Good news! Michael Jackson is apparently well enough to walk to the window and wave to the assembled masses like a bleached, freakishly reconstructed pope. Of course, that could be some other honky's hand executing a clever ruse to distract the public while Jackson is filling his rocket to the moon with prepubescent concubines colonists.
Perhaps the only thing that could make importing a hipster-tinged-irony-o-thon staring competition from NY more delightfully pointless would be star-fuckering the whole thing up with the inclusion of MTV cameras and a band very recently cursed with a Best New Artist Grammy. (Of course, if we were facing off against Walken [warning, ancient blog self-promotion], we're talking a whole, new, dry-eyed ballgame.) A Defamer operative files this report from last night's Staremaster event at Cinespace, where the guys responsible for The OC's theme song squared off against a band with a number in its name:
· Brad Pitt will star in the mind-bendingly self-referential Sony pic Chad Schmidt, where he'll play an actor that can't get work because he looks too much like Brad Pitt. You know, kind of like Skeet Ulrich and Johnny Depp. [Variety]
· Fading NBC golden boy Jeff Zucker's heartsick over his network's falling ratings, but will dry his tears with all the money pouring into NBC Universal. [Variety]
· Ripped from the headlines, pooped into development: Warner Bros. buys disturbing internet chat article U Want Me 2 Kill Him? from Vanity Fair for Bryan Singer to develop and direct. Singer needn't worry—that sort of thing almost never happens on dating sites. [Variety]
· Academy members complain that technical award winners will be stuck in the ghetto of the audience instead of onstage when they're presented with awards. Hey, it could be worse, you could be stuntmen and not get an award at all. [THR]
· Fox Searchlight singlehandedly decimates the Australian film industry with its decision to postpone Eucalyptus indefinitely in the wake of suspicious-sounding "script problems." [THR]
If Fat Actress has any hope (slim as it may be) of succeeding, the producers are going to have to stop surrounding Kirstie Alley with bloated actors that actually make her look slim by comparison. Being in the same frame as John Travolta's head is cheating—the pre-speed Anna Nicole Smith would look like, well, the post-speed Anna Nicole Smith when shot next to the swollen ham Travolta's smuggling at the top of his neck. (And we know that Alley and Travolta worked together before, but did he need the $10,000 that badly?)
Here's a story that was clearly constructed by some kind of "make your own news" generator on the web by plugging in the words "Kid Rock" and "Nashville strip club":
April Florio, the Maxim girl who was photographed with Brad Pitt in Greece, is clearly confused about the standard Hollywood "obscure model has sex with A-list movie star in exchange for fleeting notoriety" transaction:
We just heard a rumor that both Ice Cube and Bruce Willis have left CAA—separately, we suppose, as much as we love the image of Cube and Willis skipping up Wilshire Boulevard, arm in arm, in search of new adventures and new representation. As far as we know, neither has signed on with another firm. But what do we know? We're still imagining the two happily frolicking along, but now Bruno is holding a picnic basket and scattering rose petals behind them, asking Cube if signing up for three more Die Hard sequels would make him look a little desperate.
· Breaking! Nic Cage knocks up mysterious sushi-waitress bride!
· We knew this would happen eventually: a secret lab is finally breeding actresses without nipples, ensuring that embarrassing nip-slips are a thing of the past.
· Hey, Serena Williams isn't looking so hot these days. Must be the regular Ratner injections she's been getting.
· From today’s Hollywood Reporter, courtesy of Cinemocracy: “The FCC received complaints again this year about the Super Bowl halftime show, among them two viewers who said Paul McCartney bored them.”
· You make the call: Is the writer of something like Hitch capable of cleverly referencing Esquire's hoax It-Girl with the name of one of his characters, or is the similarity merely a coincidence? We're leaning towards the latter.
· Last week's "Marcia Cross is coming out" rumor throws a harsh light on unmarried women over 30, who are all obviously lesbians or otherwise damaged in some way.
· The Writers Bloc throws literary stars Andrew Sean Greer (writer of The Confessions of Max Tivoli) and Dan Handler (the man behind the Lemony Snicket industry) together in a room at the Skirball Cultural Center and lets them fight to the death. OK, it's possible that no deathmatch will transpire, but for $20, we at least want some blood spilled.
· Director Peter Bogdanovich does the Q&A thing following a screening of the Mask director's cut at the ArcLight. Obvious question to ask the director: Who spent longer in the make-up trailer, Eric Stoltz or Cher?
· Writer Koren Zailckas signs Smashed: Story of a Drunk Girlhood at Book Soup. There is no truth to the rumor that "Koren Zailckas" is Tara Reid's pen name. For all we know, Reid is functionally illiterate.
Every television actor in Hollywood has his or her own way of dealing with the uncertainty about the status of a show on the verge of cancellation. Some go on a long vacation, some hit the bottle or swallow handfuls of Vicodin, and some devote some of their newfound free time to helping worthy causes.
We'd make a joke about how the Church of Scientology has obviously killed Jenna Elfman's publicist, allowing her to spread the "tech" far and wide, but 1) the following excerpt came from Celebrity, the in-flight magazine of L. Ron Hubbard's mother ship, and 2) actresses that work as often as Vulcans mate don't work don't have publicists, silly!
· Jon Stewart is hot, HOT I tells ya: While Jon Stewart is tied to his The Daily Show anchor chair through 2008, Comedy Central will finance the development of other projects through Stewart's Busboy Productions. [Variety]
· Meg Ryan's agents have a sense of humor, signing her on to star in the romantic comedy Role of a Lifetime, when everyone knows she cashed in her "role of a lifetime" by having that on-screen orgasm in a restaurant an eon ago. [THR]
· Freddie Prinze Jr. works! (At least for a little while.) ABC helps Prinze silence Sarah Michelle Gellar's whining about how he sits on the couch all day by greenlighting a pilot for him. [Variety]
· Showtime to adapt British comedy Manchild for American audiences. Guys, the Brits don't work here, stick with the gays. [THR]
· Knowing that "logistical difficulties" would make getting Billy Crystal and Gregory Hines into a Running Scared sequel impossible (at least without prohibitively expensive CGI), New Line merely recycles the title for Paul Walker. [Variety]
We flipped on the cable news (who knew we get channels besides VH1 and E!?) to get an update on Michael Jackson's condition, and it was reported that a "severe flu" will knock Jackson out of action for a week, with potential jurors sent home until more is known about Jackson's condition. This should give Jackson plenty of time to fake his death, gather the seeds of a new, utopian Neverland society from the talent roster at Nickolodeon, and escape to the secret colony he's prepared on the dark side of the moon. You heard it here first!
In the NYT, Hollywood reporter Sharon Waxman examines how Harvey Weinstein's legendary abuse of his Miramax employees has created a class of super-executives who flourish in the business when take they their increased resistance to physical and psychological pain to other studios. Realizing that there were important lessons learned from Weinstein, Miramax survivors thoughtfully stroke their scars as they ponder important decisions:
Even working at internet speed, we can hardly keep up with the breakneck pace of developments in the Michael Jackson Trial of the Century. We were in the process of writing about the all-star celebrity roster of potential Jackson defense witnesses (Elizabeth Taylor, Quincy Jones, Jay Leno, Kobe Bryant, the ghost of Liberace, et al) when we saw this screaming from the Drudge Report (yes, him again):
