In your sobering Monday media column: Publishers Weekly editor laid off, scrounging for dollars and cougars, former New York Times Hollywood reporter Sharon Waxman's web site cometh, and more!
There are two Paula Abduls: The first, a fierce and focused businesswoman, overseeing a growing multimedia empire bolstered by her stratospheric visibility on American Idol. The other is tanked, and the one we actually care about. You rarely get just one or the other, mind you, but instead a glorious spectrum of increasingly blurry...how do you say...shades of Paula.
Bill Ayers, the former Weather Underground radical kid in the 60s whose relationship with Barack Obama was the single most important issue facing America during the presidential campaign, has finally spoken to the intrepid journalists at Good Morning America (Click to watch a highlight). He kept his mouth shut like a good boy throughout the entire campaign, and now it's time to sell a few books! So Ayers has smartly added a new afterword to his 2001 memoir and reissued it, with this stunning addition: he may have been a "family friend" to Obama, rather than just "a guy in the neighborhood." Grab your guns, patriotic Americans! Ayers told GMA that, yes, he knew Obama from way back, and yes, he was on a board, and all of this is public, and thousands of other Chicagoans knew Obama just as well as he did, and that the entire issue is bullshit, all of which is patently true. Still... It's now clear that Hussein Obama is little more than a Manchurian Candidate who has squirmed his way into the White House only to take direct orders from radical latte-sipping college professor Ayers! Even more clearly, Ayers is a canny businessman for someone so opposed to the capitalist power structure. Instead of selling 35 copies of his book a year to his own students as required reading, he's now poised to sell thousands to various right wing lunatics who will buy it just to "preserve the evidence" of his Obama ties for use in the coming race war. Good for him.
The Village Voice has gotten a good look at Disney's new straight-to-DVD Tinker Bell (now in 3-D with speaking capabilities!), and declares the 2008 version of the spritely heroine—the original of whom is wrongly rumored to be modeled on Marilyn Monroe—to be a platitudinous pixie snore. They also find her extremely "sexy/creepy...a chubby-cheeked, slightly infantilized adolescent with the body of a grown woman. She sports the skimpiest dress in the movie."Tinker Bell isn't traditionally the first Disney starlet one's mind wanders to when hoping to be aroused by hand-drawn family entertainment. She's not Ariel, glistening with salt water in a revealing oysterkini top. She's not the gorgeous Esmeralda—the Demi Moore-voiced Hunchback of Notre Dame gypsy enchantress who seduced the deformed gonger with one bat of her emerald eyes. She's not Pocahontas, Mulan, Jasmine, or Belle, either. What is she, anyway? Is she a child? A grown woman? Would she fly up your pants in a darkened theater? And—perhaps most of all—what is it that makes her first-ever broadcast interview with GMA's Chris Cuomo so deeply unsettling? Probably their sexy/creepy chemistry. Jeez, get a room or take it behind the Wishing Tree, will you guys, already?
If you think you've had about all you can stand of whatever controversy Tropic Thunder is shoveling today, try notching down the dosage a bit with Robert Downey Jr.'s appearance today on Good Morning America. Eschewing a straight discussion of his ostensibly incendiary portrayal of an Australian Method actor in blackface, RDJ brought his over-lit facial hair to bear on Chris Cuomo and the rest of the studio crew, whose early laughter fades into a riveted 'stache trance unseen since then-UN Ambassador John Bolton made a news round-up way back in 2005. Try for yourself, but only if you're insured and have a friend nearby to spot you. We can't have that many lost work hours on our conscience, at least not in this economy. [ABC]
With Tropic Thunder —the product of Ben Stiller's harrowing journey into the heart of retarded darkness— storming multiplexes today, the film's stars are going into promotional hyperdrive. And nothing sells your movie more than some old-fashioned controversy—particularly one in which you're accused of being insensitive to the disabled. (Semitic advocacy groups, meanwhile, surprised everyone by seeing nothing objectionable in Tom Cruise's minstrelsy, Jewface performance.) On the GMA hotseat today was Stiller and co-star Jack Black, both of whom calmly explained that in matters of insensitivity and bodily function, context is everything; framed by the movie's central comedic conceit of actorly self-indulgence, then, not a single dropped R-bomb or ass-bomb should be considered anything other than purely satirical.
At long last, The Bachelorette—that epic, six-week-long search for eternal love in which inarticulate Mediterranean beauty DeAnna Pappas is made to choose a suitable lifemate from a man-harem of 25—reaches its chilling conclusion tonight on ABC. Stopping by the GMA studios to show off her sparkly new hardware for a visibly envious Chris Cuomo, Pappas explained the difficult-to-grasp concept of having to choose between "two totally different people. You got one guy on one hand, and another guy on another hand, and I'm two totally different people with each guy." This suggests that Pappas is the relationship equivalent of tofu, her spongy personality absorbing the flavors of any man with which she comes in contact. Somewhere, Brad Womack is breathing a sigh of relief that he ditched this chick at the Fantasy Proposal Gazebo, and chose instead to hold out for some hot, Serbian supermodel ass like his tire-fortune-heir predecessor.
Cynthia Nixon is living proof that bad things happen to good actresses. Speaking openly for the first time about her 2006 diagnosis with breast cancer on Good Morning America today, the happily outed actress demonstrated exactly how a public figure maintains grace under fire. And even after telling us how one goes about telling their kids they sorta have to undergo an operation, and how to deal with the public's response to her coming out, one of the most intriguing lessons the Sex And The City star shared had to do with which half of a lesbian couple is called "Mom" and which is called "Mommy." Nixon's life lessons, after the jump.
A memo! "Today we received a letter at the offices of Good Morning America at 147 Columbus Avenue that mentioned anthrax. We immediately notified the NYPD and they are investigating the situation. Out of an abundance of caution we closed down the area around the office and are awaiting additional information from authorities. As we have more information we will provide an update via email."
We hear that half an hour ago, Good Morning America's floor was quarantined due to an anthrax scare. For real? UPDATE: Now we hear that someone sent a letter to Sam Champion that said he intended to spread anthrax. He being the letter-writer. Not Sam Champion.
