Our earlier lamentation about our meager Photoshop skills inspired this reader-submitted act of charity, which takes our nod to classical bacchanalia and incorporates Trump's well-publicized satyrical bent, creating a radical—yet pleasantly pastoral—branding experience unprecedented in the super premium vodka space.
With the movie premiere season rapidly drawing to a close, Variety's VPage takes a somber photographic journey back through 2005, which history will remember as The Year When Animals Rose Up And Overthrew Their Human Co-Stars. The actors' smiling faces belie the horror that uniformly followed the cascade of flashbulbs; our memories of two of the premieres' most regretable tragedies, Vin Diesel's near-fatal genital-pecking by Gary the Duck at The Pacifier bow, and the white python's grisly constriction of George Lopez (mere days after his kidney transplant) at a Lemony Snicket afterparty, are incredibly poignant.
ABC's annual celebration of overstatement, tear-jerking, and gauzy lense effects, Barbara Walters Presents: The 10 Most Fascinating People of 2005, airs tonight at 10 p.m., and this year's list, while not quite scaling the fascination heights of last year's, is at the very least mildly diverting, especially when your other options are a rerun of Criminal Minds and the Fox local news.
· Disney and Jerry Bruckheimer "quietly" agree to a 5-year film production deal, locking up the producer responsible for half-a-billion dollars' worth of Pirates of the Caribbean sequels long enough to allow Bruck to oversee the eventual installments starring Paul Walker and Bruce Willis in the roles originated by Orlando Bloom and Johnny Depp. To celebrate their continuing partnership, Mouse head Robert Iger and Bruckheimer will detonate Snow White's castle at the conclusion of tonight's Disneyland fireworks, then dance around any broken character bodies injured in the display. [Variety]
· Sundance announces this year's festival slate, with officials promising "a return to our roots" demonstrated by a commitment to movies that might seem less marketable to Hollywood types than years past. Hollywood types express their gratitude to the Sundance staff for further reducing any guilt they might feel about flying to Utah solely to drink themselves snowblind while fighting over gift bags. [THR]
· Paramount signs up Jim Carrey to star in a Tim Burton-directed action-adventure film based on Robert "Believe It or Not" Ripley's life, but the actor will "squeeze in" a thriller, a Ben Stiller comedy, and a brief nervous breakdown hiatus before reporting for Ripley duty next October. [Variety]
· The Squid and the Whale leads the Independent Spirit award nominations with six, including ones for best feature, best male lead, and best female lead. [THR]
· Faded NBC Uni golden boy Jeff Zucker lures Miramax survivor Meryl Poster to his lair with a producing deal for both television shows and feature films. Poster's deal also gives Zucker the contractual right to furtively assassinate her in the press should his own job ever seem in danger. [Variety]
Say what you will about Trump Ice, reality television impresario/real-estate dabbler Donald Trump's foray into the bottled water market, but it was exceedingly hard to get wasted drinking it. Never one to let a branding concept languish unactualized, The Donald (and, you know, the people who will actually make the stuff) is proud to announce Trump Super Premium Vodka, the top-shelf liquor with the predictably humble name:
Once upon a time there was a little girl who went to nursing school, but Aaron Spelling took her away from all that and now she's repaying the favor by sending letters to "hundreds of people, including actresses on current and former Spelling television shows," claiming the 82-year old producer sexually harassed her. Spelling has responded with preemptive measures:
Please excuse us if this is common knowledge that we're only stumbling upon now in our morning stupor, but we had absolutely no idea that notoriously, er, intense superproducer Joel Silver invented (or helped invent) Ultimate Frisbee, the sport that launched a thousand bong hits. But being the Hollywood animal that he is, Silver's baring his producing fangs to the director of a documentary about the game:
· Linday Lohan cleverly "turns the tables" on the paparazzi by taking their picture while dressed like the Unabomber. We must admit, it's a much more reasonable approach than trying to frame the paps by smashing her car into a delivery guy.
· Creepy crop circles, or a Venn diagram illustrating the intersection of out-of-work actors desperate to make industry connections and highly suggestible people with nothing better to do than take personality tests? You make the call.
· The Sunday NY Times asked, "Is child stardom no longer a life sentence?" We answer: Former child actors have been enjoying greater career longevity ever since SAG negotiated to have those subcortical microchips that explode once they cease being cute removed from their CBA with the studios.
· Jet Li's such a fast learner that there's no reason he won't one day be the biggest star in America.
· H.P. Lovecraft and the Family Circus: the best mash-up we've ever seen. [via BoingBoing]
· Monday night music round-up: The Plebz at the Viper Room; Great Northern at Silverlake Lounge; and in the evening's main homecoming event, Orange County legend Gwen Stefani returns to the Arrowhead Pond of Anaheim.
· The cast of The Kid & I will be on hand for a benefit premiere and reception at Grauman's Chinese, giving you the opportunity to be in the same room as Tom Arnold, Joe Mantegna, Henry Winkler, and Shannon Elizabeth while raising money for charity. It's almost socially irresponsible not to indulge your normally destructive celeb-worshipping impulses.
· We can think of no better way to decompress from the stresses of holiday decompression than spraying up your bangs nice and crispy and giving yourself over to the hair metal goodness of Metal Skool at the Key Club. This weekend's emotional trauma will be a distant memory by the time The Skool gets through the second verse of "Living on a Prayer."
We have some miraculous news for those of you who took the cancellation of The Simple Life particularly hard: you can put down your self-mutilation implements and rejoice! E! has answered your prayers, ordering ten episodes of the series and divising a plot hook that finds a way to use both of the series' now-feuding stars, without having Paris or Nicole ever set foot in the same room!
Defamer's technical team is still working out the kinks on an exciting new technology that would allow us to stream PrivacyWatch sightings in real time, but for now we have to settle for the physical limitations imposed by thumbs on the tiny keyboards of Blackberries and Sidekicks. A reader reports on a lunchtime sighting, from virtually moments ago:
Ex-Crips founder and four-time convicted murderer Stanley "Tookie" Williams once wrote about an afternoon in 1976 when he met a young Arnold Schwarzenegger on the Venice Beach boardwalk, and the awestruck future Governor gushed "that Williams' biceps were as big as thighs." We imagine this moment of man-on-man mutual physique appreciation is a memory Schwarzenegger has revisited often as he agonizes over whether or not to grant Williams, who is scheduled for death by legal injection December 13, a rare clemency. Meanwhile, Williams' celebrity supporters are bringing out the big guns:
· Selected cosmopolitan audiences love Fat Clooney! Syriana pulls down over half a million bucks on only five screens spread across LA, NY, and Toronto. Personal anecdote loosely illustrating Syriana's big city popularity: We were among those lining up for a sold-out showing at the Grove (do we live there now?), and enjoyed a satisfied laugh when the theater's crack crowd-control personnel punished evil line-jumpers by loudly yanking them aside and making them wait to enter the lobby. [Variety]
· "There was a time when Howard Stern fans could hear — but not see — a naked porn star giving a hot-oil massage on TV uncensored." God bless the brave new world of VOD. [THR]
· CBS seems likely to repeat as November sweeps champs in the coveted 18-49 demographic, as well as in the merely AARP-lusted-after 25-54 demo. NBC, it seems, is still valiantly refusing to cease its primetime broadcast operations, even in the face of unspeakable Nielsen horror. [Variety]
· Harry Potter dominates the foreign box office, bringing its international treasure chest up to $207 million, an amount that will almost certainly be written off as "offshore piracy" when figuring out profit participation. [Variety]
· Mad About You writer Danny Jacobson will pen the suddenly, officially single Nick Lachey's comedy pilot for The WB. Lachey will play a baseball player trying to navigate a new marriage, but who quickly fades into obscurity once the wife discovers how many movie stars are willing to sleep with her. [THR]
By now, we hope that most people realize that this year's box office "slump" was mostly caused by a flood of shitty movies. (We hate to keep bringin up Stealth, but hey, we didn't greenlight Short Circuit On A Plane.) Previously, the LAT has made a fun little game of making execs admit to their 2005 bombs, but today they try to pick the brains of some disaffected moviegoers, and in their effort seem to have stumbled across Hollywood's Chosen One:
Disease research benefits can be delicate affairs; one false step at an amfAR evening and an emceeing Sharon Stone can find herself addressing a roomful of black-ties sobbing into their sorbets. So we have to hand it to Wanda Sykes, who instead of tiptoeing around the subject at a recent Michael J. Fox Foundation benefit, decided to tackle it head on:
With NBC Universal still circling an acquisition of DreamWorks, today's NY Times wonders (with accompanying Photoshop whimsy, at left—why have we never put Jeffrey Katzenberg in a red hoodie? Well played, NYT.) what exactly the media behemoth will be getting from The 'Works' primary asset, Steven Spielberg, who has a well-established history of spreading his movie-making love all over town. Rob Marshall, director of the Spielberg-produced Memoirs of a Geisha, chooses to celebrate the value of The Maestro's artistry rather than poke the "million-pound gorilla" with a stick:
