Today is the 30th anniversary of John Lennon's assassination. Today is also the day that Celine Dion appeared on Larry King Live, and—during a discussion about Lennon—decided to belt out a verse of "Imagine." How spontaneous! Watch inside.

It's your very own printable Grazerhead mask! Download the full-size version here.

According to a press release in the Defamer inbox, Hollywood superproducing entity and non-recovering idea-addict Brian Grazer will be the recipient of the Mary Pickford Foundation Award at the USC School of Cinematic Arts 2008 graduation tomorrow—an honorarium presented by Disney head Bob Iger, and awarded to "men and women of USC who have made an indelible impact on the entertainment industry." This is obviously exciting news indeed, and we encourage any proud parents in attendance to send along video of the mogul-rich milestone. But were that all, for what lifted this publicist-penned correspondence beyond the realm of the commencement-speech-announcement mundane was a file attachment, accompanied by eight little words that shot a volt of pure ecstasy through our spine: "Have also attached a photo for your use." Oh. My. God. Are they kidding us? Just this once: Grazerhead has come home.

A helpful operative happened to notice a Banksyian homage to everyone's favorite cultural-attaché-seeking (or maybe seeking no longer? We'd love a hiring update!) superproducer-entity, Brian Grazer. They write in to explain:

Brian Grazer has made little secret of his helplessness over his knowledge addiction: The superproducer's cravings have become so extreme, he can regularly be found shivering in the alley outside the Imagine offices awaiting his cultural attaché, who arrives bearing a bindle of high-grade Blue Insight for Grazer to cook up over a bare lightbulb and inject directly between his concept-hungry toes. But with his trusty idea-pusher having decided it was time to move on, the unusual job listing for his replacement has been making the Hollywood rounds. The New Yorker reports:

Now that Imagine's Brian Grazer and Ron Howard have had blockbuster Da Vinci Code prequel Angels & Demons put off indefinitely by the strike, we think we've identified a perfect fill-in project that could hit on many of the controversial religious themes that made Da Vinci such a huge success: The 13th Disciple, a planned "fantasy-adventure" film about Jesus Christ's reincarnated evil twin. We've already cast longtime Grazer muse Russell Crowe in the heretical leading role. [Reuters]

Despite having earned untold millions from his incredibly successful superproducing career, won an Oscar for his shepherding of a buddy comedy (with heart!) about a math-loving schizophrenic and his favorite imaginary friend, and having recently dragged a troubled, $100 million passion project out of development hell and into a lucrative box office run all by himself, Imagine's Brian Grazer is still tormented by feelings of Hollywood inadequacy. In today's NY Times, Grazer, his signature hair-spikes seemingly wilting with each anguished word, laments that for all of his show business accomplishments, his name is still relatively unknown by the middle-American moviegoers to whom he delivers Russell Crowe-starring cinematic delights every couple of years:

· In a badly timed announcement of blockbuster-derived profits, Viacom crows about the "phenomenal success" of "new global brand Transformers" that helped lift their net income by 80 percent, forgetting to transfer the revenues to a balance-sheet loss column and publicly lament that "there's no money to be made in this dying business of ours." [Variety]
· Knowing that TV is, like film, a financial dead end (see bullet point above), Oprah is launching her own channel on the YouTubes. If that venture proves as successful as the media mogul hopes, the purchase of the entire internet could quickly follow. [THR]

· Ron Howard and Akiva Goldsman are frantically finalizing the shooting script of Da Vinci Code sequel Angels & Demons before the Oct. 31st deadline, hoping that the mad rush towards production won't jeopardize the duo's ability to produce the kind of easily digestible, crowd-pleasing entertainment that always results from their lucrative collaborations. Meanwhile, star Tom Hanks has been presented with a hair-growing schedule that will barely provide the actor with enough time to reproduce his character's signature demi-mullet. Truly, no one is immune from the pressures of the looming™ strike. [Variety]
· In what is always a good sign for a floundering series, The Bionic Woman gets another new showrunner, not even two months after "creative differences" ended NBC's short-lived love affair with Glen Morgan. [THR]

We at Defamer realize that a layout issue in our recent redesign has somewhat reduced our ability to shock you with the unexpected deployment of Brian Grazer's official headshot (the Grazerhead™ to regular visitors), and so in the interest of putting you back on edge, we're bringing out the nukes: this screenshot of a shirtless Grazer, who was cornered by a TMZ video camera this weekend at the Polaroid Malibu Beach House after presumably trying to superproduce an anonymous blonde's phone number by casually mentioning that she'd be perfect for the Splash sequel he's been wanting to do for twenty years.

