The LAT reports that retired Disney CEO Michael Eisner has had some informal, "Hey, at an unspecified date in the future, maybe you and I can get together and build a rival media company once my lawyers are satisfied that a court will find such future partnerships don't violate my severance deal" chats with a couple of his former lieutenants, but still hasn't made up his mind about his much-chattered-about next step. So why can't the set-up-for-untold- generations former mogul just fill his infinity pool with hundred dollar bills, pull up a deck chair, and watch as the crisp bills flutter placidly over the edge and out of sight? Because retirement is, like, totally boring:

The New York Times provides an excellent screenwriting lesson in its profile of Emilio Estevez's new Bobby Kennedy assassination movie Bobby, set entirely in the soon-to-be demolished Ambassador Hotel:

When the psychic stress of publicly pretending that her long-dead marriage to Nick Lachey was still vital became too much to bear, Jessica Simpson sought the services of a mental health professional. Britney Spears, gripped by fresh despair each time her new baby cried and husband Kevin Federline brusquely declined to comfort the infant because he was too busy working on his "flow," then sullenly retreated to the solace of his background dancing studio, reportedly also floated the idea of a therapist visit. K-Fed essentially replied, "Headshrinkerin' is for crazy bitches, yo, you har me?" The next step (as reported by the infallible celeb-scripture Life & Style) was somewhat more extreme, but perhaps inevitable given her mate's apprehensions about therapy:

· Gregory Peck's pilfered Walk of Fame star has already been replaced, with honorary mayor Johnny Grant generously offering to look the other way should the guilt-wracked thieves decide to return it. We really don't agree with this course of action, for we've always believed that it is more important for a fake mayor to be feared than loved.
· We find ourselves in the strange position of leaping to Tara Reid's defense, but we have to say it: We're pretty sure those are the old new boobs, not new new boobs.
· Tom Cruise, amazed by the fantastical Far East talking machine known as the "cell phone," demonstrates his amazing mastery of Chinese: "Hello. Xie xie. Ni hao. How are you?" Legal clarification: By linking to this story, Defamer does not intend to suggest that Mr. Cruise "goes around talking Chinese all day to anyone who will listen."
· This rendering of a NYT-controlled Gawker is probably the most brilliant thing we have seen in years.
· Wendie Jo Sperber, star of Bosom Buddies, one of the favorite sitcoms of our youth (really—even the opening credits, set to Billy Joel's "My Life," crack us up), has died of breast cancer. There's a very nice sentiment from Tom Hanks in the story, but the best tribute he could pay would be to let someone finally air Buddies again.*

A truly gifted singer/songwriter usually can convey emotion and inner life through a few simple chords and some heartfelt vocals. Sometimes, however, it requires a little more. A reader sends in this report from last night's Nellie McKay performance:

· The Week Is 60 Percent Over Music Round-Up: Red Lightning at the Knitting Factory; Nellie McKay sticks around town to play Largo; the Cribs at Spaceland.
· Anne Rice, the Queen of Literary Darkness, turns up at Vroman's in Pasadena to read and sign her new book, but there are scary rules to be observed! Warns the store's website: "Anne will sign one copy of any backlist title, paperback or hardback, and unlimited copies of Christ the Lord. She won’t sign multiple copies of old books, comic books, graphic novels, collectibles, or any other materials, like DVDs (or body parts). She will personalize with names only, no messages. No posed pictures."
· And we mention this because a nice work of charity is involved, not because of the barrage of e-mails we got virally plugging the show: The guy who bid $7,600 on eBay (the money went to the Red Cross for disaster relief efforts) to open up for Jon Lovitz will take his ten minutes of stage time tonight at the Laugh Factory.

The Great Internet Giants Battle for Hollywood is upon us, pitting interactive media colossus (and Gawker content bodysnatcher) Yahoo! against the indomitable, ubiquitous search-entity Google. Yahoo! struck first, hiring former co-chairman and co-chief executive of Warner Bros. Terry Semel to guide the company through the murky jungles of show business dealings.

Once again (and this one really stings), our fancy Hollywood premiere invitation appears to have been pilfered by the mailman, as we spent a night on the couch ignoring some Barbara Walters special instead of enjoying the open-bar-and-finger-food largesse of the Brokeback Mountain premiere in Westwood. (Yes, the untold thousands of dollars in secret studio kickbacks we've been getting for chronicling every gay cowboy-related sound-bite of the past six or so months are great, but sometimes it's nice not to feel like a discarded whore, you know?) Luckily, a Defamer operative took copious mental notes on the festivities, sharing this quite detailed report with us and somehow reducing the pain of not greedily devouring free crab cakes in the general vicinity of Lupe Ontiveros:

The world of daytime dramas is a showbusiness subculture unto itself, with its own bizarre set of rules and customs. For example: once you are cast, you stay in that part pretty much until your dying breath, and even then creative ways are often employed to get a few more shooting days out of your corpse. So when it was recently announced that exception-to-the-rule Rick Springfield would be returning to the General Hospital role that made him a star 22 years earlier, very little shuffling had to be done to pick up where Dr. Noah Drake had left off:

The starter's pistol has been fired, signalling the start of the holiday-season retail orgy (yes, our orgies always feature gunplay) that distinguishes this great Nation from the Communist puppet regimes that once plagued Eastern Europe.

· Jeremy Piven is in final talks to star in an untitled New Line "man vs. nature" comedy. Get ready for it: "Piven will play a smug Portland, Ore., real estate developer who accepts a challenge from his real estate mogul boss to develop a pristine forest in the hopes of being promoted to partner. He gets more than he bargained for when the area's animal residents start taking their revenge on him and wreak havoc on his every attempt to develop the land." Piven finally gets the lead, and he has to do an angry-raccoons-attacking-uptight-suit" flick? He should fire his agent. Again. [THR]
· SATC creator Darren Star leaves behind the world of shoe-shopping and funky spunk to develop an hour-long BBC soap about Formula One racing, "an enormous sport overseas that barely exists here." Next up: Star's sassy look at the world of cricket players' wives. [Variety]
· Annals of stunt casting: Tom Selleck will guest star on Boston Legal as Candace Bergen's ex-husband. [THR]
· Shitergy alert: USA and Bravo will pay sister company NBC Universal $1.4 million an episode for cable rights to House reruns, a hefty sum that should nip in the bud any notions that the cable nets got some sort of sweetheart deal from their corporate sibling. [Variety]
· In fairness, NBC doesn't get trounced in the ratings every single night. Last night's Biggest Loser finale did big numbers, giving them their highest (non-Olympic) rating in that timeslot in four long years, prompting president Kevin Reilly to immediately demand that his Loser finalist regain their weight for a live, two-hour special "pound-off" during February sweeps. [THR]

The Hollywood Reporter has finally unleashed its annual list of the highest-paid actresses in the business, providing us with a handy metric that helps take the guesswork out of evaluating the true worth of the big screen's fairer sex. And in an utterly unsurprising non-development, Julia Roberts once again triumphs in the only contest that truly matters:

If your movie is set, the old adage goes, on a baseball diamond, golf course, or postapocalyptic, sea-covered Earth, then the Kevin Costner is your go-to leading man. Certainly that's what producers at Ascendant Pictures were thinking when they entered into a verbal agreement with the grouchy, divorced actor to play the "grouchy, divorced" lead in their new golf (well, at least golf-related) picture, Taming Ben Taylor. But when they called off the production, Costner got extra-grouchy:

NY Daily News JV gossip Lloyd Grove hears that underemployed celebrity couple Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner's much-photographed love affair with Starbucks™ brand caffeinated beverages might have a sinister, product placement component. Luckily, entertainingly grumpy superflack Ken Sunshine was available to deny Grove's report, even slipping in a public bitchslap of the paparazzi obsessed with Affleck's eggnog latte jones:

We read the reports too: the $10 million New York bat mitvah that occupied two floors of the Rainbow Room, with daddy's deep pockets somehow convincing some of the biggest icons of rock to whore themselves out, "Hava Nagila"-style. We're talkin' Steve Tyler and Joe Perry, Don Henley and Joe Walsh with Stevie Nicks on vocal (!), and 50 Cent, reportedly drunk and threatening a JAP massacre if anyone snapped his picture. Blogger Tabloid Baby found one brave, enterprising guest who did:

Even after fourteen consecutive hours of intense, good-cop/bad-cop curbside interrogation ("Johnny, Johnny, I just want to help, but my partner here, he's nuts!) about actor Gregory Peck's recently stolen star on the Walk of Fame, LAPD officers couldn't squeeze a confession out of honorary Hollywood mayor Johnny Grant. After a sidelong reference to rusty pliers and fingernails, a shaken Grant did, however, admit that he occasionally spends an entire evening sitting next to Rita Hayworth's star, weeping and drinking a bottle of five-dollar wine from a paper bag.

No sooner had we adjusted to the thought of a brave, new nightlife landscape where the words "Open Bar 10-11 p.m. sponsored by Trump Vodka" flowed as freely as barrel-bottom potato-vinegar from a goat-legged bottle, comes yet more Donald Trump news: the Apprentice is heading to LA.

· The ArcLight hosts a screening of Crash and post-show Q & A with writer/director Paul Haggis. Watch in amazement as what at first seems like an innocuous meeting with an intense, blue-eyed man in the concession line ripples throughout the storyline of your evening, culminating in the heavy-handed master's climactic answer-session anecdote about your shared moment by the popcorn!
· Double-awesome, two-item music round-up: Precocious piano-pounder Nellie MacKay at the Troubadour; cute alliteration resistant rockers Super Furry Animals at Avalon.
· Pulitzer-winning author Frank McCourt reads from his new book about his experiences as a NYC public high school teacher, Teacher Man, at the Skirball Center.

If we were a well-known actor or actress, we're pretty sure that we'd avoid the Grove, that little man-made substitute for an actual urban shopping experience, like the proverbial Plague. On any given night, it's overflowing with gawkers, tourists, and (perhaps most gallingly) unfamous people with ready access to e-mail accounts, and there's the ever-present danger of tripping over those damned trolley tracks and being crushed beneath a conveyance whose sole purpose is to give visitors from Japan a clearer view of The Cheesecake Factory's patio. Still, these brave celebrities risk rubbing up against the masses to partake in some retail therapy, or more frequently, to take in a flick while surrounded by people dressed as bellhops. Two readers share their amusing, Grove-based brushes with the B-list from last night:

Here's some exciting news for fans of the sadistic exploitation of shameless, fame-hungry minors: American Idol has been renewed well into the next decade! After a nail-biting "will he or will he?" episode involving a legal dispute, ill-fitting-muscle-shirt-wearer Simon Cowell has signed on for another five seasons, with no word yet on the involvement of the show's other standbys, narcotized, differently abled clapper Paula Abdul, "A'ight" aficionado Randy Jackson, or recently crowned Carnaval Queen/Idol host Ryan Seacrest.