It's time once again to publicly high-five this week's sponsors, who would never callously leave us to knock up a hotter, better actress dying to have our babies. If you'd like to advertise on Defamer and announce your plans for world domination through the incredible success of your products, see this page.
· As chattered about yesterday, UTA agent Marty Bowen leaves the agency for a producing deal at New Line (with Davis Entertainment president Wyck Godfrey). Kudos to Var for apparently digging up Bowen's Godfrey's high school yearbook photo (at left—update: we obviously had no idea what either of them look like) to illustrate their story. Update: A more recent picture of Godfrey is here. [Variety]
· Steven Spielberg will executive produce another Sci Fi Channel miniseries, this time about grieving people who find a way to reconnect with their departed loved ones via near-death experiences, Nine Lives. We still prefer to commune with the dead through Jennifer Love Hewitt's rack. [THR]
· Midseason Series DeathWatch: ABC will yank Emily's Reasons Why Not and Jake in Progress after just one airing to re-run the Bachelor season premiere on Monday, but the shows are "scheduled" to return on Jan. 23rd. You know, unless more compelling opportunities to replace Monday Night Football with reality show repeats present themselves. [Variety]
· West Coast exec VP Marc Graboff is promoted to West Coast president of NBC Universal TV. In related news, NBC president Kevin Reilly still has his job, for now. [THR]
· Like the desperate guy who starts calling a girl who just gave up the digits before she's even left the bar, Showtime sends out its Emmy screeners an unprecedented five months early. [Variety]
· In the New Line romantic comedy Bridge and Tunnel, Jennifer Lopez will star as a stock trader HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. No, really! J Lo as a stock trader! Sorry, did we just lose our shit a little? Yes, we did. [Variety]
In LA, there are certain pushy pedestrian no-fly zones where celebrities can feel relaxed, knowing that they can luxuriate in their heightened level of existence without being thrown out of the fantasy with autograph or picture requests. The Chateau Marmont is a perfect example. Luckily for us, however, some of you could care less about bursting their protective bubbles:
Today's LAT looks at the current tug-of-war between studios and talent over the always prickly issue of money, with studios complaining that movies are way too expensive for top stars and filmmakers to continue to get first-dollar gross, and actors and directors carping about the studios' creative accounting practices when they get to recoup shadily defined costs before doling out profit participation. Here are the arguments in sound-bite form:
Between his daily, painstaking shit list revisings, Steven Spielberg finds time to make some of the most critically and commercially successful movies of our time. But does his latest effort, Munich, borrow too heavily from an 1986 HBO film based on the same source material called Sword of Gideon? The Wall Street Journal reports that Gideon's producers are suggesting exactly that:
Lost in the excitement of yesterday afternoon's news that the flesh-and-blood union of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's exquisite genetics has a pretty good shot at aesthetic perfection was Jennifer Aniston's reaction to the news that her ex-husband had knocked up the woman who stole her husband with the promise of a welcoming womb. Aniston's flack labeled an earlier report that Pitt called to give her the heads-up about the baby "made-up lies," and the headline above makes us believe that there was a total breakdown in Aniston's emergency Jolie pregnancy warning system. The complex relay of pager alerts, e-mail blasts, and air-raid sirens intended to give the starlet enough lead time to stage a showy public display of affection with current publicity partner Vince Vaughn malfunctioned, denying her the chance to seem too lustfully consumed with her romance to bother to have a nervous breakdown about the surpisingly rapid impregnation of her rival.
· Take Werner Herzog, subtract an 800-lb bear, add a guy in a cheaply made bear costume...eh, we're not going to try and explain it. Just watch Grizzly Bear Man for yourself.
· "Publicists stroll down the carpet, a TV reporter in a clingy blue-gray gown plops on the curb reading a magazine. Across the street, three protestors wave signs urging Hollywood to repent, 'Heathens beware. Your guilt is real! You are going to go to HELL FIRE.'" Richard Rushfield endures the searing hellflame of the People's Choice Awards for the The Envelope's Kudos Crasher column.
· USA Today launches its O-Factor blog, which is either about the Oscars or about achieving a better understanding of the female orgasm, we're not yet sure which.
· Hey, yo, K-Fed don't carr about wurther or not ya likes him. Word.
· Getting pregnant to take advantage of the carpool lane sounds like a great idea, but doesn't hold up in court.
While the second-class citizens of the Paramount lot, CBS Corp's Untouchables, are feeling the humiliating squeeze from their New Viacom landlords, at least they still haven't been forced out of their offices. (For now, at least.) But E! has shipped off some of its less-favored Style Network children from their relatively fancy Wilshire Blvd. offices to the cut-rate production fat camp represented by new space in Glendale. Says one of the displaced:
In the outside chance you are feeling slightly discouraged with your lot in life, we thought we'd ease matters by sharing the above, inspiring Forbes chart of top celebrity earners under the age of 25. You think you're overworked and underpaid? Imagine living Lindsay Lohan's taxed existence the lies, the infighting, the non-stop performance schedule. You can hardly put a price on a career that bleeds you so stone dry, but if you were to, apparently that price would be $11 million. Paris Hilton, meanwhile, earned a comparatively paltry $6.5 million in 2005, yet some might argue that she had to give up a little bit of herself to make that happen. At the end of the day, however, we hope you don't just see the numbers the low, low age ones or the high, high money ones but instead see the combined achievements of some of the most remarkable young people on the planet. Here's to you, Frankie Muniz; $8 mill hardly seems enough to cover the 22 minutes of happiness you bring to each one of us every week.
· NY comedy hotshot Aziz Ansari gets broken in by the jaded LA crowd at the UCB Theatre, then sticks around to join Best Week Ever's Paul Scheer and a surprise panel for a discussion of chapters 6-12 of R. Kelly's hip-hopus Trapped in the Closet. Meanwhile, Greg Proops, Patton Oswalt, Andrew Daly, and the rest of their gang kick the crap out of the unsuspecting crowd at the Hollywood Improv.
· The LA Press Club hosts a reception for Donald H. White, author of The Black Dahlia Files: The Mob, the Mogul and the Murder that Transfixed Los Angeles, at their HQ in Hollywood.
· Maverick filmmaker Werner Herzog will sign copies of the DVD of his award-winning documentary Grizzly Man at the Barnes and Noble at the Grove.
Seeking professional confirmation about an issue seemingly so obvious as to defy all questioning, namely that the baby produced by ab-rolling Ken doll Brad Pitt and exotic freak of beauty Angelina Jolie has a pretty good shot at being pleasant to look at, the AP asked some doctors for their board-certified opinions:
The upcoming Larry Wachowski Rolling Stone expose referenced a few posts ago has been conveniently posted today to their website. The article, not surprisingly, is as utterly bizarre as would befit a tale of a Hollywood wunderkind who decided to have a sex change and form a civil union with his dominatrix. But with virtually every paragraph chock full of quotes from scorned, mangina-having lovers, envious, dishing dominatrixes (and we all know how mean they can be), and anonymous Hollywood insiders weighing in with career advice ("Lose the estrogen, kid."), we must admit, we were left at a bit of loss as to where to begin. How about the Marcus Chong (Tank from The Matrix) SAG arbitration?
It's always a special treat when the Defamer Special Real Estate Correspondent weighs in with a virtual walkthrough of a C-list celebrity home or drops by to pick nits with the LAT Hot Property column. Today, he files a report about the recent property moves involving talk show host/budding local land baroness Ellen DeGeneres, whose acquistions seemingly won't stop until the entire city is blanketed in love nests for her and Portia de Rossi:
The media shitstorm accompanying the revelation that A Million Little Pieces author James Frey embellished moments from his life to appear more bad-ass than it actually was (maybe that gunfight with three hundred Ohio cops was just a speeding ticket, but such is the subjective nature of drug-addled memory) has certainly thrown some heat on the big-screen adaptation of the book, currently in development at Warner Bros. Frey's allegedly mused about landing Tobey Maguire, Orlando Bloom, or Jake Gyllenhaal to play him, but if the producers want to eschew pretty starpower for a deeper commitment to physiognomy, we see a clear choice for the role: boybander-turned-actor Joey Fatone.
The watercooler chatter indicating that bigtime UTA lit agent Marty Bowen is ditching the agency for a producing deal at New Line has reached deafening levels. We're sure we don't need to tell you that Charlie Kaufman immortalized Bowen in Adaptation, who was hilariously depicted with sodomy-craving relish ("See her? I fucked her up the ass.") by Ron Livingston. Pavlovian salivation over Bowen's client list, which (according to the Studio System database) includes the aforementioned Kaufman, the Broken Lizard guys, and James Gandolfini has already commenced, and a poach-happy rampage should soon ensue over those UTA (reportedly busy soiling its Armani pants over the loss) can't convince to stay in the fold. CAA is probably already planning a showy baby-eating exhibition by the side of Wilshire Boulevard to impress any waffling talent with their bloodthirsty commitment to their clients.
Larry Wachowski, the half of the Matrix trilogy writer-director sibling team who is widely rumored to have had a sex change, and is currently shacking up with a dominatrix by the name of Ilsa Stix, clearly isn't screwing around when it comes to his "alternative lifestyle" existence. But with their upcoming movie, V for Vendetta, soon to unleash a shorn Natalie Portman onto the world, the spotlight-shirking filmmaker will inevitably have to contend with the fact that his life is about to become an open, though deeply confusing, book:
· Despite optimistic New Viacom CEO Tom Freston's intimation that chairman/skeletal executive presence Sumner Redstone wouldn't be as "actively involved in the day-to-day business" of his company, Redstone assures us that his bony fingers are still clamped around the throats of both Freston and CBS Corp head Les Moonves. He also says he encourages the two companies to compete—not for any business reasons, just because the bloodsport gives him pleasure. [Variety]
· Pilotmania 06 begins with the announced orders of TV series hopefuls: ABC: Six Degrees from JJ Abrams; CBS: Jericho from Jon Turteltaub and Orpheus from Ridley and Tony Scott; Fox: Faceless; NBC: Heroes from Crossing Jordan producers; UPN: Untitled drama loosely based on the life of Alicia Keys. [THR]
· DGA makes their primetime TV series awards nominations, with Grey's Anatomy and Curb Your Enthusiasm each earning two. Meanwhile, the Producer's Guild revokes their nomination of Curb Your Enthusiasm as the series did not air any original episodes within the awards deadlines. Scrubs is now the happy recipient of their nomination. This little hiccup in the awards process should be tempered by the fact that no one outside of the PGA could possibly care. [Variety, Variety ]
· Starbucks will partner with Lionsgate to market and distribute the movie Akeelah and the Bee; no word on if the partnership will expand to include baristas handing out awards screeners of Crash to anyone claiming to have a SAG membership. [THR]
· Charlize Theron is teaming up with Picturehouse and New Line to produce and star in the drama The Ice at the Bottom of the World. Perhaps disillusioned with the results of looking too hot in spandex in the bomb Aeon Flux, Theron will rough herself up again to portray a heroin addict. [Variety ]
When does a movie's award campaign cease to come off like a transparent attempt to buy some prizes, and start feeling like the grassroots beginning of a new, celebrity-courting, pseudoreligious cult? How about when the studio behind it decides to send out 130,000 screeners yes, you read correctly including one to every single mind-malleable member of SAG. Welcome to the birth of Crashology. Hide your children.
