· More fun from CBS: 60 Minutes Wednesday is kicked to the programming curb, but Moonves denies that Memogate had anything to do with it, but allows, "There's just something that bugs me about Dan Rather's face. It's all square and stuff." [Variety]
· John Woo will direct Chow Yun Fat in the "next generation action action game" Stranglehold. Things exploding stylishly and broken English to follow. [THR]
· In the unexpected, but potentially genius, casting move of the season, Kelsey Grammer will play Beast in X-Men 3. [Variety]
· Beware, the streets will be teeming with virgins carrying lightsabers: More than 80% of tonight's Star Wars post-midnight showings are already sold out. [Variety]
· Husband/wife team Laurie MacDonald and Walter Parkes leave their positions as co-heads of DreamWorks Pictures for the obligatory "shingle" gig. Curiously empty offices to follow. [Variety]

· This apparently merits a red font and a Breaking News tag: DreamWorks unveils plans for the animated caveman flick Crood Awakening at Cannes, written by John Cleese. [Variety]
· Disney reports a 30-percent increase in its second quarter profits, temporarily making the uninspired choice of Robert Iger as its next CEO not look like a mistake. [THR]
· Paramount will foot the bill for Freedom Writers, which we will dismissively describe as Dangerous Minds with Hilary Swank, even if it only bears a passing resemblance to the earlier film. We're jerks that way. [Variety]
· ABC, CBS, and Fox seesaw back in forth in last night's war for viewers, but Fox ultimately wins the night on the power of the simmer sexual tension between Paula Abdul and Bo Bice. [THR]
· Meet the Parents of the Focker director Jay Roach picks up his Everyman shingle and moves it from Fox to Universal, who will get first crack at his dog-flushing comedic endeavors for the near future. [Variety]

· "Reports of B.O. death greatly exaggerated": If you subtract The Passion of the Christ from last year's box office take, this year's business doesn't look nearly as shitty. [Variety]
· Disappointing Shrek 2 DVD sales in the first quarter send DreamWorks stock plummeting. Did the public finally decide it's had enough ogre cock shoved down its throat over the last year? [THR]
· Bob and Harvey Weinstein snap up Transamerica, Felicity Huffman's tranny flick, for their Weinstein Co. [Variety]
· ShitergyWatch: MTV and Nickelodeon sign Outkast's Andre 3000 to produce films and TV shows for their Viacom fiefdoms. [THR]
· And because Wednesday is Viacom day, VH1 president Christina Norman will take over MTV, while MTV VP moves over to run VH1. Got it? Neither do we. [Variety]

· Details/rumors about the new-look, Weinstein-free, Disneyfied Miramax are leaking out: It will have an annual budget of $350 million, release only 6-10 films a year, get cut down to about 50 employees, keep its HQ in NY, and whoever gets to lead the studio will be Disney Studios chairman Dick Cook's bitch. Sounds like a party! [Variety]
· Kate Winslet is in talks to star in New Line's adaptation of Tom Perrotta's novel Little Children, and will play a suburban mom who boinks a stay-at-home dad. You know, like Desperate Housewives, but without the stars tearing out each other's hair between takes. [THR]
· The New Paramount™ takes a page from the Sherry Lansing recycling playbook, signing up Mummy/Van Helsing hack Steven Sommers to remake When Worlds Collide, the big-object-crashes-into-Earth classic that's already inspired asteroids-fucking-shit-up flicks like Deep Impact and Armageddon. But unlike the old, cheap Paramount guard, Brad Grey's team will throw a lot of money at the rehash. [Variety]
· UPN gives "ratings-challenged" Veronica Mars an early pick-up; ABC keeps Grey's Anatomy safe behind its Desperate Housewives lead-in, bumping the already-renewed Boston Legal into another timeslot that will inevitably lack the same ratings protection. [THR]
· DreamWorks enables Beyonce's acting ambitions, negotiating with her to star in the adaptation of Dreamgirls. [Variety]

· Chairman Kevin Martin "softens" the FCC's stance on regulating cable TV by issuing a darling ultimatum: Police yourself and we won't have to do it for you. Government regulation has rarely felt so warm and fuzzy! It's like an Ugg boot on the windpipe! [Variety]
· Drew Barrymore's Flower Films drops Columbia Pictures like Tom Green once his career went cold, finding a new home at Warner Brothers. [THR]
· Spike Lee realizes that he probably needs Denzel Washington to make a movie that isn't universally hated, casts him to star in Inside Man. [Variety]
· Michael Bay may direct the Stephen Spielberg-produced live-action Transformers movie for DreamWorks and Paramount. A hack director and a beloved children's cartoon from the 80's—this might be crazy enough to work! The project provides ample opportunities to things to needlessly explode. [Variety]
·The resurgent ABC picks up Alias, Lost, Boston Legal and Desperate Housewives for next season. Like they weren't going to pick up Housewives, even if the cast has gone batshit insane? [THR]

· Hugh Jackman signs on for the film adaptation of the C.P. Taylor play, Good, and will play a professor in 1930's Germany who gets "caught up in the fervor of nationalism." We're going to assume that's a euphemism for "getting all Nazi'd up." [Variety]
· DreamWorks and Imagine hire the writers of Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle for the Eddie Murphy vehicle Johnny Blaze. The writing duo will spend the next two months trying to rediscover the exact combination of psychotropic drugs and junk food that birthed their first hit. [Variety]
· FilmEngine purges the original cast of the Butterfly Effect and will go ahead with the development of a Kutcher-less sequel. Wilmer Valderrama, your moment has finally arrived. [Variety]
· And in other ridiculous sequel news, New Line has picked up a couple of disposable actors for Final Destination 3. Before you laugh, this one features an amusement park accident. Dude—killer Ferris wheels! [THR]
· Reason for rejoicing; Bravo orders a second season of Project Runway. [Variety]
· Everyone gets a poker project! Janeane Garafalo to star in the NBC poker comedy pilot All In. [THR]

The LAW's Nikki Finke reports that Vanity Fair editor/Hollywood snuggle-buddy Graydon Carter is jabbing a salad fork in the back of his entertainment industry buddies on the eve of his splashy Oscar party:

Today's NY Times reviews the James B. Stewart tell-all DisneyWars, a collection of sordid, family-unfriendly tales from the underbelly of the Magic Kingdom during Michael Eisner's dysfunctional reign. Luckily for Stewart, Eisner's "exiles... have a tendency to wind up testifying in public about their former boss":

In his farewell to the NY Times on Sunday, former entertainment reporter Bernard Weinraub offered up a litany of his Hollywood sins. He admits to some initial starfucking (hey, wouldn't you ditch Billy Bob Thornton to squeeze a quote out of Cameron Diaz?), falling asleep while interviewing Jim Carrey (mortifying!), and personal shame over driving his crappy beater to meet rich studio types (doubly mortifying!). In one anecdote, Weinraub admits to falling for the estimable charms of Jeffrey Katzenberg, who predictably dropped him like a dead kitten once he finally abandoned the movie beat after his marriage to rising studio head Amy Pascal proved too complicated for the Times:

· In about three weeks, the home video rights for Alexander will probably sell for less than its soundtrack promo at Amoeba.
· Behold, another strange intersection of Jeffrey Katzenberg and the porn industry.
· We're almost ready to officially recognize the Curse of the Entertainment Weekly Must List
· If you haven't seen this by now, you haven't been properly utilizing the power of the interweb.
· It's a cliché to use this formulation, and we've never been afraid of beating a dead horse, so here goes: Slate's Movie Club is for pussies. Bloggers do it better at The Conversation
· Should we be offended that Brad will only talk about his life with the Japanese?
· Based on this one segment alone, it seems that there's no way that the new season of Ali G will be less than amazing.

A little birdie told us that DreamWorks Animation head Jeffrey Katzenberg requested a table at the party thrown by porn distributor Pure Play Media's party at the Hard Rock in Vegas last Thursday night, right in the thick of the AVN awards. Granted, there were a lot of "mainstream" entertainment types there, but we're not sure what the top executive of a family-friendly animation studio would do at a party thrown by the company that sells titles like Anal Surprise Party and Undressed and Oversexed. Maybe he was performing due diligence for a possible new direction for the Shrek franchise. Shrek 3: White Chicks Love Green Cock would be an instant smash hit.

· SAG celebrates the actorly arts by recognizing the casts of The Aviator, Sideways, Million Dollar Baby, Finding Neverland, and Ray with their award nominations. [THR]
· Shades of Wooderson? Matthew McConaughey signs on for the Scott Rudin project Failure to Launch, as a thirtysomething guy whose parents fix him up to get him out of their house. [THR]
· What the hell, cast everyone! Danny DeVito, Kim Basinger, Carla Gugino, Nick Cannon, Forest Whitaker, Jay Mohr, Kelsey Grammer, and Ray Liotta sign on (or will soon) for the Mark Rydell-directed indie drama Jump Shot. [Variety, sub req'd.]
· NBC wins Monday night with Medium, despite competition from the premiere of The Bachelorette and a second night of 24 doubleheaders. [THR]
· Bill Condon, now the musical go-to-guy after adapting Chicago, will follow up Kinsey by directing a movie version of the Broadway musical Dreamgirls for DreamWorks. [Variety]

· Rick Sands, the Miramax COO hardened by years of Harvey Weinstein's cat o' nine tails, assumes the title of president and CEO of DreamWorks. He'll report to David Geffen, whom we expect will issue a totally different kind of daily beating than the ones Sands grew accustomed to at The Max. [Variety, sub. req'd.]
· You hardly needed this told to you: Shrek 2 was the highest selling home video title in 2004. DreamWorks Animation's Jeffrey Katzenberg can now flush entire stacks of hundred dollar bills down the toilet, whereas before he had to peel them off one by one. [THR]
· Just because there's nothing to do in the first week of the year but count the piles of money: Sony wins the year in North American box office thanks to Spider-man 2, while Warner Bros. takes the international box office crown [THR, Variety]
· Paramount execs were taken by surprise by the stories that Brad Grey has been anointed as the next studio head, feeling they weren't consulted. Hmm, maybe they weren't told because they're all about to get fired? [Variety]
· Jerry Bruckheimer gets two drama pilot pickups, including E-Ring for NBC, a supposed West Wing in the Pentagon. Maybe it's time he gets his own channel. Jerry's Steaming Pile of Derivative Shit TV has kind of a nice sound to it. [THR]

· The O.C.'s Mischa Barton is in negotiations to star in Dino de Laurentiis period drama The Decameron, based on the 14th century literary classic that no one within a 300-mile radius of Los Angeles has ever heard of. [THR]
· Adam Sandler's proves his Happy Madison Productions exists solely to keep his underemployed friends in mortgage payments, producing Bench Warmers for Rob Schneider and David Spade. Make up your own idea for a logline, you'll probably get it in fewer than three tries. [Variety, sub. req'd.]
· In a move we're sure has NOTHING to do with Pixar's Cars move, DreamWorks pushes Shrek 3 to 2007. Why not just hold it until the Apocalypse, Katzenberg? It's a great time for opening family fare. [THR]
· Wayne Brady and Frasier scribe Saldin Patterson set up a legal comedy at NBC. Suicide, cutting, and vomiting to follow this item. Not in that order. [THR]
· DreamWorks renews its deal with Ben Stiller's Red Hour production company, banking that it will get more DodgeBall than Duplex. [Variety]