· Universal Pictures extends its 21-year marriage with Imagine Entertainment, signing a five-year deal that gives the studio first-look access to the fascinating contents of superproducer Brian Grazer's mind through 2013, and which ends a rumored flirtation with those homewreckers at Paramount. [Variety]
· The AMPTP has issued a clarification about its recent "let's nuke the residuals system" musings, a proposal that the Writers Guild is expected to dismiss as merely "crazy," a downgrade from yesterday's "batshit insane." [THR]

Shortly after fainting from delight from reading the phrases "Brett Ratner is set to direct," "Brian Grazer is producing," and "film about the life of Playboy magazine founder Hugh Hefner" contained in the lede of today's Variety story on the progress of a Hef biopic, a quick-thinking intern revived us with smelling salts, allowing us to read about how Hollywood's most lovable fauxteur and its leading, newly single superproducer have come to team up on the dream project. Reports Var:

· Imagine's Brian Grazer will superproduce an adaptation of the graphic novel Cowboys and Aliens for DreamWorks and Universal, a project the spikey-haired seeker described as the "perfect realization of all the cowboys-meeting-aliens-related ideas I've been quietly developing since I was a hyperactive six years old locked in my bedroom with a chest full of toys." [Variety]
· Fox's show about people who think they can dance continues to shame their one about people who think they can direct movies, pulling in more than triple the viewers of the last On The Lot installment. [THR]
· Another famously overweight TV personality rumored to be under consideration to replace Bob Barker is Drew Carey. [Variety]
· Advertisers give a $2.4 billion upfront vote of confidence to Steve McPherson's vision for ABC, with one Madison avenue booster gushing, "Have you heard about this Cavemen thing? It's like a sitcom and car insurance commercial all rolled into one! Think of what they could do with that Coke ad with the polar bears." [THR]
· Stripping off his shirt and smearing his entire body in warpaint, CEO Howard Stringer whipped 7,000 employees into a frenzy at a shareholder ceremony in which he dramatically declared himself the "Sony Warrior." [Variety]

· Ladies and gentleman, we give you the next Snakes on a Plane. Coming soon from director Barry Sonnenfeld: Space Chimps. We'll say it again: Space Chimps. One more time? OK, if we must: Space Chimps. Begin erecting your unauthorized fan sites...now. (And make sure to tell the studio it's only going to work if they make it a live action film.) [Variety]
· A Tennessee projectionist is fired for telling Ain't It Cool News how shitty the new Fantastic Four movie is a week or two before Fox was ready to deal with the inevitable flood of negative reviews awaiting its superhero sequel. [THR]
· We care so little about this meaningless milestone that we're loathe to even note it, but Pirates 3: Whatever It's Called reaches the $500 million mark internationally in a record 20 days, a week faster than Spider-Man 3: We're Not Even Going To Bother Giving It A Real Title. Congratulations, winning multimedia conglomerate that released a successful movie-related project! [Variety]
· Ben Silverman renames NBC Universal Television Studios as Universal Media Studios, a move intended to demonstrate that he's not too busy partying to enact superficial changes at his new company. [THR]
· Hollywood Out of Ideas, Hollow Man Edition: Universal and Imagine hire David Goyer to write and direct a new take on H.G. Wells' Invisible Man. Brian Grazer to superproduce. (Note: The Grazerhead is too tied up by regrettable personal business to make an appearance at this time.) [Variety]

