What looked vaguely at first like a garden-variety Hollywood legal squabble escalated late Monday into the Cuban Missile Crisis of fanboydom: A judge upheld Fox's pending lawsuit claiming that they, not Warner Bros., own the distribution rights to Zack Snyder's forthcoming graphic-novel adaptation Watchmen. The resulting mess is thick, deep and aromatic, with not just two but three studios slogging through a paper trail nearly two decades long. And perhaps the best part: Fox says it doesn't even want to be bought off, instead publicly suggesting they'd rather file an injunction against the breathlessly anticipated film's release next March than not get what it has coming. Which won't happen (at least we don't think so) but that doesn't make matters that much better. But whatever — we love a good Hollywood blood feud as much as anybody. Follow the jump for a morning-after summary, a few pressing questions and a bit of quick-and-dirty handicapping.We can start by thanking Larry Gordon for both the vision and the legal gaps that first got Fox (the original studio to sign on for Watchmen), Paramount (the international distributor) and Warner Bros. (the studio that nabbed the film for Snyder as his 300 came together in late 2006) into this imbroglio. Deadline Hollywood Daily yesterday offered a helpful timeline of events that started with Gordon placing Watchmen at Fox in the late '80s and finally reclaiming it in 1994 when the studio nudged it into turnaround: "The 'turnaround notice' gave Lawrence Gordon Productions 'the perpetual right . . . to acquire all of the right, title and interest of Fox [Watchmen] pursuant to the terms and conditions herein provided.' " And that should have been that; if and/or when Gordon took it elsewhere, he and his new partners cut a check. Alas, it never happened, says Fox, and while Judge Gary Feess didn't rule one way or another Monday, he denied Warners' request to dismiss its rival's claim to the rights that Gordon allegedly never bought back. But how bad is it? Bad enough for Fox to publicly toe the hard line in stopping Watchmen's opening on March 6, 2009:

We saw the disgrace that unfolded recently when Scarlett Johansson's putative e-mail relationship with Barack Obama was exposed for the sham it was, so it's with great care that we broach revelations that George Clooney is reportedly the Senator's new Hollywood BFF. As seen in the accompanying video, however, Obama's new Special Envoy for Text-Message Policy (West Coast) drew attacks Monday from the reactionaries at the Fox News institution Red Eye, which touched on Clooney's underqualifications as both a leading man and a filmmaker: "Do you want to take advice from the man who looked at the Batman and Robin script and said, 'Let's do this'?" Indeed, while we admit bristling at last week's GOP smear linking Obama to Paris Hilton, even we must acknowledge that the "nipple suit" is a far-too-sizable albatross for anyone to contend with come November. [Fox News]

• New details about Tina Brown's forthcoming (and Barry Diller-funded) news site: It's going to be called The Daily Beast in an homage the Evelyn Waugh novel, Scoop. [Baltimore Sun, via Gawker]

Suck It, Seacrest. Here's a pathetic little statistic for you: 300 people attended American Idol's first-ever audition in Puerto Rico. How's Simon Cowell supposed to work with that? It's not nearly as fun tearing apart some deluded young gay's dreams when there aren't 47,000 more deluded young gays waiting nervously outside the door for their own shot at humiliation. You guys barely even gave Paula a chance to get drunk! (PS: Puerto Rico, you are the coolest place in the greater U.S. and its territories right now. Own that. No one can take it away from you.) [UPI]

Celebrity Hospitalization Week continues here at Defamer with some distressing news from the sweat-soaked-leotard world of So You Think You Can Dance. No sooner did we note that Fox had picked up another season of the series—a reality competition seeking America's Top Krumping Ballroom Cha Cha Champion—comes news that two of the final four contestants were hospitalized for failing to keep up with the grueling demands of the show's whip-cracking, belegwarmered creator, Nigel Lythgoe. From People.com:

So this is where the career trajectory of Ashley Dupre has led: A $2 million offer from "an entertainment network and a major studio" for virtually all media rights to her high-priced hooker story, including an interview, reality show and possible book. The story was broken in the Post, so Fox's TV and movie divisions are decent bets. As the scandal over her onetime john Eliot Spitzer cools toward tepid, it's hard to imagine Dupre getting a better deal, no matter how many more times paparazzi "catch" her in a hotel with a married construction heir or on the beach in a bikini. Oh, also, here are the three insane careers Dupre is interested in once she gets her payday and this scandal blows over:

Oh, look, someone's left those floodgates ajar. Fox News "independently verified" the Enquirer story that John Edwards met with Rielle Hunter and her baby at the Beverly Hilton late one night. Their story is written in a lovely tone—equal parts sensationalistic and "reporting on what this nasty tabloid claims" careful prudishness. Now the Enquirer reporters are suing the Beverly Hills Police Department, because hotel security didn't let them have their gotcha moment. Huh. This means, as they note, that "Edwards now could be contacted by police to give an eyewitness account of what occurred." Hah. Have a great weekend!

Overrated ball-thrower Brett Favre recently announced his intention to un-retire from American Football. He announced this on the program of terrifying Scientologist (and family friend of Joe McCarthy!) Greta Van Susteren-which was odd, because he was looking to be released from his contract with the Packers, not for a lost white girl. You know who else thought it was odd? America's sportswriters! That elite league of old white dudes coudn't understand why their favorite good ole boy QB broke this news to a lady instead of one of them. Thankfully, Greta is not merely a top-rated television hostess-she is also a blogger! So she responded to a couple utterly obscure small-market sports columnists with typical internet heroism. Enjoy!

To pimp its sugary, 200-calorie iced coffees, fast food giant McDonald's offered to pay some local TV newscasts for product placement. And of course the newscasts went for it, since local TV journalism is where ethical standards go to die. Meredith Corporation is putting the drinks in front of anchors at the Fox affiliate in Las Vegas (pictured) and at two CBS affiliates elsewhere. Tribune Company has the coffee at its Fox affiliate in Seattle. Even national Fox News is playing ball, placing McDonald's product at the News Corporation-owned station in Chicago. Station operators offered the Times any number of excuses, but the best has to be from the news director at the Las Vegas affiliate: He argues the placement is ethically OK because it is restricted to the "lighter, news-and-lifestyle" portion of his morning news show. Sounds like the portion of the program that might normally be given over to, say, segments on weight loss, fitness or preventing kids from becoming obese. But these days, if the station wants to do any reports that might upset McDonald's, it is supposed to yank the lucrative cups:

When NBC Universal jumped into bed with Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. to launch YouTube-competitor Hulu, you just knew things were going to get tawdry. Murdoch, after all, has shrewdly and repeatedly exploited the draw of sexual content, at UK newspaper The Sun (with its page three girls), on TV network Fox and elsewhere. And so perhaps it should have been clear from the get-go what Murdoch's number two Peter Chernin was wrong when he declared that Hulu was going to be "a game changer for Internet video... for the first time, consumers will get what they want." Actually, Hulu is bootstrapping itself the same way the entire rest of the internet did: via porn!

Brit Hume, who is sort of one of the least objectionable Fox News personalities while also embodying all the terrible and wrong things about that network (it's a corrective to liberal bias!!) (that's rich coming from a formerly "objective" reporter with plum gigs at the broadcast networks despite his open conservativism), is leaving the network. Sort of. He's quitting his job anchoring Special Report every night but he'll still be on the channel as a panelist on Fox News Sunday and whenever else he feels like appearing. It's not clear why he's quitting now, except that his contract is up. Also maybe Megyn Kendall broke his heart when she ended their affair and married some other dope in March. [NYT]

As we well know, former NBC president Kevin Reilly was thrust aside in a bloody coup in May of 2007, with original programming gangsta Ben Silverman installed in his place, crown cocked B-boy style to one side of his head and tossing Benjamins at assistants' desks as he strutted towards his corner office to the beat of Notorious B.I.G.'s "Ten Crack Commandments." Reilly would quickly land back on his feet, however, appointed FOX's president of entertainment. Buoyed by a little something he likes to call "American Fuck Idol You Money," he's been playing around with the dusty concepts of a rigid development season, telling reporters at TCA that the network plans on dividing theirs in two. What's more, with finding the next hit comedy a top priority, Reilly is throwing all office-bound pitching notions out the window, instead pulling the equivalent of when your 3rd grade teacher used to announce, "It's such a beautiful day outside, I thought we'd hold class in the park!" THR reports:

Today in Slate, writer Christopher Beam accepts full responsibility for the phrase "terrorist fist-jab" in reference to Barack Obama's exchange of daps with his wife. This characterization contributed to Fox blonde E.D. Hill losing her television show, only to be replaced by Laura Ingraham! (Is E.D. back? Can someone watch Fox and check on this?) How is this Beam's fault? Because he wrote an item about how a random commenter on a political blog used the phrase "Hezbollah-style fist jab," and then that item ended up on other blogs, and then E.D. kinda changed it and said it on TV without explaining it, making it sound like a common response to the harmless gesture. You see? All Beam's fault! And in other "kind of apologizing for other people's idiocy" news, Fox has apologized for photoshopping two New York Times reporters! Sort of!

Talk radio superstar Laura Ingraham (the top-rated lady host on the airwaves!) finally got her own television show on Fox News after acting as Bill O'Reilly's official guest-host for 100 years. It lasted for three weeks! In part because she's strenuously unpleasant, as these ten minutes of her preparing for air demonstrate. Once again, Harry Shearer's magical satellite dish captures off-air television gold. Watch as Laura requests that you don't come in her ear and complains of a strange Hispanic gentlemen showing up in her prompter. (Fun fact: she used to date Keith Olbermann like ten years ago!) Clip below. Enjoy.

Remember when Fox News inexplicably displayed terribly and offensively photoshopped photos of two Times reporters without explanation on what is ostensibly a news program? Yeah? Well Vanity Fair totally got them back! They photoshopped the hell out of some Fox people! Zing! Taste of your own medicine! That'll show 'em! [VF]

Wendy Williams, the queen of hip hop talk radio and sworn enemy of Method Man and his cancer-stricken wife, is in high demand these days. And not just by hitmen looking for work! Williams is about to launch a trial run of a morning talk show on Fox, for those who would rather watch a loud, be-wigged radio DJ first thing in the morning than learn some new summer smoothie recipes from Meredith Vieira. Television is a wasteland, let's face it. But at least Wendy is planning to keep things upbeat; the last long discussion her producer had was about "whether you can say penis."

"The Irena Briganti that I know is funny, hard-working and always willing to help out a colleague-no matter how busy she is," wrote Fox Television flack Erica Keane yesterday, in response to our "smear" of Briganti, Fox News boss Roger Ailes' PR attack-dog-in-chief. But Keane is in the minority in her assessment of Briganti's charm. Our post on her generated perhaps the biggest outpouring of responses we've had since Bloomberg staffers got the chance to vent about horrid boss Matthew Winkler. There was a wellspring of resentment against the Fox News flack just waiting to come out-and much of it came to us unsolicited. Everyone from journalists to Briganti's fellow News Corp. employees weighed in. "She-devil" is among the more middle-of-the-road descriptions. After the jump, all you'll need to know about Briganti's reputation-and her handful of obligatory defenders:

Howard Wolfson, the Hillary Clinton surrogate whose many television appearances were second in embarrassment only to Terry McAuliffe's, has a new job! The former communications director is taking his message of Cosby sweater-inspired victory to Fox News, where they continue to find new and inventive ways of hating the Clintons, like by parading their vanquished aides before the nation. Clinton's campaign came to believe that Fox was more fair to her during the primary campaign, mostly because they never tired of beating up on Obama and his pastor or whatever. Wolfson, recently named "the most charmless human being on the planet," is excited to bring his tireless advocacy for failure to the fair and balanced network.

As of today, our fantasy of an exotic lifestyle of TV criticism is officially over — beaten, bloodied and left for dead by Ray Richmond, who compares the debauched good old days of the Television Critics Association press tours to the nearly irrelevant confab starting tomorrow in Beverly Hills. It's the first such event since July 2007, back before last winter's conference was scuttled by the writers strike and mainstream media had begun shearing critics and culture writers from their ranks like slabs of fat.

Fox bossman Roger Ailes is the best teacher any media attack flack could have. He's been screwing with the media for decades. Ailes is the man who perfected the art of hammering the media with charges of bias in order to deflect negative coverage from oneself. Kerwin Swint's new biography of him, Dark Genius, has plenty of examples from throughout his entire career. And you have to hand it to Ailes: his clients-all the way up to the President-got the best media haranguing tactics money can buy: