CNN uses the impending release of Jerry Bruckheimer's Glory Road (coming to a theater near you this Friday!), the story of the first all-African-American college basketball team who won the national title in 1966, to examine the "brand" that the superproducer's billions-grossing body of work has created. While Bruck evasively touts the simple power of his own taste in his selection of material ("I don't know what you like, I don't know what an audience likes; I know what I like. It's what I try to do."), he does explain what drew him to the current project:

Later today, those with access to a television (and, it goes without saying, a handful of antidepressants) can tune in and see what happened when Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes dropped by Ellen DeGeneres' place to gab about the Miracle Baby with their favorite galpal:

The tempest grows over the controversial last minute pulling of Brokeback Mountain from the Sandy Megaplex, a movie theater owned and run by Utah Jazz owner Larry Miller. Yesterday, representatives of Utah's gay community made a "call to action" against the theater, demanding to know "why that decision was made." So far, the only communication on the subject has been a notice posted in the ticket window an hour before the film was to have its premiere screening, stating, "There has been a change in booking and we will not be showing 'Brokeback Mountain.' We apologize for any inconvenience." Since then, not a peep:

Lindsay Lohan is a true master of her craft. A lesser attention whore tabloid victim would've called it a night after showing up at a bar with last year's most celebrated cokehead, Kate Moss, and scrawling a nasty message equating rival Scarlett Johansson with a part of the female anatomy (or, in perhaps a worse sin, pandering to Brit BFF Moss by appropriating some slang). But not our Lindsay, who made her Sharpie wall-poetry merely the first act of her evening. Says Page Six:

· Jossip interviews the guy who set up DirtyColin.com for the people who are trying to sell the Colin Farrell sex tape on the internet, who reveals that he expects the site to be back online in the next day or two, despite rumored legal threats and court injunctions.
· This is not the most flattering comparison we've ever seen. We'll just leave it at that.
· Thank you, Ari Emanuel, HuffPo blogger and official Agent Dance mascot, for giving us the pleasant image of the president suckling a teat. If he had a little more blogging experience, he would've Photoshopped up something nasty to go with it.
· Pierce Brosnan is relieved to be free from the typecasting, the arched-eyebrow dialogue, and the $20 million paychecks that come with being James Bond.

Robert Altman will join an illustrious list of movie history's greatest also-rans, when he is bestowed at this year's Academy Awards ceremony that greatest of consolation prizes for a lifetime's worth of unrecognized achievement, the honorary Oscar:

This week's NY Observer takes a look at the Hollywood subspecies of "manager," the industry creatures who brave the constant fear of being fired by treacherous clients for the crime of finding them work for the opportunity to attach themselves to the same clients' projects as producers. But besides the legal differences between managers and their percentage-taking cousins, agents, the two types of reps seem to be made of different stuff:

· And now, your Hump Night music line-up: Pennywise with No Use for a Name and Suicide Machines at the Henry Fonda; Dirty Little Secret at the Silverlake Lounge; Open Hand at the Troubadour.
· Gary Panter, Emmy-winning head set designer on Pee-Wee’s Playhouse and creator of the graphic novel Invasion of the Elvis Zombies, sits down to rub inspired craniums with deservedly lauded Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn author Jonathan Lethem at the Hammer Museum.
· AFI hosts a screening of Taxi Driver at the ArcLight, the film that perhaps makes us most acutely feel disappointment in the current Meet the Fockers/Analyze That incarnation of Robert DeNiro.

Perhaps the greatest celebrity neighbor feud of our generation, between an overweight, wisecracking ABC sitcom dad (Jim Belushi, we think), and one of the aging actresses who played Catwoman on the 1960s Batman TV series (Julie Newmar, but again, don't quote us) has finally come to a happy, made-in-Hollywood ending:

Not that we didn't believe People and their double-"representative"-and-an-aid-worker sourced story from earlier today, but now that Pitt publicist Cindy Guagenti, whose job it is to creatively distort reality in accordance with her client's wishes, has copped to the knocking-up, we're feeling a little better about things. Strap yourselves in for two trimesters' worth of breathless, wall-to-wall coverage of every aspect of Jolie's pregnancy: two-page-spread analyses of her bump's visible development, stolen sonograms, and expert opinions on how the happy parents might best explain to Maddox and Zahara (and to all the other adoptation-ready infants of the world waiting for their turn at a Hollywood life) that just because Mommy and Daddy are making a baby of their own, they won't love them any less. Oh, the fun we're all going to have!

No matter how hard we try, we can't quite connect the dots on a a joke that begins "Kate Moss and Lindsay Lohan walk into a bar" and finishes up with one of the two rubbing her nose and instructing the bartender to "put it on her bill." (One of them probably needs to be carrying a duck, but whatever.) Anyway, the facts of Gawker's real-life tale of troubled dynamic duo Lohan and Moss, on the loose together in NYC last night, is much better than anything we could come up with:

For months, the bodyguard had been secretly admiring his annoying—yet strangely alluring—charge, fighting against the impulse to violate every code he'd learned earning his hard-won certificate from the Personal Security Correspondence School. Occasionally, he'd allow himself a lingering glance, or a stolen whiff of her sweet perfume, just something, anything, to keep him from being driven insane by the forbidden fruit he squired from club to club, night after night. He'd take a bullet for her, sure, or step in front of a speeding Bentley, or toss an overzealous paparazzi to the pavement, whatever it took to keep her safe.

Had you asked us this morning if there was a riff on the Brokeback Mountain poster out there that might still make us laugh, we would have responded in an assuredly confident negative. But then someone had to go and send us Grayskull Mountain, and damn it if we weren't helpless to poor Skeletor Del Mar's disconsolate gaze, or the manboyish allure of the object of his forbidden affections, He-Jack. And while we're feeling all warm and Brokeback fuzzy, why not mention that Gene Shalit has made a heartfelt and apologetic statement regarding his highly criticized review, saying, "In describing the behavior of "Jack" I used words ("sexual predator") that I now discover have angered, agitated, and hurt many people. I did not intend to use a word that many in the gay community consider incendiary." Oh, Bozo the Pringles Guy, you had us at "describing." How could we possibly stay angry with you come back into our tender buns, you silly hairball!

· Variety does its best to sift through the continuing fallout from Paramount's DreamWorks acquisition. Paramount insiders deny that Brad Grey #2 Gail Berman's job is already at stake (despite the loud whisper of the moment that she might be axed and replaced by DW producer Walter Parkes, but shhhh, that's just a nasty rumor). And as for the problem of redundancy in jobs across DreamWorks and Paramount, "department heads from both studios were required to turn over names of employees in their division. The lists are being combed over to see which employee is a stronger candidate, the current Paramount employee or the DreamWorks staffer." After five minutes of dramatic head-scratching and thoughtful harumphing, the Paramount list will be run through a shredder and offices will be cleared to make way for the DW staffers. It's nonstop fun and excitement on the Melrose lot! [Variety]
· NBC will air a record 416 hours of Winter Olympics coverage across its many networks, meaning that you, the incredibly bored viewer, might not miss a single minute of people in spandex sliding down ice chutes in a dizzying variety of positions. [THR]
· Reclusive move star Julia Roberts considers returning to her long abandoned career to star opposite Tom Hanks in Charlie Wilson's War, possibly for her Closer director Mike Nichols. If she's going to hand the twins over to a nanny to go back to work, she's not gonna fuck around. [Variety]
· With just weeks until shooting, the producers of the new, Daniel Craig-starring Bond remake Casino Royale are sleeping with actresses as fast as they can to find a new Bond Girl. [Variety]
· FX has already purchased the cable rights to 2006 summer blockbuster-to-be Superman Returns for a reported $17-25 million. guaranteeing the network first crack at cramming the Bulge of Steel onto the small screen. [Variety]

While Hollywood continues to gaze navelward in response to the recent revelation that certain too-juicy-to-be-true hit literary memoirs were precisely that, the flake-averse East Coast publishing world has perhaps unsurprisingly taken a much harder-edged, pragmatic approach to the matter: Namely, the fucker lied, so you get your $24.95 back.

There's finally some movement in the Anthony Pellicano Wiretapping Trial of the Century, but indictments to an anticipated net full of big Hollywood fish have yet to materialize. Yesterday, Keith Carradine's ex-wife pleaded guilty to perjury for earlier denying she knew that Pellicano (also her boyfriend, in an interesting twist) tapped Carradine's phone. Hardly thrilling stuff. But we now have our first, beautiful only-in-Hollywood moment of the proceedings, courtesy of a Pellicano case involving scary lawyer Bert Fields. Says the NY Times:

We promise that we haven't been neglecting you all morning, or engaged in some kind of cruel plan to make you read about Angelina Jolie's uterus over and over again. The entire Gawker Media Blogging Concern has been plagued by technical difficulties all morning, which seem (holding breath, crossing fingers) to be resolved now. Don't miss the exciting James Frey and Colin Farrell sex tape posts below, which our stopped-up server finally farted into existence moments ago.

Rush & Molloy do some explaining about the rapid coming-and-going of DirtyColin.com, the shady website that popped its head out of its unauthorized celebuporn hole to offer the Colin Farrell-Nicole Narain sex tape, and which may have been quickly hammered down by the Wack-a-Mole mallet of the onscreen couple's lawyers. According to the report, Farrell's camp seems suspicious of Narain, who wants to release the tape, while Narain's people are pissed mostly that they're not getting a cut of the site's sales:

The Million Little Piecesgate shitstorm continues to rage you don't make Oprah, Queen of the Universe, look stupid without some serious consequences with threatening letters from legal pitbull Marty Singer flying (we feel your pain, Smoking Gun), the first brusque responses from accused memoir embellishist James Frey posted to his website ("I won t dignify this bullshit with any sort of further response,"), with further bullshit non-dignification to follow on his Larry King appearance tonight. And lest we not forget the JT Leroy scandal, which serendipitously (for trend watchers, at least) broke on the very same day: According to the NY Times, the supposedly HIV+ male truck-stop hooker turned memoirist and literary darling is a complete fabrication and played by a woman. With both authors' books in various stages of movie development, THR examines what effect the scandals will have on the productions, if any. In doing so, they stumble onto a fascinating philosophical dialogue on the ultimate nature of truth (as it applies to getting your movie made):

When two incredibly famous, incredibly good-looking movie stars engage in a mutually narcissistic, very-public-but-officially-denied love affair, and those two people have already crisscrossed the globe collecting adorable training-wheel orphans from which to cobble together a beautiful family, it's time for those movie stars to finally round out their brood with the product of their own maddeningly perfect genes. Yes, dear seekers, People now reports (double-sourced though both camps and through an aid worker in Santo Domingo, to boot) what everyone's been whispering about for weeks: that Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt are adding a Caucasian baby to their impossibly photogenic, Benetton-ad-quality clan via the quaint route of Jolie's own uterus. Somehow, though, we can't let ourselves be happy yet; the cutthroat glossies have punched ragged holes in our heart before with their exuberance to break these stories. Still, we're inclined to believe, and we sadly concede our office pool, in which we foolishly wagered that Pitt and Jolie would adopt Bengali and Inuit tykes before succumbing to the urge to go halfsies on their own offspring.