· Local comedy monopolist Judd Apatow continues to integrate the industry's mirth-making entities into his rapidly expanding humor-producing conglomerate, collaborating with Jack Black, Knocked Up's Harold Ramis, Superbad's Michael Cera, and an Office writing team on Year One for Columbia. [Variety]
· The dust is finally starting to settle at a post-Albrechtgate HBO, with "longtime Albrecht right-hand man" Michael Lombardo reportedly being promoted to a new job overseeing all west coast operations. [THR]
· Jim Carrey will star in the dark comedy I Love You Phillip Morris (by Bad Santa's Glenn Ficarra and John Requa), an idea pitched as Catch Me if You Can meets Brokeback Mountain. There is no direct Judd Apatow involvement that we can discern, a fact that could doom the promising project to eventual turnaround. [Variety]
· Imagine superproducer Brian Grazer's unparalleled Bacon-attaching skills lead to ubiquitous actor Kevin joining the cast of Frost/Nixon, the big-screen adaptation of the Peter Morgan play. [THR]
· The U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals throws out the FCC's "capricious" rulings against Fox over Cher saying "fuck" and Nicole Richie "shit" during broadcasts of the 2002 and 2003 Billboard Music Awards, a landmark decision that reaffirms an awards show presenter's right to "accidentally" swear on live TV. [Variety]

Because our secret publicity contract with frighteningly handsome, genius-level superproducer Brian Grazer mandates that we draw attention to his every appearance across a variety of media, we note a curious sketch from this weekend's SNL season finale, in which host Zach Braff is harassed by the obsessed assistant (whom, we fear, might be a dude) of one "Brian Gold," a powerful and spikey-haired Hollywood executive. For reasons that are left unexplained in the skit, "Gold" is subletting Grazer's Imagine Entertainment office space, possibly to help defray the cost of the company's exorbitant Beverly Hills rent while the intellectually voracious executive criss-crosses the globe in search of minds to plunder with his creepy powers. After the jump, NBC's official YouTube clip of the sketch, curiously described as "Melissa and Zach Braff make a connection in Brian Grazer's office."

· Frank Langella will reprise his stage role as Nixon for Imagine's big screen version of Peter Morgan's celebrated play, Frost/Nixon. The casting suggests director Ron Howard will remain true to the source material, though that doesn't completely rule out Akiva Goldsman being brought in for an eleventh-hour rewrite that incorporates several make-believe characters that exist only in the disgraced President's paranoid imagination. [Variety]
· In further Imagine news, Ridley Scott signs on to direct Russell Crowe in Nottingham, the "Robin Hood but where the Sheriff's the good guy" movie, hoping the two can reignite Gladiator, not-so-much A Good Year, magic. [Variety]

When last we encountered superproducer Brian Grazer. he was at the center of a media maelstrom resulting from his selfless desire to unscrew the top of his singularly coiffed head and share with the world an unobstructed view of the constantly churning works within through an ill-fated guest-editing stint on the LA Times Sunday Current section, but today's Var brings news that Grazer has quickly shaken off the scandal and gotten back to what he does best: finding material for Imagine Entertainment partner Ron Howard to chew up and regurgitate into a form easily digestible by the moviegoing masses. The just-announced project is a remake of 1970's Colossus: The Forbin Project, the tale of the government supercomputer controlling America's nuclear arsenal achieving malevolent sentience and plunging the world into chaos (think Wargames meets, um, Wargames), which Grazer plans to reimagine as a somewhat more personal narrative: His Colossus: The Spring Street Project will be the story of a revenge-obsessed Hollywood producer's cybernetically enhanced brain hacking into the mainframe of a major metropolitan newspaper and erasing its entire archives as payback for its refusal to publish some essays he solicited from some intellectual friends.

Because even the most utilitarian of office furniture becomes highly desirable when you're told it once belonged to a former child star turned helmer of blandly palatable Hollywood blockbusters, we offer for your online bidding consideration this blocky, brown specimen, which, an eBay seller tells us, once sat in The DaVinci Code director Ron Howard's Imagine offices.

Late yesterday afternoon, Imagine philosopher-king Brian Grazer's introduction to his ill-fated Current section was saved from the oblivion to which it was dispatched by the LAT's cautious publisher, whose decision to kill the stunt-edit called down from the media heavens a shitstorm arguably equal in filthy intensity to the one he was trying to avoid in the first place. Today, Grazer's statement on the matter is circulating in reports about the controversy (words probably lovingly composed by the same publicists who got him into this mess), hinting at the delights the intellectually voracious superproducer of easily digestible populist entertainments had planned for the Times' readership this Sunday morning. From THR: