Jon Favreau isn't the only one haunted by release dates these days, though the execs polled recently by Claudia Eller and Josh Friedman aren't necessarily worried about having less than two years to write all the product placement into Iron Man 2. No, their fears hinge on the surplus of new releases reaching theaters annually — 517 titles in 2007 by the authors' counts (most others put it above 600), up 49 percent from '06. And while the glut has been essentially played out elsewhere, it is kind of rare to see such a studio-friendly perspective on the "crisis," even from the pushovers at the LAT; after all, it's the specialty labels of the world — your Warner Independents, not your Warner Bros. — really battling for life in the cluttered market.

THR reports today that Briana "Daughter of B.J. and the Bear's Greg" Evigan has been cast as the lead in Burning Bright—a Born Free meets When A Stranger Calls thriller from Sobini Films in which "a woman wakes in the midst of a hurricane to find a tiger roaming through the home, [and is] forced to drag her autistic young brother through the house in a desperate attempt at survival." As if that isn't intriguing enough, an operative points out that two paragraphs from the end comes this curious statement, which has since gone missing from the online version:

Jay Leno is going through a sexual identity crisis. After getting in trouble with the gays for Ryan Phillippe GayFaceGate, it seems as though all the apologies and gay wedding attendances have him worried his flyover state fan base may have lost faith in his man’s man, Harley-riding rep. And in an effort to clean up that potential mess, he’s resorted to eagerly provoking Justin Timberlake into pervy chatter about the improvisational humor-challenged song and dance boy’s girlfriend Jessica Biel. To prove his macho prowess, he leaps suggestively into a tale about meeting Biel on a Jaywalk when she was just 15 or 16, and insists (twice, in fact) that all sorts of very heterosexual thoughts went flooding through his head. As uncomfortable as this clip makes us, Timberlake finds the entire ordeal a (quite literal) thigh-slapper. The pair’s respective desperate attempts at humor and machismo, after the jump.

Although we are loathe to admit it, we kinda knew that this moment was coming. Ever since Molls started doing the nightly To Do's here, a lot of people have come out of the woodwork with scandalous tales of what she is REALLY like after hours. And, well, as much as it pains us, we think it's probably best to broadcast the Molly McAleer sex tape here on Defamer before it inevitably ends up in Pat O'Brien's grubby paws. While most of you savvy internet surfers probably saw it earlier today, we figured we'd at least turn Molly's shame into a few extra page views. After all the embarrassment it's caused, it's the least she can do for us. Enjoy ... or learn ... or something.

This undated photo provided by the Center for Fabulous Zoological Studies near Florence, Italy, shows a one-year-old Deericorn—the extremely rare and fabled creature, tamable only, as legend requires, by a virgin gelato-maid hailing from the Tuscan town of Prato. True to the fantastical species, this friendly specimen—named "Uno" by its keepers for the Crazy Eights-style card game they enjoy playing while they guard it—produces both magically restorative tears, and an impossibly tender venison carpaccio. We hope it brightens your day as much as it has ours.

Two former members of the infamous Bimbo Summit were not late for very important dates this week. But one alum probably should’ve been. Worker bee Britney Spears was spotted having a one-on-one dinner last night at Havana Room, while pansexual couple of the moment Lindsay Lohan and Sam Ronson pretended to eat dinner with an unexpected new BFF at Il Sole on Monday. And while Britney’s knight in Hebrew-hating armor has proven himself to be quite the positive influence of late, we’re not so confident that Sam and Lindsay’s third wheel will strengthen Lohan’s so-far-successful ascent towards paycheck-earning, substance-free livelihood. The angel on Britney’s shoulder and devil on Lindsay’s revealed after the jump.

We should have known the epic fanboy disgrace following Transformers 2 HamburgerGate couldn't possibly end well for anyone — not deposed extra Reginald "Hedgehog" Brown, not robot-illiterate mega-director Michael Bay, and certainly not producer Don Murphy, on whose message board Brown's tragic tale of exile first found an outlet. Naturally more than just feelings were hurt in the end, and if you had "Wednesday, 2:18 a.m." — when Murphy published a few of Brown's angry e-mails "so that we can all figure out what he is trying to say" — as the official start time on your Litigation Pissing Match scorecard, then you win a prize:

[Photo Credit: INF Daily]

You gotta hand it to Katherine Heigl. In the last two years, thanks to plum roles in Knocked Up and on Grey's Anatomy, she's gone from the forgotten child star from My Father, The Hero (forgotten by everyone except pervs, that is) to an Emmy winning actress who's bumping her way onto the A-List. But along the way, thanks to a string of questionable PR snafus like publicly lambasting Judd Apatow and emasculating her husband Joshua at every conceivable turn, she's racked up more than her fair share of detractors. But being the determined ball buster that she is, she's not going to let a little thing like criticism get in her way of becoming her generation's Julia Roberts. Today, Variety reports that she is set to star in and co-produce Escape, based on the true story of Carolyn Jessop, whose memoir of escaping her polygamist husband became a best-seller. While it remains to be seen if this role will earn her a nod at the 2010 Oscars (if it walks like Oscar bait and talks like Oscar bait, it probably is), we can confirm that she won't be accepting any awards at this year's Emmys. As Tom O'Neil of the LAT's Gold Derby blog reports:

We're receiving our first signals this week that the Jon Favreau Power Index has irrevocably entered "player" levels of awareness. While the global $550 million take for Iron Man says pretty much all the industry needs to know about the viability of the franchise itself, director Favreau bristled recently (and publicly to fans on Iron Man's MySpace message board) at Marvel Studios' sequel announcement — especially that troublesome part about Iron Man 2's scheduled April 30, 2010, release date. Or, as Favreau might say it these days, "Nobody asked Jon Favreau!":

[Photo Credit: Flynet]

This shit literally never gets old: In addition to being one of the sicker defendants with a federal case currently pending against him, up until yesterday it appeared that scat-and-bestiality auteur Ira Isaacs was also among the luckiest. After all, his judge, Alex Kozinski — randomly selected in a rotation with other jurists in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals — had a reputation for libertarian thinking and had established proven freedom-of-speech creds. So progressive was His Honor, in fact, that he even maintained a publicly available Web site featuring his own collection of sexually explicit images (which has since been shuttered).

Jeremy Piven is important, he will have you know. He can pick up girls in a hooptie. He can cut Stephen Dorff in bathroom lines. He can tell Billy Bush to fuck off on the red carpet and his own mother to fuck off over brunch. And, as Janet Charlton reports today, he can also cast wildly eccentric and ill-suited stars in cameos on Entourage based solely on fun chatter he has with them on airplanes. As the piece claims:

[Photo Credit: Getty Images]

Having now spent two consecutive summers curled up inside frigid multiplex screening rooms with champion switchblade-twirler Shia LaBeouf, it was really starting to feel as if the hot young actor was becoming part of the family. Which made it all the harder to watch a leaked video of LaBeouf partaking in a very real round of Five-Fingered Mexican Roulette—an extreme subgenre of backyard fighting banned in 50 states, five territories, and several Maritime provinces—in which he was heard to drunkenly goad his bromantic sparring partner with a dropping of the dreaded rainbow F-bomb. A pink-faced LaBeouf has now dispatched his right-hand flack to deliver this apology! exclusive! to E! Online:

In a breaking celebrity-dumpee cup-enlargement stunner, In Touch Weekly is reporting that Sarah Larson, the woman who spent one year as George Clooney's girlfriend before being unceremoniously relieved of all arm-candy-tendering services, was actually recovering from breast enhancement surgery when she received the life-changing news. They report:

The legend of the "James Bond Curse" took another wholly contrived media twist Tuesday, when Daniel Craig reportedly severed the tip of one of his fingers while shooting the particularly unlucky Quantum of Solace at Pinewood Studios. The injury is Craig's second in a week (he'd previously required eight stitches to close a gash in his chin), but that's just the beginning, notes The Daily Mail:

Despite less-than-stellar ratings and only one season in the bank, the creators of the hormonally charged, red lipstick-laced Gossip Girl are already hard at work on putting together a spin-off. As THR reports, producers will use the original books’ It Girl series as a blueprint, in which the social-climbing, scandalous and date rape-prone Jenny Humphrey character (Taylor Momsen) is shipped off to boarding school to clean up her act — just as the show’s main character, Serena Van Woodsen, had been punished for bad girl behavior like sex with BFFs’ boyfriends and being an über-lush by spending a year in the supposedly rigid countryside enclaves north of Manhattan. As the producers spin their wheels hoping that GG network CW bites, we took a look back on the Boarding School For Bad Boys And Girls phenomenon on television to get a sense of how ridiculously and erroneously Hollywood writers have been depicting these New England pastures in the past:

After yesterday's HamburgerGate drama from the set of Transformers 2, we know how poorly things can go when an extra's big, swinging ego good intentions override his place in a production's creative food chain. As if on cue, Vanity Fair contributor Bryan Burrough — whose book Public Enemies, about John Dillinger and the founding of the FBI, is being adapted by Michael Mann — chimed in at the magazine's Web site with a dispatch from his own cameo in Mann's film. Not quite surprisingly, we suppose, the spoilerrific Burrough fared a little better with his director than one "Hedgehog" did with Michael Bay:

The Weinstein brothers' strip-mining of Project Runway-the powerhouse fashion contest they own-is in keeping with the guiding principle they've stuck with since their heyday at Miramax. Harvey's critical successes were funded by profits from his brother's B-movies; and now the irascible film producer is milking reality television for the same purpose. Fine-except the Weinsteins' demands for payment from Marie Claire for the privilege of association with Project Runway (which we reported yesterday) are extreme even for them. And their motives may have less to do with greed and more with desperation. Hollywood insiders speculate the brothers' $1bn launch financing isn't as much of a buffer as it seems: the investment bank and other investors may pull some of the funds at the end of the year.