We somehow missed this during our morning rounds, but the NY Daily News' Ben "Gatecrasher" Widdicombe reports that a third party is shopping around a sex tape made by longtime Paris Hilton accessory Kim Kardashian (who denies it exists) and an ex-boyfriend, asking anyone interested in obtaining the video to pony up a million dollars:
Marcia Cross, heavy with double child, has been ordered to bed rest by her doctor, but try explaining that to millions of rabid Desperate Housewives fans who could care less about healthy prenatal development if it gets in the way of tying up the "Kyle McLachlan's ex-wife is moving down the block and Bree still doesn't have any idea!" loose-ends Season 3 has presented for her anal-retentive homemaker character. For producers, there was only one solution—bringing the party to Cross:
· Photographer Nikki S. Lee holds the West Coast premiere of her first film, a.k.a. Nikki S. Lee ( "a mix of reality and unreality, acting and non-acting") at the Hammer. Q&A to follow, because not to do so would be madness itself.
[via flavorpill]
· In the grand tradition of celebrities signing self-improvement books with titles containing their names recently established by LL Cool J, Mariel Hemingway will sign Mariel Hemingway's Healthy Living From the Inside Out: Every Woman's Guide to Real Beauty, Renewed Energy and a Radiant Life at Borders in Thousand Oaks. Sure, that's a little far, but she's a famous person, and it's not like she's going to come to you.
· Actor Danny Huston will chat about his career and answer fan questions at Rocket Video. Earn bonus suck-up points by mentioning how good he was in Ivansxtc or by bringing up how disappointed you'll be if Children of Men isn't nominated for an Oscar.
We're not exactly sure how we got on his e-mail distribution list, but a Wall Street lawyer who once appeared on the short-lived ABC attractive-people-screwing-on-the-beach reality series One Ocean View has announced his intentions to throw away everything he's worked so hard for to chase his crazy Hollywood dream of toiling soullessly in the bowels of a Wilshire Boulevard office building:
Once again proving there is virtually no ripped-from-the-headlines crime they're unwilling to exploit in the name of easily-syndicated primetime procedural drama, the gang over at Law & Order are already planning an episode based on the tragic murder of Adrienne Shelly, the actress who was killed in November by a construction worker who then tried to make the crime look like a suicide by hanging her. A reader sent in this casting notice for the role of "Julio Contreras":
Wanting to give unemployed actress Tara Reid a break from taxing party-hosting jobs that involve mental gymnastics like counting backwards from sixty while simultaneously trying not to spill the precious contents of a martini glass brimming with top-shelf alcohol, her handlers set her up with some gigs with responsibilities considerably less onerous than the ones she performed on New Year's Eve, dispatching her to Australia to hug dolphins at Sea World, then to be a "celebrity bid-spotter" at a horse auction in Brisbane. According to The Australian, Reid proved a natural at pointing at people trying to get her attention by waving paddles in her general direction:
Continuing our long tradition of posting first and then asking questions later (or, you know, in the post), we're going to put this one up there:
· The Writers Guild of America nominations smile upon a few comedies this year: Babel, Little Miss Sunshine, The Queen, Stranger Than Fiction and United 93 for original screenplay, and The Departed, The Devil Wears Prada, Little Children, Thank You For Smoking, and Borat for adapted. Since Borat was based on a previously created character, it qualified for the latter category, but that does little to ease the sting for Clint Eastwood's screenwriters (Paul Haggis among them) of knowing their "important" work was nudged out by dialogue of the "I will look on your treasures, gypsy. Is this understood?"-variety. [Variety]
· The American Society of Cinematographers nominated Emmanuel Lubezki for Children of Men, Dick Pope for The Illusionist, Robert Richardson for The Good Shepherd, Dean Semler for Apocalypto and Vilmos Zsigmond for The Black Dahlia for the top feature film award. The winner will be announced February 18 at the Century Plaza Hotel. It won't be broadcast, but you can be sure all the home video shot there will make stunning use of available light. [Variety]
· Here's what some Golden Globe nominees and past winners have to say about their peers, and we don't think we're giving too much away when we tell you that Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck has Forest Fever. [The Envelope]
· The Costume Designers Guild nominated The Devil Wears Prada, The Queen, Little Miss Sunshine (really? The costumes?), Casino Royale, and Babel for contemporary film, and Marie Antoinette, Dreamgirls, Curse of the Golden Flower, The Illusionist, and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest for period. There's a fantasy category as well, but we'll let you find out for yourselves how Eragon faired. [THR]
· The DGA named their TV directing nominees, with ABC getting three nominations for Grey's Anatomy, Boston Legal, and Ugly Betty. NBC's 30 Rock and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip got one each. [THR]
· Want more Gail Berman stories? Of course you do. [Variety, THR]
· Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson politely responds to New Line co-chairman Bob Shaye's comments to Sci Fi Wire that Jackson (who is suing NL over LOTR money he says he says he's owed) will make The Hobbit or any other movie with his studio (and we paraphrase here) over Shaye's rotting, festering dead body. [Variety]
· Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Samantha Morton and Tilda Swinton are in negotiations to star in Charlie Kaufman's directing debut, Synecdoche, New York, a project whose script was memorably made sweet love to by the LAT back in September. [THR]
· Meryl Streep will star in the film adaptation of the ABBA musical Mamma Mia! [Variety]
· The FBI hosted a screenwriting workshop in Westwood to educate writers in the hopes that their counterterrorism efforts will be more accurately portrayed in future film and television productions. For example, scribes learned that Kiefer Sutherland's beheading of a suspect on 24 does not fall within the guidelines of the government's best vigilante justice practices. [THR]
Behold the slow-spinning wheels of Island Justice, as an investigation by the Bahamian police department into the fatal overdose of Anna Nicole Smith's 20-year-old son Daniel back in September has at last been presented to the D.A's office, bringing them that much closer to a decision over whether or not a formal inquest into the death will be necessary. Director of Public Prosecutions Bernard Turner defends the delay:
We had planned on completely avoiding the news that British tabloid sensation David "Bend It Like Me" Beckham and his Spice Girl wife will soon alight in Los Angeles to deliver the largely ignored sport of soccer to unprecedented levels of popularity with American tabloid editors, but after receiving multiple media requests this morning for comment on BeckPosh's (do they have one of those cute conflated nicknames yet?) imminent arrival in our city, we now realize the naive folly of thinking we could just ignore the story. And so we offer our official position on the matter: We are wholeheartedly against the idea of foreign attention whores stealing away scarce Lohan-diddling and vagina-flashing opportunities from our homegrown celebutards, and we'd rather see our native paparazzi burn down Los Angeles rather than forfeit their turf to the coming wave of alien guerrilla photographers who will soon be dispatched to document the Beckhams' every Starbucks visit.
Madonna made a rare, live appearance on The Today Show this morning to promote her voice-over work in the U.S. release of Luc Besson's Arthur and the Invisibles. (Madonna: "I don't like getting up and talking to people this early." Meredith Vieira: "So then what possessed you?" Madonna: "Um, Harvey Weinstein.") She touched briefly upon the subject of OrphanGate, merely to assure the world that David Banda—whom she admits she probably chose because of his physical resemblance to herself—couldn't be happier. But it's her thoughts on the far more pressing and controversial topic of the Donald vs. Rosie feud that have been making headlines:
Citing the kind of unnamed sources that make the supermarket tabloids an infinitely more entertaining checkout line read than the ingredients list on the fifteen cans of cat food the sexagenarian ahead of you is attempting to purchase with an expired coupon, the current issue of Star magazine speculates that Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes have thus far avoided taking recently fabricated baby-unit Suri Cruise out in public because they fear kidnapping plots (SURI IN DANGER? blares the concerned mag's cover copy, next to a photo that in no way could assist potential malefactors in their infant-pilfering efforts) targeting the child. Fortunately, the alleged 24/7 armed security force assigned to Suri-retention detail should be able to prevent any renegade geneticists obsessed with discovering Scientology's baby-manufacturing secrets by reverse-engineering the tyke from absconding with her while Holmes is distracted with self-medicating the despair of her imprisonment with shopping sprees at Barneys.
