva Longoria during sweeps? Probably couldn't hurt! [THR]
· Lindsay Lohan loses her job in the Dylan Thomas biopic The Best Time of Our Lives to Sienna Miller, whose inevitable tabloid misadventures will probably be somewhat less damaging to the production than Lohan's. [Variety]
· Apparently, The Departed's Best Picture win triggered a clause in all participants' contracts mandating that all of their subsequent movie projects must involve at least two Departed alumni, as Leonardo DiCaprio and screenwriter William Monahan form yet another "reunion" for the adaptation of the novel Body of Lies for Warner Bros. [Variety]
· Emboldened by the Easter holiday, Jesus finally serves a cold dish of revenge to Desperate Housewives for its second-season "slutty nun fight" episode, sending the series to its lowest ratings in its three-year history. [THR]
· Harrison Ford will sneak in a stint protecting America from illegal immigrants in the Weinstein Co.'s Crossing Over before reporting for duty this summer as cinema's most beloved, swashbuckling sexagenarian archaeologist. [Variety]
· Jared Padalecki will play the Painter of Light™ himself in Lionsgate's groundbreaking adaptation of Thomas Kinkade's blockbuster "Christmas Cottage" painting. [THR]
· 300 topples Mr. Bean at the foreign box office on its way to a $32 million weekend, boosting the tale of a crazed Persian emperor's ill-fated campaign to give every last soldier in Greece an erotic shoulder-massage to a $367 worldwide gross. [Variety]
Getting the drop on famous people and breaking potentially upsetting news to capture their shocked reactions is a popular bloodsport with local celeb-stalking news crews, but Extra failed to put any points on the Gotcha! scoreboard by waylaying Eva Longoria about her former co-star's recently announced trip to rehab. Even after being gently reminded that Metcalfe was the guy who both provided her expert lawn care and sexually serviced her for 22 episodes, she merely shrugged, offered a polite, "No, I'm sure I don't know who that is," then continued in a whisper, "you know, I might 'go to rehab' too once the show's over and I need to get my name out there. Check back with me in couple of years and I'll get you the exclusive."
· Is it starting to feel like ABC's getting a little desperate to squeeze the life out of its hits? They've now signed up Housewives creator Marc Cherry to a four-year, eight-figure deal to stay with the show through its seventh season, during which the only remaining unexplored plotline will involve Eva Longoria and Teri Hatcher waking up to find themselves trapped in each other's bodies. [Variety]
· Today in theoretical WGA strike saber-rattling: A Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp. study says a strike, whether "real or de facto," would "not be good news for areas of Los Angeles County with exposure to the business." The LAEDC also recommends that studio executives who find themselves suddenly impoverished by a labor stoppage "burn piles of stockpiled scripts for warmth." [THR]
· The DreamWorks Obamamaia fund-raiser may have raised $1.3 million for Barack, Hollywood blood money the candidate's campaign has no intention of giving back, no matter how pissed off Hillary was by David Geffen's crack about the Lincoln Bedroom. [Variety]
· American Idol producers Nigel Lythgoe and Ken Warwick are tasked with trying to make the moribund Emmy telecast a little more exciting, a goal they hope to achieve by handing Paula Abdul a garbage bag full of prescription painkillers and then sending her out on stage as host and sole presenter. [THR]
· Rules of Engagement's early success following Two and a Half Men leads Var to postulate that audiences might be craving more formulaic, multicamera sitcom crap. [Variety]
Marcia Cross, heavy with double child, has been ordered to bed rest by her doctor, but try explaining that to millions of rabid Desperate Housewives fans who could care less about healthy prenatal development if it gets in the way of tying up the "Kyle McLachlan's ex-wife is moving down the block and Bree still doesn't have any idea!" loose-ends Season 3 has presented for her anal-retentive homemaker character. For producers, there was only one solution—bringing the party to Cross:
· A distribution of nominations according to studio puts Paramount Pictures at the head of the pack with 15, not including Paramount Vantage's 7 for Babel. You can bet the hugs were flying at Vantage today! [GoldDerby]
· If you caught a replay of the nomination announcements this morning (or, heavens forfend, actually woke up to watch them), then you probably caught an ethereal Jessica Biel's shimmering cascade of giggles as she twice had to read the words Borat: Cultural Learnings Of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. You then fell back to Earth with a thud when permanent grouch-face Matthew Perry approached the podium to cough up his list of nominees. [Reuters]
· Nominee quote orgy! The Gloater: "I'm just going to sit and bask in people's envy." -Justin Kirk. The Anhedonic: "Our film is really about enjoying the experience of life...and not getting caught up in the contest." -Jonathan Dayton, co-director, Little Miss Sunshine. The Liar: "It is a privilege to be mentioned in the same breath with actors like...Will Smith..." -Leonardo DiCaprio. [AP]
· Desperate Housewives creator Marc Cherry describes the typical writers' room post nomination announcement celebration: "I will probably toast my writing staff with Diet Coke and we'll spend about 10 minutes talking about it and then we'll just jump back into work," putting their celebration at roughly five times the duration of the one Teri Hatcher and Eva Longoria have planned for their nominated co-stars, Marcia Cross and Felicity Huffman. [AP]
THR explores the path that brought Desperate Housewives: The Game from its humble beginnings as a brainstorm by a Buena Vista interactive exec who thumbed through the company's annual investors' report and asked, "Now which members of the Disney family would be fun to blow away in a first-person shooter?" to a fully realized, immersive reality set on Wisteria Lane. The title's biggest cheerleader is Scott Sanford Tobis, a sometimes writer for the TV series hired to script the game, and who was immediately struck by the project's liberating lack of constraints. (Read: There was no Marc Cherry hovering over his laptop, snapping, "But Gabrielle would never say that!" before insisting he replace the exchange with a hilarious nun-punching sequence.) What's more, Tobis sees games as a viable prospect for TV writers who, not unlike the trend of feature directors working in TV, may want to expand their employment opportunities by slumming diversifying in another medium:
It's been a while since Desperate Housewives' haunted set has unleashed a Final Destination-style attack on one of the show's stars—not since April, to be exact, when a series of linked events beginning with the unsealing of a deli platter at the craft services table eventually led to shards of exploding lightbulb lodging themselves into Teri Hatcher's eyeball. But the possessed, bloodthirsty Universal backlot location seems to do its best work with Eva "Conked on the Head" Longoria, and has thus returned to its former muse. From an Extra press release:
We'd call Longoria's bold eschewal of post-Desperate Housewives television gigs a somewhat premature retirement announcement (she's probably got another year or two on Wisteria Lane), but we have a feeling that once Housewives' last episode wraps and her agent delicately offers her the choice of playing the "older love interest" on a midseason Freddie Prinze, Jr. sitcom or slowing starving to death in a series of houses of declining square footage in the Valley, she'll quickly rediscover her love for the medium.
· A scene from an upcoming Desperate Housewives in which Kyle MacLachlan goes down on Marcia Cross, "with explosive results," according to Variety, was distributed on YouTube. This angered ABC execs, who insist it wasn't an "official leak" intended to build buzz. We're starting to feel extremely nauseous at the moment. [Variety]
· What do Idi Amin, Diane Arbus, Truman Capote and John Lennon have in common—besides being invitees #2 through #5 to the ultimate dinner party/coke-fueled-orgy of our wildest fantasies? They're all the subject of movies at the Telluride Film Festival. [Variety]
· Fox is stumped, not knowing what possibly more than Emily Deschanel's terrific rack audiences could need to show up for their faltering forensics drama, Bones. [Variety]
· NBC swaps the Jeffrey Tambor/John Lithgow sitcom Twenty Good Years with 30 Rock, putting it in the 8:30 slot, because, Kevin Reilly explains, it makes for a "more compatible lead-in to 'The Biggest Loser'." Take from that what you will, Misters Tambor and Lithgow. [THR]
· CBS wins a Thursday night with mainly reruns of CSI and Without A Trace. One can only imagine how well the network would have done had those CSI staff dunderheads not blabbed about the exciting K-Fed surprise. [THR]
Whether merely by coincidence or some heavenly congruence orchestrated by the Celebrity Love Gods, the nuptials of movie star Nicole Kidman and TV star Marcia Cross gave the past few days the unofficial title of "Icy Redhead Dogged By Lesbian Rumors Marriage Weekend." By all media accounts, both events were well-attended, hugely joyous occasions: The Kidman-Urban reception featured guests Hugh Jackman, Fox potentate Rupert Murdoch, and Nicole's memorable arrival in a Rolls Royce with her proud father, who had been specially taxidermied for the occasion (see photo). Cross's wedding, meanwhile, was in San Gabriel, and was attended by her Desperate Housewives co-star Eva Longoria, who had a delightful evening of celebrating/screaming at caiter waiters to "clear faster." For easy reference, we refer you to USA Today's stat sheets on both affairs, which also act as a telling metric of fame: Kidman's report coming in at 437 words to Cross's 202.
We all know Eva Longoria is the hottest woman in the universe (at least according to Maxim magazine's inscrutable criteria), but beneath that bitsy, beautiful package lies a ferocious ugliness just waiting to jump out—particularly when she is required to pay for things. Who could forget her heartfelt holiday wishes to a Koo Koo Roo parking attendant who dared ask her for the required fee ("Jesus! It's Thanksgiving. Be nice. FUCK!"). Now comes this report from a Defamer operative about the Desperate Housewives actress, accompanied by Saved by the Bell star Mario Lopez, annoying the regulars and stiffing the friendly staff at a popular watering hole in Toluca Lake:
As brand names steadily creep into the plots of your favorite shows, TV writers are getting increasingly vocal about their trepidation in accepting these kind of embedded advertising dollars. Concerned that product placements can too easily come across as hacky, obvious commercials that jar viewers out of the story, a group of prominent showrunners, including Desperate Housewives' Marc Cherry, held a news conference to voice their disapproval at the growing trend:
Desperate Housewives' Eva Longoria continues to be the subject of an ongoing campaign by Maxim magazine to beatify the pint-sized Latina firecracker with the title of Her Babemost Excellency, Supreme Exalted Hottie Above All Others. Not satisfied merely to celebrate their 100th issue by coating the Nevada desert in her Godzilla-sized likeness, Longoria now crowns the magazine's annual "Hot 100" list for the second year in a row:
Teri Hatcher is determined to make her "I Was Molested!" media blitz book tour the most fun you'll ever have hearing about sexual abuse. She can swing the mood from haunted to hilarious to horny, sometimes within a single, run-on thought. Take for example her recent "everything goes" interview with Access Hollywood's Nancy O'Dell, where the painful subject of her molestation almost instantly clicks into an icky, in-depth discussion about her favorite body part:
Eva Longoria is confounded by the fact that her media coverage—for example, posing in a bikini for a 110-foot Maxim cover visible from space—has given the public the impression that she's some sort of a primetime soap-starring airhead. Promoting her upcoming supporting role in The Sentinal, she corrects the record on the massive intellect she has until now been keeping tucked away safely somewhere in her cleavage:
