In his weekly column in Variety, trade paper potentate Peter Bart dashes off a memo to Matt Damon, hoping to assist the privacy-cherishing megastar in cultivating a public persona somewhere between the "boring and elusive" one he's established by keeping a deliberately low media profile and the tabloid-torment-attracting model developed by the more outgoing characters occupying the genitalia-flashing, DUI-collecting end of the celebrity spectrum. Bart, striving for answers, engages in some deskchair psychoanalysis: Is Damon afraid of a Affleckian career flameout if fans gain US Weekly-supplied information about his daily Starbucks runs? [Ed.note—Please, Jesus, let Matt be a caramel macchiato man!] Does he fear that no one will believe he can kill ten double-agents with nothing more than a soggy phonebook if they know too much about his fancy-boy Harvard education? Probes Bart:

Jake Gyllenhaal - Showbiz Tonight [YouTube]

More Venice Film Festival color: George Clooney, dubbed "mag-nifico" by the local press for the way he pronounces the word in an Italian TV ad, was pointedly asked by a reporter why he does endorsements. After fumbling for an answer, he sarcastically replies, "Me? In commercials?" [Film Experience Blog]

The Daily Mail really is milking this before/after fat/skinny routine for all it's worth today. After all, Clooney only porks up when he smells Oscar. [Daily Mail UK]

· Court TV explores the explosive intersection of molesty elves, Dolly Parton, and dinner theater.
· A bullet to the head: the miracle cure for so many of life's little problems.
· Things have gotten so bad for ditzy famous people that they can hardly purchase a really cute Chinese handbag emblazoned with Commie slogans without human rights watchdog groups shitting all over them. Will the persecution never end?
· And you know what? If Clooney was walking around with one of those Commie-purses, we bet the press would just give him a free pass, what with all the Darfur stuff and whatnot.

· The Japanese are developing a way to make model train sets even less fun than they already are.
· John Krasinski as the new Fletch? As long as it's not Braff, sure, we're on board.
· George Clooney, cooperative citizen of the quiet Italian lakeside town his tourist-attracting presence is slowly destroying.
· Gay Bomb: The Porno Flick.
· Paris is out on Tuesday. Look busy.

· Who crowned Clooney King of Hollywood when we weren't looking?
· We're told that there might be a topless picture of Mila Kunis here, but we've been way too busy to check it for ourselves. [UPDATE: We're told it's a fake that they mocked up for the movie. Mila Kunis's virtue is restored!]
· There's a $14 million Kevin Costner DVD for sale—and it's not even The Guardian.
· Denis Leary laments that hypocritical T-Mobile isn't more rape-positive.
· And, finally, a Thursday afternoon palate-cleanser.

· Can't three Hollywood buddies pose for some photos on their knees without people taking cheap shots at the nature of their friendship anymore?
· That's right, ladies: Larry David is back on the market. And as for the guys, Laurie David's got to be worth at least $100 million (assuming Larry didn't have her sign a Massey prenup), so bone up on your environmentally savvy pick-up lines (the one about checking out the back seat of your Prius is a classic) and get to work.
· E! Online details the hidden dangers of your innocent searches for photos of Britney Spears' vagina.
· Though he finds Judd Apatow cuddly, Peter Bart isn't buying the Knocked Up hype. Is the cantankerous Var chief's heart made of stone?

Back in the fall of 2005, Brad Pitt and George Clooney were widely reported as having co-invested in the Boom Boom Room, a Laguna Beach gay bar and hotel, though the actors' reps denied their involvement at the time. Its official buyer, Beverly-Hills-based billionaire Steven Udvar-Hazy, has now put the property back on the market. Smelling an opportunity to hang ten on a wave of some well-timed Oceans publicity, Lily-White Coastal Community Citizens for the Right to Get Hammered on Planter's Punch Among Their Own, Man-Loving Kind have enlisted the actors' help in an ad found on page 14 of today's Variety.

· Having recently provided the venture capital that buoyed the business of a pair of North Carolina lemonade magnates, do-gooding Ocean's 13 star George Clooney is now helping to launch multimillion-dollar musical careers.
· Being the most recognizable motorcycle cop to an entire generation of law enforcement officials has put a target on Ponch's back.
· Apparently, Judd Apatow is a big Britney Spears fan. Do with this information what you will.
· Stuff on My Lohan: Like with the cats, only drunker and much less cute.
· Nicole Richie was just kidding about that 100-lb weight limit on her party. The fatty cut-off was only supposed to keep out porkers over 85.

· We thought that bachelor auctions only existed on bad TV shows, but we suppose we were wrong about that.
· In other Clooney news, he and his Ocean's 13 pals had some fun joshing the media about an eye-lift he may or may not have had.
· Harvey Weinstein vs. Luc Besson: It is so on.
· Joss Whedon is not a Captivity fan, to say the least.
· Another day, another O'Donnell/Hasselbeck slapfight.

It should surprise no one to discover that launching a film at the Cannes festival is an absurdly expensive proposition, as the overseas export of Hollywood's auto-fellating promotional machinery requires the transport, lodging, and constant pampering of scores of entitiled executives, talent, and hangers-on pressed into movie-pimping duty. (Publicists and other support staff, of course, sleep 30 to a motel room and subsist only on the croissant crumbs they brush off their betters' tuxedo lapels on the red carpet.) In looking at the costs associated with properly debuting at Cannes, the LAT notes that at least one maverick studio is doing what it can to halt the budget-destroying insanity:

· Realizing that he's only played a lawyer once (Fatal Attraction), Michael Douglas quickly signs on to fill the courtroom-drama-shaped hole in his career by starring in Tragic Indifference, based on a landmark case against Ford over its "indifference to flaws in its SUVs." Scene-chewing delivery of a stirring closing statement to follow. [Variety]
· Chinese Pirates 1, Sony 0: China's camcording brigade has already made pirated copies of Spider-Man 3 available on the streets of Beijing, nearly two weeks ahead of the movie's U.S. debut. Didn't that flashy Tokyo premiere teach the scofflaws anything about respecting copyrights? The MPAA's next step: dispatching piracy-hating stuntman Manny Perry to smash some black market DVD stalls with a Louisville slugger. [THR]
· The Coen Brothers will make the Fargoesque dark comedy A Serious Man for Working Title and Focus Features. Lantern-jawed muse George Clooney has yet to be attached. [Variety]
· Should ABC pick up the much-discussed Grey's Anatomy spin-off for the fall, creator Shonda Rhimes has selected Krista Vernoff to run the Grey's mothership and Marti Noxon for the satellite; Rhimes will oversee both, which will primarily involve ensuring that both shows' characters have properly overwrought speeches about their impossibly complicated love-lives to deliver and collecting enormous paychecks [THR]
· Lifetime proves its admirable commitment to keeping the female television drama stars of the 90's off the streets, signing up 90210's Jennie Garth and Party of Five's Lacey Chabert for made-for-TV movie gigs. [Variety]

· 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]

· An executive think-tank composed of movie and TV heavyweights proposes that the studios and the unions jointly fund an independent report to examine the residual and new-media compensation issues that could lead to a strike, described as a "a showbiz version of the report from the Iraq Study Group." Get ready for a prolonged, bloody, and disastrous war, Hollywood! [Variety]
·Brad Pitt joins Ocean's 13 BFF George Clooney in a project in which he may actually be called upon to act, the Coen Brothers' Burn After Reading. [THR]
· NBC's Kevin Reilly indicates that his network is pushing towards a year-round development schedule, an attempt at filling the creative pipeline with projects that can take over the timeslots of next fall's Studio 60/Black Donnellys-style disappointments once they're yanked at midseason. [Variety]
· And in other NBC programming news, the network will throw a May sweeps Hail Mary by broadcasting movies on Sunday night, realizing that an all Deal or No Deal schedule is probably not going to solve its ratings woes. [THR]
· You know what Hollywood's got too many of? Those damn meetings. Who's with us, people? [Variety]

Even before we learned about the actor's generous investment of venture capital in some North Carolina entrepreneurs' planned George Clooney Drank Here chain of celebrity-endorsed lemonade stands, we were fully prepared to believe Clooney's strenuous denials of any involvement in the leaking of those I Heart Huckabees outtakes, as an upstanding Hollywood citizen who's offered up an unnecessary million dollar bounty to anyone who can prove his alleged complicity in such a non-scandal has done more than enough to satisfy us. But just in case there's someone left in the world who believes Clooney is obsessed with screwing with onetime Three Kings sparring partner David O. Russell, he reassures EW that even if he were so inclined, he wouldn't know how to go about upstreaming a viral to the YouTubes:

In case you were still wondering whether, despite earlier denials, George Clooney was responsible for leaking that unflattering footage of David O. Russell berating Lily Tomlin to the internets, George would like to make one thing very clear: he doesn't even know how to work the damn thing! "The last thing in the world I would have done is stick it on the Internet. I don't even know how to get onto YouTube," he told Entertainment Weekly. For someone so unfamiliar with the information wide superhighway, Clooney does have some strong opinions about it, which isn't surprising: as longtime Gawker readers will recall, he was an earlier, cuter hater of the Stalker Map. "I just think the Internet is a free-for-all now. Ultimately a lot of crap comes out ... Until someone figures out how to tame the wild wild west then I don't really know you can put the genie back in the bottle."

The official story has a North Carolina mom offering the international movie star, human rights activist, and video-leak bounty hunter George Clooney a free cup of her children's 25-cent lemonade after he'd posed for a couple of photos, an act that presumably triggered a moment of guilt about his incredible good fortune so crushing that he was induced to wildly overpay for the refreshing drink, despite the fact the move would inevitably result in an unwanted, feel-good story about the generosity of a visiting celebrity. In reality, however, Clooney was the victim of one of the lemonade stand's trio of cherubic, tow-headed grifters, who cried out, "That quarter was going to go to the kids in Darfur, you cheap Hollywood bastard!" as the actor cheerily accepted the gift and began to walk back towards the set, prompting him to return and grudgingly hand over a suitable "donation."

When George Clooney isn't busy hunting for the real leaker of the Huckabees videos or developing socially conscious movie projects to assuage the guilt induced by all the fun he's having placing Saran Wrap over the toilet bowl in Brad Pitt's double wide (Brad always falls for that one!) on the set of Ocean's 13, the committed actorvist spends time fretting about whether or not it's a prudent idea to publicly repress his intense feelings for Democratic Presidential mancrush Barack Obama for the good of his campaign. In discussing his acute case of Obamamania in today's LAT, Clooney notes the delicate balance between using celebrity to raise a politician's profile and tainting him with the perceived Gay Satanism of "Hollywood values" that Middle America so thoroughly fears:

• Stephen Colbert's Americone Dream flavor lives! Though you might have trouble getting it, since the Colbert Report bought up a whole bunch today. [Midtown Lunch]