Die-hard Aaron Sorkin junkies who find themselves unable to wait until Monday night's Studio 60 broadcast (NBC says they're standing behind it for now, despite nasty, nasty rumors) for their next fix of his signature rat-a-tat, call-and-response banter might find themselves temporarily sated by McSweeney's transcript of Sorkin's last trip to the dental hygenist:
A local children's AIDS charity had recently hoped that Sharon Stone, everyone's favorite loose-screwed screen siren, would auction off a one-of-a-kind "Sharon Stone" Barbie doll at a fundraiser, but when the actress took a look at it, she found it woefully underrepresentative of her own, still-fabulous-at-forty-eight looks. Reports Page Six:
We realize that Tom Cruise's newly resurrected United Artists is merely a brand within the MGM family, but we still think that his parent studio needs to recognize their historic partnership with the star in dramatic fashion. What better way to celebrate Cruise's incipient moguldom than by erecting a UA water tower atop MGM's headquarters, the kind of iconic structure that already beautifies the property of several competitors' lots? We feel so strongly about the idea that we've devoted a good five or six minutes of our in-house design department's valuable time to conceptualizing such a monument, which would loom intimidatingly over Century City and be visible for miles in every direction, letting the entire town know where Cruise's new moviemaking power is centralized. Failing this, MGM could always opt for something on a smaller scale, like commissioning a tasteful bronze sculpture for their lobby depicting the actor kicking Sumner Redstone in the ass.
· It still hasn't totally sunk in that Tom Cruise is going to be running United Artists. We think we all still need some time with this one. [Variety, THR]
Robert De Niro and 50 Cent are in "final negotiations" to star as partners in cop thriller New Orleans, a project that is screaming out to be immediately reimagined as a Lethal Weapon-style buddy comedy. [THR]
Producer Brian Grazer, Universal, and a dump truck full of cash are close to convincing Spike Lee that a sequel to seemingly self-contained bank heist flick Inside Man is a good idea. [Variety]
Madonna-founded Maverick Films is suing a film production company for stealing its ideas for a movie Maverick is making on the Stanford Prison Experiment, which they themselves originally appropriated from a Psychology 101 college textbook. [THR]
Universal's Rogue Pictures will distribute legendary video-game-adapting hack Paul W.S. Anderson's Castlevania movie. [Variety]
A press release in our inbox alerting us to the upcoming nomination announcements for the 33rd Annual People's Choice Awards isn't typically the sort of thing we would bother mentioning, regardless of how thrilled we may be at the prospect of George Lopez getting the popular recognition he so richly deserves as one of America's Favorite Television Actors. But something about the lineup chosen to read this year's nominees struck us as noteworthy:
While various Hollywood types anonymously scoffed at Tom Cruise's plan to fund his post-Paramount moviemaking comeback with funds derived from funnel cake sales and spare change lost by patrons hanging upside down in various gravity-defying thrill rides, we always had the feeling [Ed.note—Sure we did!] that Cruise was planning something a little more dramatic. A press release issued this morning has just revealed the shocking news that Cruise is personally—personally!—reviving dormant studio United Artists with producing partner Paula Wagner and MGM. Retreat into the fetal position and shudder in existential fear as you're introduced to Tom Cruise, movie mogul:
After writers Max Mutchnick and David Kohan made enough money to have a 50-foot, solid gold Colossi erected inside the CBS Radford lot by mining their personal histories for laughs in Will & Grace (the title characters were based on Mutchnick and his best friend), they've found that each subsequent comedy excavation trip through their pasts has yielded fewer riches and quicker cancellations (see Good Morning Miami and Four Kings, based on their morning show experience and friendship, respectively.) But the THR reports that the duo has convinced CBS to forget about their string of misfires and give them yet another chance to recapture the kind of highly lucrative, homo/hetero buddy-sitcom magic they once stumbled upon with Will & Grace by stripping away all pretense of creativity and just writing about themselves:
According to a report in the Indian Financial Times, Al Qaeda is even more upset about the casting of Angelina Jolie in the role of Mariane Pearl than critics who think producers could've gone a little more "ethnic" with their choice, as terror threats to the actress and charity-tagalong Brad Pitt have been deemed credible enough to warrant increased security during her stay in the country to shoot A Mighty Heart:
We know absolutely nothing about the gubernatorial race in Michigan, but this flier that landed in our inbox supporting Republican candidate Dick DeVos gives us all the information we need at a glance: incumbent Governor Jennifer Granholm has allied herself with the darkest, most nefarious forces of liberal Hollywood evil, and she must be stopped. We immediately understand the campaign's efforts to tie their Democratic opponent to Madonna, whose recent headline-grabbing purchase of a foreign orphan is a clear affront to family values and anti-immigration advocates (not to mention her open practice of scented-candles-and-red-string witchcraft), and bullhorn-wielding troublemaker Michael Moore's inclusion on their list needs no explanation, but Scorsese? Haven't these people seen The Departed? Maybe the Republicans think voters believe that anyone who can coax a scene-stealing performance from Mark Wahlberg is clearly in league with Satan himself.
· Today on Good Morning America, Courtney Love revealed that Mel Gibson helped her get sober. Too bad; had Gibson decided to instead join together their substance-abusing tendencies, they could have formed a drug-addicted duo so formidable that not even an entire army of sugartitted and Jewish law enforcement officials could've stopped them from taking over the entire Pacific coast.
· If this photo of Jon Lovitz being approached by two topless blondes on the beach doesn't excite you, then we really have no idea what turns you on anymore.
· Annette Bening knows that chatter about an Oscar nomination for Running with Scissors can only end in heartbreak.
· Kevin Federline's music has earned at least one positive review; then again, it's from the people who recently body-slammed him on national TV, so we're going to imagine that when the WWE critic claims that K-Fed's "song writing skills are better than Beethoven's and Mozart's combined," he's not exactly without bias.
· Tyra Banks has traded in her fat-suit for a man-suit, and she's about to make you reconsider everything you thought you knew about how people actually treat big-breasted supermodels who pretend to be dudes for a day.
Towleroad notes the alleged "inning" of Neil Patrick Harris by his publicist, an incident which began with an item on Canada.com that claimed the actor had pulled strings to get "longtime sweetheart" David Burtka a role on How I Met Your Mother, then was followed by a report on ContactMusic.com ("A grain of salt free with every suspiciously underattributed celebrity news item!" ) which stated that the actor's "publicist, Craig Snyder" (actual name: Craig Schneider, according to StudioSystem) had countered the story by saying, "He's not of that persuasion." Now that the statement's out there, it shouldn't be long before we get a more definitive proclamation on the matter from the flack, who can always distance himself from his remark on the original Canada.com item by clarifying that the words "not of that persuasion," were referring to Harris being Canadian, not gay—a subtle but crucial difference.
Upon discovering that page-pampering, disgraced former Congressman's Mark Foley's checkered past included a cameo in the unfathomably cheesy action flick Strike Force, our friends at Radar made it their mission to obtain a copy of the movie and post a clip from it, allowing us to appreciate how utterly convincing Foley was in portraying "Republican Fairchild," a politician "who hires a band of violent, jet-setting vigilantes to rescue his kidnapped daughter." It's not hard to see how the heady experience of honing his acting chops alongside dramatic powerhouse William Forsythe or making small talk at the craft services table with straight-to-video ubiquity Erika Eleniak nurtured a love of cinema that once made him one of the Hollywood's most valuable allies in Congress. And it's tragic, really, that Foley never got the chance to fully transition from a job in politics to one in the entertainment industry, where a healthy appetite for teenage boys has never been a barrier to one's career ambitions.
· Beach Boy Brian Wilson celebrates the 40th anniversary of Pet Sounds by performing the entire album from start to finish at UCLA's Royce Hall. And if that's not enough musical nostalgia to fill an evening, you'll also get a set from Scritti Politti.
· Music round-up: Voxtrot at the Troubadour; Jamie Liddell at Safari Sam's; Mighty Six Ninety at Spaceland.
· Deadwood creator David Milch will discuss the prevalence of the uses of the words "fuck," "cocksucker," and their many colorful variants in the vernacular of the Old West (among other things, we're sure) with USC history professor William Deverell at the Central Library.
· Jim "Special Ed" Florentine, Daniel Tosh, and Marc Maron will be at CollegeHumor.com's comedy show at the Hollywood Improv tonight, and we're told that mentioning you saw the listing on Defamer will get you in for free. (Or beaten severely and ejected onto Melrose Ave., we can't really remember which. Good luck.)
PrivacyWatch celebrity sightings are submitted by our readers, which we try to post several times per week. So before attending to any other of your daily matters, be sure to type those babies out and send them in. Submit yours to tips[AT]defamer.com (please put "sighting" or "PrivacyWatch" in the subject line) and let the world know about the time you spotted Brooke Shields, barefoot and snookered in the Trader Vic's parking lot.
The Go Fug Yourself girls have snagged a photo of Ann Curry's Cher costume, and what a costume it was:
We ask that you steel yourself for the possibility that a recently filed copyright infringement lawsuit could prevent the release of Fox's Deck the Halls, throwing into utter chaos all of your cherished plans to spend the holidays watching Danny DeVito and Matthew Broderick driven to the brink of mutual homicide by their competing desires to erect the most ostentatious Christmas light displays ever conceived. THR ESQ reports that a screenwriter is seeking an injunction against Fox and New Regency, claiming that their forthcoming movie is uncomfortably similar to a screenplay he wrote which both the studio and production company had previously rejected:
If you've been counting the minutes until Chevy Chase returns to the limelight in this Friday's Law & Order episode by playing the not-entirely-fanciful role of a Hollywood actor whom, upon being stopped for drunk driving, delivers a virulently anti-Semitic diatribe to his arresting officers, we suggest you read no further: The LA Daily News' The Mayor of Television blog has seen the episode, and details the original SNL breakout star's virtual disappearance beneath the skin of a matzo-mistrusting conspiracy theorist:
A Defamer operative out on his late afternoon Jamba Juice break probably didn't expect to come face-to-face with Hollywood greatness on Halloween, but that's exactly what happened, prompting him to file this brief report of his brush with the Queen of Child Actresses (who disappointingly seems to have recycled her costume for a recent charity event) yesterday:
