In what will probably prove to be the only truly interesting thing that will emerge from the Toronto Film Festival, Sacha Baron Cohen arrived in character to the midnight premiere of Borat: Cultural Learnings from America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan last night on a rickety cart pulled by a quartet of the finest peasant women that Canadian background casting agencies have to offer, much to the delight of the assembled throng of fans. Their excitement was short lived, however, as a projector malfunction so severe that not even on-call technician Michael Moore could restore it to operability ended the screening about forty minutes in. Cohen, Moore, and producer Larry Charles did their best to appease the crowd with an impromptu Q & A, but once it became apparent that no amount of stalling would provide sufficient time to repair the projector, the film's star offered each member of the rowdy audience "five minutes for sex-making with my nice cart-pull prostitutes," a promise that resulted in a hefty hike in his already put-upon peasant day-players' rates and ruined the surprise he'd been saving for Borat's U.S. premiere.

· If you're not currently in Toronto, you probably don't care too much about what's expected to happen at the film festival, but here's an overview anyway. Fingers crossed that J. Lo and her husband (Enrique something, right?) sell their movie. [Variety]
David Letterman's romance with CBS snugglebunny Les Moonves is more torrid than ever, prompting Letterman to sign on for four more years at his newfound soulmate's network. [THR]
As glowingly press-released yesterday, Sony's Amy Pascal was given a new title and had her contract extended well through the release of Stealth III, the story of a Roomba who gains malevolent sentience when struck by a power surge from a faulty wall outlet. [Variety]
MIA onetime TV stars Dana Kim Delaney and Willie Garson get new gigs, keeping them out of SAG/AFTRA's vaunted food stamps program for the time being. [THR]
Wall Street expresses its sadness over Tom Freston's firing by dropping its stock price a combined 7.6 percent over the last two days. Will its heartache ever end? [Variety]

The Toronto Film Festival line up is announced, featuring offerings from up-and-comers Ridley Scott, Ethan Hawke, Russell Crowe, Jude Law, Sandra Bullock, Sigourney Weaver, Brad Pitt, and Gwyneth Paltrow. [Variety]
· In a joint interview with ICM head Jeff Berg, Chris Silbermann, partner in recently acquired boutique agency BWCS, describes the transaction: "This is not an acquisition of need; this is a merger of desire." You may now stab yourself in the ear with a letter opener to halt the flood of images of pieces of Armani suits dropping to the floor, followed by the two merger-crazed agents rushing into each other's arms, finally ready to consummate their deal of passion. [THR]
· Paramount elevates MTV Films and Nickelodeon Movies from "studio-based production companies" to "full-fledged divisions." Nothing gets us more excited than a nice, hot corporate restructuring story. [Variety]
The Weinstein Co. picks up the Dixie Chicks documentary Shut up and Sing, about the fallout from the country group's fateful decision to express an unfavorable public opinion about George W. Bush. [THR]
To appease the nation's anti-smoking lobby, Turner Broadcasting will edit out smoking in classic Hanna-Barbera cartoons
that air in the U.K., such as Tom and Jerry, The Flintstones, and Scooby-Doo, as well as completely erase from existence the character of Mr. Spacely, George Jetson's cigar-chomping boss. [Variety]

· No Monday morning would be complete without a blurb about how much money Pirates 2 is making overseas. The megablockbuster sequel added $57 million to what we are contractually obligated refer to as either its "pirate's booty" or "treasure chest," lifting its total worldwide gross to a rival-sterilizing $772 million. [Variety]
· Hollywood Out of Ideas, Huge In France Edition: Jerry Lewis will do some voices in a Weinstein Company remake of The Nutty Professor as an animated film, giving new life to a story that hasn't been needlessly recycled in nearly six years. [THR]
Hollywood royalty endures the inconvenience of no direct commercial flights from Los Angeles to Traverse City, MI, to participate in the Michael Moore-hosted film festival there. Notable: Borat's unofficial premiere at the festival, held a month before it's "official" bow in Toronto in September, and Moore's failure to draw any protests to this year's event. [Variety]
The comedy heroes responsible for Wet Hot American Summer add Winona Ryder, Famke Janssen, Gretchen Mol, Liev Schreiber, Rob Corddry, Ron Silver and Oliver Platt to the cast of The Ten, which already includes Jessica Alba, Adam Brody, Paul Rudd and Justin Theroux. [THR]
The non-union actors who walked off the job at the NY American Girl Place store in NY have returned to work, with no guarantees that their stuffed, creepy, racially diverse baby-doll masters will ever recognize their attempts to join Actors' Equity. [Variety]

