The faceless multimedia conglomerates behind your favorite movie factories are on edge about an SEC proposal that would require that they disclose the staggering amount of money that they pay out to to their stars and studio heads, as they prefer to keep shareholders blissfully ignorant of, say, how many millions Viacom will really hand over to Tom Cruise to save Paramount's summer with M:i:III. Variety details other reasons why the studios don't want their paychecks on the record:

Jake Gyllenhaal's brain-liquifying levels of dreaminess have made him a universal object of desire, with every surfacing photograph of him and companion used as definitive evidence in the ongoing "He's on our team!" tug-of-war. (Even the canine community claimed him when he was snapped canoodling with an underage puggle.) Something about the coziness between Jake and friend Austin Nichols in a series of photos taken at a Lakers game a few months ago really set people's Jakedar a-beeping. Today, the NY Daily News reports a rep insists they are "just friends":

Sarah Silverman, who recently joked about her "rape" by elderly talk show host Joe Franklin in The Aristocrats, takes on a potentially more dangerous subject by explaining why she prefers one of Hollywood's celebrity-courting cults fame-inclusive spiritual inspiration societies to another:

America just wants Jennifer Aniston to be happy, OK? And by "America," we of course mean that segment of the population who can be lured into theaters by people holding clipboards amd promising free movie tickets in exchange for their very valuable opinions on the filmmaking process. Page Six reports that The Break Up, the project that conveniently brought together the newly jilted Aniston and her bearlike love-savior, Vince Vaughn, went through some reshoots to fix a negative reaction to the film's ending:

· Tom Cruise calls his plane Kiss Me Kate. However, it isn't named for fiancée Katie Holmes, but for his childhood desire to be fake-married to Katherine Hepburn.
· POSSIBLE "SURPRISE" ENDINGS TO THE NEW SAMUEL L. JACKSON FILM SNAKES ON A PLANE."Scenario Two: After single-handedly killing all snakes on board and landing the plane, Jackson steps onto the tarmac and removes his trench coat only to reveal that he is, in fact, made entirely out of snakes."
· We imagine that kissing Ryan Seacrest has cured people of a lot of things, but we thought that Teri Hatcher's verbal diarrhea in the presence of a camera and microphone would be resistant even to his Lourdes-like healing abilities.
· Is Colin Farrell back on the sauce? Maybe being at a party sponsored by Johnny Walker wasn't such a great idea.

When a GQ profile quoted Michael Douglas as taking a petty swipe at everyone's favorite globetrotting altruists Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie ("I don't know about Brad Pitt, leaving that beautiful wife to go hold orphans for Angelina. I mean, how long is that going to last?" were his reported words), it instantly became the diss heard round the world. But the impressively bearded actor has gone on the record with Extra, claiming that the quote was entirely fabricated:

· The Music Center Speaker Series lures its latest A-list participant, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Please, no questions on the war. He's so totally over that.
· The New Beverly double-features Hitchcock's Spellbound and Notorious.
· Andy Dick will be among the comedians on hand at the Drug Policy Alliance's benefit at the Skirball Center to "Prove the War on Drugs Can Be a Laughing Matter!" Really, only a whoopee cushion liberally dusted in blow could possibly have been a better choice for the event.

This week's New York magazine wades knee-deep into the Messiah-level anticipation accompanying the impending birth of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's forthcoming biological offspring, the perfect being expected to emerge from Jolie's womb, cut its own umbilical cord, and toddle off into the world to take care of the business of saving mankind. No one stands to profit more from the infant's arrival than the lucky paparazzo who first captures an image of the graced rugrat (assuming, of course, that the new parents don't sell the photo themselves and donate the money to their favorite charity), and one of the photographers plays out the "bleak scenario" that could unfold in the event of a Paris-based (where the couple now has an apartment) birth:

Saturday night was LA's chapter of the GLAAD Media Awards, and the gay-friendly celebrities showed up in droves. (The gay-closeted celebrities, on the other hand, chose to skip again this year.) Moments before this picture of Teri Hatcher and Nicolette Sheridan doing the lezzie lip mash was snapped, Hatcher was overheard asking her Desperate Housewives co-star, "Wanna know what Ryan Seacrest tastes like?" Our ironically titled Defamer Correspondent for Anti-Defamatory Awards Shows sends in this conveniently bulleted report:

In this exclusive Parade.com poll accompanying the teaser for their story on Tom Cruise, his troubled childhood, and dead-eyed war bride (actual press release title: EXCLUSIVE PARADE.COM POLL FINDS VAST MAJORITY SYMPATHIZE WITH TOM CRUISE; 84% BLAME THE MEDIA ON NEGATIVE PRESS), more than 8 out of 10 Celebrity Centre drones tasked with sabotaging online surveys agree: Cruise's year of almost universally unfavorable coverage is the fault of the media. Putting aside for a moment the somewhat tautological assertion that the media is to blame for the bad press, we see their point: Had the media-industrial complex not forced Cruise to brutalize Oprah's furniture, publicly browbeat Brooke Shields and Matt Lauer with his incredible knowledge of the history of psychiatry, and quickly marry and impregnate someone previously most famous for being Dawson's hyperverbal girlfriend at the outset of the press tours for the suspicious couple's summer blockbusters, the actor would probably have enjoyed a relatively controversy-free year.

The following PrivacyWatch sighting takes place between 1:00 pm and 2:00 pm on Sunday, April 9, 2006:

The eating disorder repudiation is a particular subspecies of the larger genus of publicist-generated celebrity denial: A deathly thin actress will insist up and down that their frame has nothing to do with, say, their 17-calorie-a-day Sweet n' Low and olive diet, and everything to do with some convenient external factor ("I inhereted a freakishly fast metabolism from my Grammie Bea!") The excuses are almost always, pardon the expression, hard to swallow, and no one made more of them than Calista "I'm tiny boned!" Flockhart. Flockhart has finally fessed up that her skin-and-bones look from her Ally McBeal days was a result of—surprise!—constantly exercising and not finding the "time to eat":

· 20th Century Fox TV takes all of the suspense out of the next few seasons of 24, virtually guaranteeing that Jack Bauer will survive a host of close shaves by signing up Kiefer Sutherland to a three-year, eight-figure deal. Sutherland will also get a shingle on the Fox lot with the deal, tentatively named I Am Only Beheading This Guy For The Good Of The Country Productions. [Variety]
· ABC further probes the possibilities of internet delivery by posting episodes of Lost, Desperate Housewives, and others on their website the day after they originally air. Advertising fans annoyed by a DVR's fast-forwarding features will be thrilled to discover that online viewers will have to sit through unskippable commercials. [THR/Reuters]
· In perhaps the most inevitable syndication deal of all time, Lifetime has bought the basic-cable rights to rerun episodes of Desperate Housewives. [Variety]
· Will Arnett quickly moves on from Arrested Development's death, selling a pitch to DreamWorks and Paramount about a "former U.S. vice president's privileged son, who is assigned an ambassadorship in Europe, where he quickly becomes the quintessential ugly American." For now The Ambassador seems to have one the title coin-flip over The Ugly American. [THR]
· Has it really taken Hollywood an entire year after her death to buy the rights that would allow someone to make a TV movie about the Terri Schiavo story? This place is really slipping. [Variety]

Gwyneth Paltrow and husband Chris Martin set the stupid celebrity baby name bar absurdly high on their fruit-inspired first try, dooming their second child to disappointed shrugs and "Eh, it's not that bad" indifference. But Moses? Did they even try? We were kind of hoping they were going to stay with the inanimate-objects-in-the-kitchen theme and come up with something truly inspired, like Placemat or Four Slice Toaster.

Life in the big house can be a lonely affair, eased only by the shallow, temporary comforts of the occasional gang rape. Perhaps, then, there is no better audience for Brokeback Mountain's tale of man-on-man yearning than a prison population, who know all too well the pained longing that can often follow a spittle-assisted "claiming" of the new blue-eyed number on the block. Unfortunately, a Massachusetts prison didn't feel the same way, and are disciplining a guard who sought to share the Brokeback experience with his inmates:

This weekend's LAT Hot Property column reported the sale of Kevin Costner's Hollywood Hills spread to American Idol Ryan Seacrest for $11.5 million, a passing of the luxury real estate baton from fading movie star to inexplicably popular, general-use TV host. A brief rundown of the estate's features:

The morning after The Sopranos' Gay Vito Spatafore cemented his status as the breakout character of the new season [SPOILER ALERT] by being caught cavorting in a leather bar by a couple of wiseguys, the AP profiles the man behind the bear mobster, actor Joseph R. Giannascoli. Giannascoli claims that taking Vito's arc gayward was his own, somewhat cynical idea, a ploy to push his character from "Hey, want some more gabbagoo, Tone?" Satriale's back room space-filler to front-and-center made guy, and shares some of the colorful past (gambler, restaurateur, and dabbling drug-dealer) that gives so many Sopranos regulars a tinge of authenticity:

You may have woken up on the bathroom floor this morning, praying for a swift death, but we know what kept you from answering your own prayer by flushing your head down the toilet: the knowledge that the box office numbers were waiting for you at work. Enjoy.

· Fake PregnancyWatch: Tom tells the Germans he's ready to fly home the second he gets word that Katie's air-stopper has been unplugged. He tells Parade how rough he had it as a kid. Katie bites the binky, but not before carting around her beachball for a day of stationery shopping.
· The Pellicanist: Director John McTiernan is charged with lying to the feds about his involvement with Pellicano. Sumner Redstone stands behind his boy Grey, for now.
· Ratnerweek: Playing svengali to Lindsay Lohan. Causing catfights between Lindsay and Jessica Simpson.
· Sure, eight inches is nice. But it's the Drakkar Noir that seals the deal.
· WE HEAR....THAT Page Six is up shit's creek without a paddle.
· Lorenzo Lamas puts the swinger in Swingers.
· Kiefer Sutherland has a serious fleur de sel problem.
· The United 93 trailer lets you relive the worst day of your life with a bucket of $8 popcorn in your lap.
· Maybe our math's off, but that would have made her 17 when they started dating. Right, Chad?
· Hugh Hefner feels just awful about sticking Jessica Alba on a cover and selling a bunch of magazines.
· Paramount develops a new system to help sort their master race employees from CBS' rodent-bloods.
· Cameron Diaz's breasts see justice.
· James Bond challenging LeChiffre to a winner-takes-all round of Uno just doesn't have the same ring to it.
· Nothing will prepare you for the first time you get a Paris Hilton song stuck in your head.

· We were just about to take back every negative thing we've said about this year's Best Picture winner after reading this "Real Life Crash" item, but then we remembered that according to Paul Haggis, there are no gay people or skinheads in LA.
· There's another indictment in the Pellicano wiretapping case today, but it's not a studio executive or Scary Hollywood Lawyer, so we're finding it hard to get too whooped up about it.
· April Fool's Day saves a straight Rescue Me actor from being homosexualized for the second time. [Estimated price of item for FX: $135]
· Good news! Rob Schneider is not on steroids.
· Dumpster Baby is real. Be very afraid.
· Teri Hatcher talks about her sexual abuse again, but this time without posing in her underwear immediately afterwards.