A heart attack has claimed the life of actor John Spencer, who was nominated for an Emmy five times, winning once, for his work on the West Wing. His character coincidentally also had a heart attack, but survived:

We're dangerouly close to intravenous margarita time, but on a big weekend like this, we couldn't sit out another round of unfailingly accurate predictions.

We recently posted a reader's blow-by-blow plot analysis of an Argentinian men's fragrance ad starring Ben Affleck, locally oversaturated movie star and director of Violet-burping, hitting the streets of Buenos Aires with a babe-tallying clicker. Today, a helpful reader points us to the ad itself, which is available for online viewing (simply click on the TV icon to "mira el comercial.")

We'd never encourage anyone to try and tackle two big industry soirees in a single night; the risk of party-muscle cramping, hors d'oeuvres poisoning, and DUI citations is doubled, and the likelihood of having the same exact conversations (last night's icebreaker certainly began with, "Dude, what up with Kong?") with a slightly different group of people is roughly quintupled. But a brave operative pulled off a double-header last night, enduring both a Very Michael Bay Christmas and a historical epic premiere to file this report:

We're happy to reintroduce our Hollywood Holiday Cards feature with this year's offering from the mud-wrestlin', wall-climbin', Beer-Pong-brawlin' management/production entity Benderspink, who most recently paralyzed us with comedic delight by burying cinematic treasure Ryan Reynolds in latex for Just Friends. We much prefer this 2005 sequel to last year's somewhat stale Apprentice parody, a set-up that can either play as a cute Christmas tableaux of Santa cavorting with kids on his Nice List, or the horrifying moment immediately preceding the giant Claus Kong's bloody rampage through a pajama-themed industry orgy.

Teri Hatcher has won her libel suit against British tabloid The Daily Sport, which falsely reported that she enjoyed turnstyle gentlemen caller action in the Volkswagen van parked in her driveway as her daughter sat in their home. Simply not true, says Hatcher:

It's time to light the Yule log of our appreciation and warm ourselves in front of the nurturing fire represented by this week's sponsors, without whom we'd be consigned to another Christmas of mugging Salvation Army Santas for nog money. If you'd like to advertise on Defamer and keep the holiday spirit alive, see this page.

· More perfectly timed holiday layoff fun: MTV Networks let go close to 100 employees, a move the suddenly scary-looking Tom Freston might have been hinting at when he told THR yesterday, "We're looking very closely at a much leaner corporate overhead." Merry Christmas, pinkslipped "overhead"! [THR]
· Paramount signs a term sheet to sell the DreamWorks library to a number of private equity firms for somewhere between $900 and $950 million. We will not even attempt to sex up this move. [Variety]
· Time Warner cable will roll out "Family Choice Tier" cable package of "smut-free" programming. You know, the kind of smut that you find on Nickelodeon or the Cartoon Network, which are not a part of the package. [THR]
· After the disappointing Wednesday numbers for King Kong, execs are clinging to the hope that word of mouth, school vacations, and the South thawing will lure fans of the little monkey out of hiding. [Variety]
· Sometime actor Bruce Willis will take some time off from his promising vigilante-financier career to star in Morgan's Summit, playing a professionally nice guy who goes crazy for vengeance once a brutal crime changes his life. [Variety]

US Weekly poops out another exclusive just in time for the weekend. No breakups, no quickie marriages, but exciting just the same: a celebrity falling down!

If there is a job in Hollywood that sounds less appealing that being the erstwhile Most Powerful Man in Hollywood's (current title: Man in Hollywood) nanny, we've yet to hear of it. (Actually, probably any job in "excitable" producer Joel Silver's office that involves daily exposure to blunt projectiles whizzing by one's head is no picnic, but we digress.) A former Michael Ovitz nanny has written the inevitable tell-all about her experience in the Other House That Ovitz Built, You'll Never Nanny in This Town Again, in which she accuses him of threatening her with the dreaded "nanny blacklist" and the following litany of sins, as catalogued by Rush & Molloy:

Call it Dawson's Curse: wherever they are, ex-cast members of Dawson's Creek are haunted by the Question. No setting is too inappropriate: Joshua Jackson was asked in a public men's room. Now Michelle Williams, under the auspices of a Newsweek interview about her performance in Brokeback Mountain, once again falls victim to its pernicious prying:

Illustrator Tom Umbarger recently hopped in his time machine, snatched this Christmas card from atop someone's mantel, and returned just in time to share the merry Yuletide wishes of America's favorite improvised family with all of us. We'd assumed that since Maddox is getting his punk phase out of the way so early in life that he'd move on to something else (Goth, perhaps?) in his teens, but the kid's obviously no toddling poseur. Even more unexpected is Pitt's transformation into a character actor and Jolie's disturbing foray into Meg Ryan territory.

· NBC Universal's Jeff Zucker manages to get a promotion despite NBC's declining primetime ratings, perhaps putting him in a position to suffocate boss Bob Wright with a couch pillow should the CEO ever make the mistake of taking a nap at work.
· Just in case you missed the comments on the last hyphen post: Hey, six-legged unicorn!
· This is how we were introduced to Cute Overload, the fastest we've bookmarked a site since the day Stuff On My Cat changed our lives forever.
· Supposed never-nude Rachel McAdams becomes the latest addition to Fleshbot's Celebrity NippleWatch pantheon with this rare double-reveal.
· A ban on search engines might be the only solution to this problem.

You pray everything will go perfectly on your wedding day, but some things are hard to plan for. And don't think being a movie star makes you immune: The Smoking Gun posted a police report recounting the events leading up to the arrest of a devious, thieving hairdresser skulking around Kevin Costner's 2004 nuptials:

King Kong, the box office's presumptive simian savior, opened yesterday to just $9.8 million (soon-to-be universally known trivia: this was just the 21st best Wednesday bow on record), and if you're anything like us, you completely forgot that the movie's already been released until you read a story about the disappointing take. Confronted with the low first-day number, Universal's head of distribution displayed a breezy confidence in her studio's product:

· Thursday night music round-up: BRMC (Black Rebel Motorcycle Club if you're not into the whole brevity thing) at the Hotel Café; Space Mtn at Spaceland; Southern Culture on the Skids at The Echo.
· The Aero Theatre in Santa Monica screens Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven, featuring a young—but still smoldering!—Richard Gere.
· Friends of Venice artist Joe Goode have donated works of art to a special ($200 per ticket) raffle to help him recover what he lost in a fire. If you don't have the ticket money (or even if you do), you can view the items beforehand at the Fire Sale Preview at the Santa Monica Museum of Art.

Sometimes, when you are dogged with rumors, the best response is to simply give the people what they want. Brandon Routh, the next Superman, has been accused of everything from being director Bryan Singer's private boytoy to packing a Superbulge so distracting, it sent special effects coordinators scurrying off to invent new crotch-reduction technologies. Here, Routh gamely addresses both stories head-on, joined in a touching show of support by Yankees manager Joe Torre (who undoubtedly can sympathize with the gay rumor thing). Both proudly hold aloft a gigantic, flaming phallus, as if to say, "Perhaps I am on fire. And perhaps I am hung like Brontosaur! What of it? Live and let live!"

New father and househusband Ben Affleck always seems to have a number of quiet side-projects cooking: uncompensated celebrity Starbucks endorser, unauthorized likeness model, and according to a reader spending some time outside the country, South American fragrance-advocate:

Last great indie studio holdout (and, full disclosure, one-time Defamer associate editor employer) Lions Gate Entertainment has revealed a bold new logo reimagining, replacing the somewhat baffling (and scary!) "LGF with green smoke and thunder" motif currently preceding their releases. The new logo, pictured above, melds the studio name into one streamlined word. The press release explains that this was no random smushing, but rather a representation of everything the company stands for:

A reader alerted us to banner ads (one of them is pictured above, and another variety is also rotating through) currently running on Yahoo!'s movie site, which seem to take the 40-Year-Old Virgin Hyphen Affair to its logical conclusion—unless, of course, some insane editor really wants to ensure that no nontraditional hyphenation possibility goes unexplored and approves ads utilizing 40-Year-Old-Virgin, 40 Year Old-Virgin, or the six-legged unicorn of possibilities, 40-Year-Old-Vir-Gin variations.