From the overflowing Nobody Knows Anything file: NBC is finding that all of their promotion of Studio 60 hasn't yet bought a hit, while lesser-hyped Heroes is getting the results that Aaron Sorkin is being paid untold millions to deliver. [Variety]
Rachael Ray scores the best opening week syndicated ratings since Dr. Phil, ushering in a new, perkier era of midday talk show evil. [THR]
In Russia, Kazakh period epic Nomad may face off against Borat for control of the "screen image" of the recently prank-besieged Central Asian nation. If Fox actually releases the Borat movie over there, the nomads aren't going to stand a chance against Sacha Baron Cohen's merciless, culture-ravaging onslaught. [Variety]
Dancing with the Stars crushes first-hour timeslot rival Friday Night Lights, which NBC will probably soon move from Tuesday night to Fridays to alleviate viewer confusion over its currently misleading title. [THR]
Kanye West is returning to William Morris after a brief, unsatisfying fling with CAA. Say it with us now: "CAA doesn't care about black people." [Variety]

HarveyMania! The Weinstein Co. finds a home for their book business in Little, Brown and Warner Books, partners with international distributor UIP for releases in the UK, and has a variety of exciting film projects on tap, including Untitled Rob Marshall Musical and the Denzel Washington-directed Great Debaters. Hurray for Weinsteins! [Variety]
· Eric "Dr. McSteamy" Dane gets a regular gig on Grey's Anatomy, giving his character a full season to pit his abs against those of rival Dr. McDreamy. In the end, we suspect, there will only be room at the hospital for one cutely nicknamed, hunky doctor, and Grey's producers will have to find a new exotic disease or gory, freak accident with which to dispatch the newcomer. [THR]
Foreign moviegoers prefer World Trade Center's tragic rubble to Adam Sandler's magical remote, as WTC tops Click at the international box office. [Variety]
· Showtime extends its upcoming free preview weekend by offering programs to Yahoo users, hoping to hook the broadband crowd on its lineup of pot-selling soccer moms and lipstick lesbians. [THR]
Fox Atomic's upcoming, sequeltastic slate includes 28 Days Later, The Hills Have Eyes 2, and a remake of Revenge of the Nerds. Atomic was created to produce cheap films targeted to teens, who market testing has proven "totally hate" any idea they haven't seen before. [Variety]

Wanting to cultivate the kind of obsessive devotion that drives fans of Lost to scrutinize the possibly anachronistic inclusion of home appliances in The Hatch, Fox's publicity department decided to promote fledgling drama Vanished by embedding "enigmatic clues about a larger sinister conspiracy" in the show's press materials, hoping that members of the media would pick up their breadcrumb trail and lead their readers on a symbolic scavenger hunt to the ultimate prize: Nielsens good enough to avoid a hasty cancellation. Unfortunately, writers seem to have better things to do than hunch over a publicity photo with a magnifying glass and wonder if the plunging neckline of Rebecca Gayheart's blouse is a symbolic representation of a "V" or just a run-of-the-mill Fox attempt to spotlight a star's rack. Reports the LAT:

Heroes premieres strong, beating CBS's comedy block of Two and a Half Men and Old Christine. Meanwhile, Studio 60 was down 16 percent from its premiere, a ratings drop-off that might force Aaron Sorkin to finally address the network's note that he find a way to replace Bradley Whitford's cocaine addiction with a superpower. [Variety]
Fox's new series are already "fading fast," (yup, sure seems that way), but no network really seems to have a breakout hit so far. [THR]
Once the season earmarked for Oscar contenders, the Fall is now ruled by horror franchises and genital-torture comedies. [Variety]
· Hollywood PanderingWatch: The Governator assures his entertainment industry friends that his reelection will give them a "built-in lobbyist" in office. To his credit, he did stop short of promising state subsidizes to guarantee all locally produced movies have healthy opening weekends. [THR]
North Korea's Pyongyang Film Festival continues to bar Hollywood movies or stars from its competition, a slight that will eventually be used as justification for a full-scale American invasion of the country. [Variety]

While Fox continues to insist that the just-yanked Happy Hour hasn't been officially euthanized in an attempt not to concede this Fall season's game of First Cancellation Chicken to the other networks, according to Variety, they've also quietly given a couple of their troubled, new series a pair of "unscheduled hiatuses" to get their shit together:

BravoTV.com's DeathWatch game is a contest promoting their Brilliant But Cancelled series, in which players are required to guess which of the new network series will meet the same, grisly fates as underwhelming Defamer commentators. An e-mail went out minutes ago announcing the first casualty of fall '06—Fox's bizarrely unfunny swingin' bachelor pad sitcom Happy Hour—though a retraction quickly followed:

Rupert Murdoch tells investors that he can potentially make money from MySpace from a combination of advertising, videos and "internet telephony," but admitted that even News Corps' best business minds have yet to find a legal way to monetize the site's community of sexual predators, who wield an impressive discretionary income. [Variety]
Will Ferrell and Adam McKay's Gary Sanchez Productions moves into TV with P.E., a single-camera comedy for HBO about "a guy who, after flaming out as a major league baseball pitcher, returns to his small Southern hometown to teach physical education at the middle school he once attended and has to make amends with all the people he turned his back on." It is unclear whether HBO plans to back out of the deal once they discover that Ferrell himself will not be starring in the project. [THR]
The Class and Studio 60 have "solid" premieres, but it's hard to get too excited about numbers that earn the headline "Big Hopes, OK Debuts." [Variety]
Former WB Network bigshot Garth Ancier gets the standard, "Hey, sorry we fired you, but please accept this bag of money and an office on our lot as a token of our affection" shingle at Warner Bros. TV. [THR]
George Lucas will donates $175 million to USC Film School, at least $10 million of which is earmarked for the commissioning of a 50-foot-tall bronze statue of the director kicking Steven Spielberg in the ass. [THR]

Long feverishly dedicated to the wholesale destruction of Christian values through the broadcast of such apocalypse-inviting programming like Temptation Island, Trading Spouses, and the short-lived, but surpassingly influential, Who Wants To Fellate the Thorny, Infernal Member of Beezlebub For A Crisp Five Dollar Bill?, Fox has now decided that Christians' money is just as green as that of Hollywood-worshipping heathens. The LAT reports that the company will today reveal its plans to exploit The Passion of the Christ's staggering success by producing up to 12 Jesus-flavored films a year, at least 6 of which will actually make their way into multiplexes through its new FoxFaith label. But before they could get the God Squad on board with their attempts to raid the collection plate, the FoxFaithful had to first acknowledge the sins of their corporate family:

Strong-jawed triple-threat George Clooney will star in, direct, and rewrite the oft-in-development, football-related period romantic comedy (yeah, we don't get it either) Leatherheads for Universal, while Renee Zellweger is in negotiations to play his inevitably pouty, yet adorably plucky, love interest. [Variety]
CSI creator Anthony Zuiker is developing the cop drama The Man for LL Cool J, who will star as the titular alpha-male who raises troubled kids by day, and runs so-deep-undercover-he-doesn't-know-which-way-is-up-anymore sting operations by night. [THR]
Simpsons writer Josh Lieb and David O. Russell are developing a series for FX described as an "Upstairs, Downstairs" dramedy set at a Los Angeles country club. We put the over/under on the amount of time it takes for a mouthy actor playing a haughty tennis pro to find himself on the wrong end of a Russell headlock at two days. [Variety]
· New Fox shows Justice, Til Death, and Happy Hour can now be streamed online as early as the next morning after their initial TV broadcast, allowing you to catch up on missed episodes at virtually the same time executives get their Nielsen overnights and try to decide which of the series to cancel first. [THR]
Hollywood Out of Ideas, Exploiting a Classic Edition: ABC is developing a weekly series based on Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation, with Coppola signed on to oversee the network's needless adaptation and updating of his film. [Variety]

· Survivor: Race Wars producer Mark Burnett options the rights to a series of children's fantasy books similar in tone to Harry Potter, but instead of the children assigned to Gryffindor and Slytherin houses, they're segregated accorded to—on second thought, we can't bring ourselves to finish this joke. [Variety]
· As we mentioned before, Jim Carrey kissed UTA goodbye, and is pointing himself towards a CAA tomorrow. [Variety]
· Fox head Tom Rothman brags to the Merrill Lynch Media and Entertainment Conference about his company's "fiscal discipline," except where "creative ambition" is concerned. To illustrate his point, he then runs a 27-minute, behind-the-scenes featurette entitled, "'Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties': From Dream To Screen Reality." [Variety]
· The creator of Medium sells a pilot to CBS called The Meant to Be's, about a dead woman who, "in order to 'pass over,' ... must return to Earth and help people improve their lives." No word yet on which generously beracked actresses are on the shortlist to star. [THR]
· The producers of Invincible, a movie about football, and The Rock, star of football movie Gridiron Gang, are collaborating on The Game Plan, Hollywood's first major attempt at dramatizing the competitive world of professional miniature golf. Just kidding—it's another football movie. [THR]

· After the studio dabbled in the unsexy world of distributing and marketing "mid-range indie pics," MGM head Harry Sloan is ready to restore The Lion to its rightful place as a mega-budgeted sequel factory that will pump out blockbuster product like new Terminator, Pink Panther, and Hobbitt movies. [Variety]
Spike Lee stretches his creative wings, following up his HBO documentary on the post-Katrina New Orleans with a pilot script for a drama series about post-Katrina New Orleans. [THR]
This weekend's box office take was the lowest of any weekend in three years, a slowdown that experts attribute to "shitty movies that no one wants to see. Especially that Renny Harlin one." [Variety]
Fox orders a presentation of a potential late-night talk show starring The Sopranos' Steven "Bobby Bacala" Schirripa to fill a development void left by the abrupt cancellation of its The Big Pussy Domestic Violence Hour earlier this year. [THR]
As the America's Next Top Model writers strike drags on with no end in sight, WGA members debate whether or not it's a good idea to continue to commit resources to their expensive occupation of the sidewalk outside the Top Model offices. [Variety]

· ABC is tinkering with its 9/11 miniseries to address the concerns of pissed-off Democrats who are nitpicking over the project's "despicable, irresponsible fraud," and also allegedly considering the "bombshell" move of pulling the program altogether. The network has defended itself against the Dems' claims by saying the movie isn't a documentary, but rather "this funny little thing we threw together because everyone seemed to have a September 11th movie." [Variety]
· Tom Freston is cheered on his way out the door at Viacom, while it's reported that his successor will be getting a $2 million base salary to lead the employees who will never love him the way they loved good old Tom. [THR]
· Hollywoodland's release this weekend signals the unofficial start of Hollywood's post-Labor-Day, pre-real-awards-contender, "Here come the movies that we hope will get an Oscar nomination, but if not, no biggie" season. [Variety]
· News Corp pays billionaire overlord Rupert Murdoch a $21 million bonus, while you will be lucky to get an Olive Garden gift certificate in a holiday card at the end of the year. [THR]
· Oscar producer Laura Ziskin says that with new host Ellen Degeneres, "You're as happy to see her in Hour Three of the show as you are in Hour One." That is, if you've already punctured your eardrums with a letter opener sometime in Hour Two. [Variety]

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.

One has to wonder what crime Mike Judge perpetrated against Fox to make them bury Idiocracy so deep that not even Moviefone can tell you what it's called, much less where you could have found one of the 130 theaters where the studio was quietly hiding prints of the film. Fox's "we dare you to see this movie" strategy paid off handsomely, as Idiocracy pulled in $160,000 (and a "dismal" per-screen average of $1,231), a result they can say was predicted by a test audience comment card complaining, "Hey, this movie is calling us dumb! I don't like that very much. But can you really get a handjob at Starbucks? I gotta order one of those."

• Your American D-List Idol [The Malcontent]

Starz, the movie channel your local cable provider helpfully packages with HBO, Showtime, or the Black Inches On Demand Network, we forget which, plans to produce 12 movies a year for all platforms. [Variety]
THR generously explains Sarah Michelle Gellar's signing on to star in the low-budget-sounding, South Korean thriller adaptation Addicted as her "hoping to continue her winning streak in the genre business," rather than "taking the only kinds of roles she's offered anymore." [THR]
Anna Faris to go blonde, dumb in a Paramount comedy about a former centerfold who becomes a sorority house mother. Excuse us, a house mother "at UCLA's lamest sorority." Prepare yourselves for the obligatory, giddy makeover scene in which Faris tarts up some of her mousy charges. [Variety]
Celebrity Duets leads Fox to a Tuesday ratings win. How the hell did this premiere without us knowing about it? Our TiVo is clearly still angry at us for making it record an entire, ultimately unwatched season of Skating with Celebrities. [THR]
Hoping to not have to dream up a completely new title for their adaptation of the British phenomenon Footballers' Wives, ABC decides to transition the show's trashy soccer spouses to American football. [Variety]

• Paula Abdul [YouTube]

Here's Variety on the Cruise/Redstone battle. [Variety]
· And just because we love you, a link to the THR coverage as well! We really never stop giving. [THR]
Fox unleashes primetime streaming hell upon the internets, making available new episodes of Prison Break and Vanished to just about any site capable of hosting video. [Variety]
Steve Buscemi and Dan Aykroyd join the cast of Universal's same-sex-marriage-for-health-benefits comedy I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, with Buscemi as the city official hell-bent on proving Adam Sandler and Kevin James are only gay-for-copay, and Aykroyd as the fire department captain who'll crack wise about how the fake couple really want to fuck each other. [THR]
Morgan Creek Productions lines up $150 million in funding from a French bank, at least 20 percent of which is earmarked to cover production losses for days on which Lindsay Lohan is too dehydrated to show up on the set of their Georgia Rule. [Variety]

We can almost see the barely concealed look of horror that flashed across the 24 casting director's face when deceptively Anglo-monikered Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle star Kal Penn signed in at his audition for a part as an up-and-coming CTU operative who would play a crucial role in a particularly daring, death-cheating Jack Bauer escape from enemy clutches. Upon discovering that the actor was perhaps not as alabaster-complected as they'd hoped ("Hold on, didn't I ask for Harold? What? Harold wasn't white either?"), much shuffling of script pages occurred as they scrambled to find the sides for the part of the Indian programmer to whom the recently deceased Edgar's job was outsourced, but could finally locate only ones for the "guy who is somehow involved with the Islamic guru running the neighborhood mosque and might be the key to a terrorist plot." The talented Penn, of course, shrugged off the switch and knocked it out of the park, saving the casting department the trouble of sitting through a wasted day of auditions with Latino actors they would deem not "ethnic" enough to be mixed up with terrorists.

• Jennifer Leuzzi cannot get enough of Jo l Robuchon. It'd be nice if she let Sun readers know that they're BFF. [TGC]
• Newspaper industry believes newspapers should be more expensive. Newspaper industry also plugging ears with fingers and chanting "We can't hear you." [Independent]
• Fox, on the other hand, understands the value of its product. [TV.com]
• Simon Dumenco brings us a chilling vision of the future, where Gawker merges with Hallmark. Get ready for those "Darling, please accept my apology for being such a douchebag" cards any day now. [AdAge]