To quickly review the grand mal seizures that rocked Paramount's executive ranks yesterday: Not only is Paramount Pictures president Gail Berman out (as is co-president of production Alli Shearmur), but after failing to reach terms with the guy from the Water Tower Cafe on a deal to replace Berman, studio emperor Brad Grey has decided to eliminate her position entirely, preferring a "label strategy" of organization, in which every Paramount employee will provide Grey with an in-person, ten-second update on his day's work at the close of business each evening. With all the upheaval in his moviemaking fiefdom yesterday, wizened Viacom corporate overlord Sumner Redstone took a moment to give Grey, whose job security has often been questioned during his tenure atop the 'Mount, an unequivocal vote of confidence following his personnel moves:
· The always-reliable National Enquirer reports that Lindsay Lohan's doctors are concerned about her overworked liver, but isn't that exactly why they installed the back-up last week? With that extra organ up and running, she was able to resume her partying almost immediately.
· LAist thinks that Gwen Stefani might fill the suspicious hole in her touring schedule with a Coachella appearance. Do with this information what you will—we'll probably use it to give ourselves another excuse to skip two days of sweating in the desert this year.
· R.I.P. Yvonne "Lily Munster" De Carlo.
· Overeducated and Underemployed offers five easy tips on how not to pose with your newly won People's Choice Award. Sadly, this advice arrives too late to save Jennifer Aniston from looking like she's so lonely that she's going to sleep spooning her trophy for the next three months.
· Studio 60's resident Krazy Khristian on why the show isn't doing better, other than the fact that in any given episode, a senile writer from the blacklist era might show up to teach us all a lesson about history: "The engine was running so long on this baby before it ran out of the gate, I think it just overpowered people," she said. "It was like the audience was being held at gunpoint and the message was, 'You better watch the best damn show on television or else.' That's liable to turn anybody off."
As we mentioned earlier, vying for the attentions of sauced celebrities piling out of the Beverly Hilton ballroom after the Golden Globes ceremony is a new event on the block: The "Golden Green" party, in the Hilton-adjacent former Robinsons-May retail space, is being co-presented by E! Network and the Environmental Media Association, and it plans on eschewing the wasteful extravagances of your typical Hollywood awards show bash for more eco-friendly party favors:
A reader was so moved by a promotional item a co-worker received for Hilary Swank courageous-white-lady- inspires-inner-city-kids drama Freedom Writers that she found her own writing voice, submitting this report about her disappointment with the shoddily constructed, pungent swag:
· A great night in music round-up: Lady Sovereign at the El Rey; Cursive at the Troubadour; and Lou Barlow at the Smell.
· Do some permanent damage to the impressionable child in your life by subjecting him to Mike Myers' The Cat in the Hat—while teetering on ice skates! More info on tonight's Glide-In Movie at Pershing Square is here.
· Join local comedy miscreants Jimmy Pardo, Paul F. Tompkins, and Jen Kirkman for the debut of You're Welcome, the self-proclaimed "Most Important Show in Show Business," at the Meta Theatre on Melrose. After the laughs subside, hit their post-party at Genghis Cohen.
Normally, any development in an According to Jim cast member's love-life short of a Belushi-related murder-suicide wouldn't rate a mention, but taken with yesterday's news that Hilary Swank is finally owning up to her relationship with a member of the ten-percent-taking caste, we think we're seeing the beginnings of a troubling trend; should an actress form an emotional attachment to someone she should merely be screwing for the career benefits, she should keep that shameful fact to herself, and not further erode the accepted social order by trumpeting her misguided, taboo-defying love to the press.