· International audiences love boringly presented blasphemy, Brett Ratner: Da Vinci Code wins the foreign box office for the second week in a row with $90.9 million, while new release X-Men: The Last Stand rakes in $76.1 million. [Variety]
· CBS settles its lawsuit with Howard Stern and Sirius, with Stern's new satellite home paying CBS $2 million for rights to his radio archives, dashing our hopes that the affair would be settled by a winner-take-all match of anal ring toss between Les Moonves and Beetlejuice. [THR]
· The Palm d'Or goes to director Ken Loach for The Wind that Shakes the Barley, reminding us that films besides Da Vinci and X-Men screened at Cannes. [Variety]
· Studios looking past traditional promotional campaigns with fast food and soft drinks tie-ins this summer are joining up with less conventional marketing partners, like Superman Returns' risky, co-branded line of feminine hygiene products featuring Lois Lane's likeness. [THR]
· ABC and CBS make it easy for viewers to ignore their American Idol clones The One and Rock Star by scheduling them to face off in the same summer timeslot. [Variety]

· Sony's worldwide day-and-date release strategy for The Da Vinci Code proves incredibly effective, especially in Catholic-heavy countries like Spain and Italy, which set box office records this weekend. As a reward for their patronage, Sony's Amy Pascal has promised those markets special premieres of any future film that blasphemes their savior. [Variety]
· We'd somewhat naively assumed that deleting a show from our TiVo season pass made it disappear from the airwaves, but the huge Nielsens of the Desperate Housewives finale prove otherwise. [THR]
· Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette has already generated buzz in the fashion world. We don't even know what "flouncy pink footwear" is, but apparently it's "in" because of the movie. [Variety]
· A development executive at MTV wakes up from a two-year coma and greenlights a Jennifer Lopez-produced reality series about dancers trying to make it, tragically unaware that no one cares about what Lopez does anymore. [THR]
· After five days at Cannes, no film has emerged as frontrunner for the Palm D'or. Jury members, however, are considering awarding it to the out-of-competition X-Men: The Last Stand if Brett Ratner promises to leave their country a few days early. [Variety]

· CBS will pick up only three new dramas and one comedy for the fall season, and is moving Without a Trace and The Amazing Race to Sundays, creating their first-ever (we think) All Jerry Bruckheimer Night. Color us terrified by The Bruck's creeping programming hegemony. [Variety]
· New network abomination The CW will be stitched together almost entirely from old parts of The WB and UPN, adding just two new shows to its inaugural fall season schedule. And one of those is a Girlfriends spinoff, so they're not even pretending to try. [THR]
· The Da Vinci Code will premiere tonight in Cannes to "an unprecedented mix of Hollywood hoopla, fest glamour and worldwide hysteria," and, probably, some pretty fun protests involving flaming effigies of Ron Howard. [Variety]
· Bastard Fox semi-network MyNetworkTV presented its ambitious plans to replace test patterns, infomercials, and public access shows about local bakesales with telenovelas in selected markets. [THR]
· American Idol pulls down great ratings, again. Doesn't that ever get boring for them? How about just one week where it gets a 9 share so everyone has something to talk about? Is that asking for too much? [Variety]

At the Waterloo station in South London today, Ron Howard proudly showed off his Da Vinci Code-branded Eurostar train to stars Tom Hanks and Audrey Tatou, which will carry the trio from England to their movie's world premiere in Cannes. The train is specially equipped with a state-of-the-art loudspeaker system which will blare controversy-exploiting promotional messages such as "Hey Catholic ! Did you hear how Jesus married a prostitute? Come see The Da Vinci Code and find out more!" and "Everything the Pope told you is a lie!" as they hurtle through the idyllic European countryside, ensuring that they'll be met by throngs of curious moviegoers when they disembark in the south of France.

· Stacey Snider gets her feet wet at her new DreamWorks gig by acquiring the rights to the French comedy The Valet for the Farrelly Brothers to remake, an act of unoriginality clearly meant to upstage Paramount boss Brad Grey's own lack of vision. [Variety]
· At the National Association of Broadcasters' Digital Cinema Summit, director/evangelist James Cameron says digital 3D projection will save cinema, getting "people off their butts and away from their portable devices and...back in the theaters where they belong." Somehow we don't think the ability to see The Benchwarmers in three dimensions is going to solve Hollywood's problems. [THR]
· Forbes magazine's media executive salary survey reveals that Tom Freston, Les Moonves, Bob Iger, and Rupert Murdoch have way too much fucking money. [Variety]
· Wherever possible, the eco-friendly entertainment industry makes sure its garbage is dumped into theaters, not landfills. [THR]
· A strike by Commie-leaning French unions might disrupt the Hollywood-led capitalist orgy at the Cannes film festival, but in the end, things will probably work out, with the only rioting being conducted by Tom Hanks hair purists angry about the actor's ridiculous Da Vinci Code mullet. [Variety]

· Sofia Coppola's Marie-Antionette, Richard Linklater's Fast Food Nation, Richard "Donnie Darko" Kelly's Southland Tales, Pedro Almodovar's Volver, and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's Babel all land in competition at Cannes, while hack-helmed, big-budget blockbusters Da Vinci Code and X-Men: The Last Stand appear just for the free trip to France. [Variety]
· Mick Jagger digs deep to find a piece of his soul he hasn't already sold, then offers it to ABC in exchange for a role in a sitcom pilot. [THR]
· Suspicious that the folks at CAA must know about a secret warehouse full of fresh babies somewhere in Century City, ICM follows the juggernaut toddler-gobbling agency out of Beverly Hills and into new office space in the MGM building [Variety]
· KristieAnne Reed (not a typo, there's no space in her first name as far as we can tell) is promoted to executive VP of Bruckheimer TV. "KristieAnne is one of the brightest and most talented executives I've had the pleasure of working with," said Jerry Bruckheimer, who then brutally murdered her as a tie-in for a planned CSI episode taking place in Hollywood, defying his forensic detective stars to connect him to the slaying. [THR]
· Legendary Pictures is developing a live-action film adaptation of Paradise Lost, which will be reimagined as a romantic comedy between Adam and Eve in hopes of attracting Matthew McConaughey and Reese Witherspoon as stars.. [Variety]

· The Tribeca Film Festival sells what's left of its soul to Hollywood, landing the premiere of Mission: Impossible III, complete with a promotional stunt in which Tom Cruise will race across the city by "'motorcycle, speedboat, taxi, helicopter, sports car and subway' over six hours as he makes his way to other Mission screenings around Manhattan before the fest's official fest preem at the Ziegfeld Theater." After the movie ends, he will throw pregnant fiancee Katie Holmes over his shoulder and scale the Empire State Building, where she will spectacularly expel the couple's child from her womb as he harmlessly bats away disapproving biplanes. [Variety]
· Apple proves that you don't have to pay for product placement if Hollywood already thinks your product is cool. [THR]
· China's commies establish rules forbidding its TV networks from featuring "indecent content" and "forbidden subjects," regulations that seem aimed directly at halting the dangerous ideas that Desperate Housewives injects into their culture. [Variety]
· Columbia bumps up All the King's Men (which was previously pushed off its original Dec. 2005 release date) from a December to late September premiere. The studio further reserves its right to bury the movie in a time capsule below the Sony lot should the film's Oscar prospects erode even further. [THR]
· American Idol draws a season-low 21.8 million viewers, prompting Fox to order a weeklong shutoff of the show's production office Cristal fountain. [Variety]

· Hugh Jackman may be crowned King of Cannes, with both X Men: The Last Stand and The Fountain premiering at the festival. His first royal act will be to require that everyone join him for a mandatory showtune singing session in the town square to begin each day. [Variety]
· Not content to run Blockbuster nearly out of business, Netflix obtains a patent for its "DVD rentals by mail, unless the postman steals them" business model, then immediately sues the chain for stealing their idea. [THR]
· A federal judge finds that The WB's Smallville may be infringing on the copyrighted "Superboy" character, created by Jerome Siegel. No person, however, can claim a copyright on Smallville actor Tom Welling's pretty-boy looks, the true star of the show. [Variety]
· Congenitally perky early morning TV presence Kate Couric abandons NBC's Today Show to join Les Moonves' CBS harem as evening news anchor and 60 Minutes correspondent. Yeah, we really don't care either. [THR]
· Parker Posey will join ABC's Boston Legal for a three episode arc, during which extra set builders will be on hand to replace the scenery chewed to splinters by the combination of William Shatner, James Spader, and their temporary guest star. [THR]

Things have been eerily quiet on the Andy Dick front as of late (is he finally feeling his age since turning 40?), but Salon reports that Dick seems to be in classic, head-humping form down in Austin at the South by Southwest film festival, where he's showcasing his latest masterwork:

· Unlike the Hollywood whorefests at Sundance and Toronto, the four-day Telluride Film Festival is still about the "love of cinema" and its lineup is shrouded in secrecy. Boo! We think a frustrated acquisitions exec just crapped his pants. [Variety]
· Meanwhile, the completely unsecretive Toronto fest announces its lineup. [Variety]
· FX picks up third season of Rescue Me, allowing us still more time to put off finally checking out one of the episodes piling up in the TiVo. [THR]
· Var uses the phrase "urban suspense thriller" twice in four sentences to describe potential Jodie Foster vehicle The Brave One. In addition to its apparent suspenseful, urban qualities, vigilantism is involved. [Variety]
· National Lampoon taps Diedrich Bader and Nicole Eggert, the spiritual heirs of John Belushi and the vintage Chevy Chase, for National Lampoon's Cattle Call. [THR]

While this obvious attempt at a tit pun is a welcome break from the non-stop phallofreudian nightmare usually represented by Drudge's front page, it's half-hearted at best (not to mention that it doesn't even work if you pronounce "Cannes" correctly). We expect a reflexive return to the sites's sneakily bulge-obsessed status quo immediately. Unless, of course, he's invited to join the writing staff of Stacked first.

As you may or may not know by now, the LAT has finally freed its art and entertainment coverage (known as Calendarlive in the Times' inscrutable parlance) from the shackles of paid subscription. All citizens of the internets can now freely browse its resplendent offerings, such as this endlessly fascinating entry from a reporter's "web diary" (note: this is not a blog—it's impeccably spell-checked!) from Cannes: