NBC's Kevin Reilly realizes that when you're in charge of a fourth-place network, you've got to shake things up a bit—think outside of the box, as it were—to reverse the disastrous descent into the dark Nielsen places occupied by the WB and UPN. Today, Reilly heralded the launch of the NBC Entertainment Idea Box, a web-based system through which his employees can transmit their craziest, paradigm-shifting thoughts to the appropriate decision makers—for awards and cash prizes! The e-mail follows:

· Late night talk show joke writers despair: Nipsey Russell, frequent non-sequitur punchline and the "poet laureate of television," has passed on.
· Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt are selling their Beverly Hills estate for $28 million. That breaks down to about $8 million for the house and grounds, and $20 million for the opportunity to invite your friends over to marinate in the palpable psychic pain left over from the destruction of America's Favorite Couple.
· Trust us, if your Desperate Housewives came in only in Spanish last night, you didn't miss much. But how many more times can Adelphia fuck up (Defamer HQ was in last Wednesday's odd blackout, making us miss Lost) before someone burns down their offices?
· Sarah Polley and Terry Gilliam correspond about Polley's traumatizing experiences as the nine year-old star of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Strangely, none of these psychic wounds concerned prolonged exposure to Robin Williams.
· Pamela Anderson's stalker may never get to work with her.

· Because nothing is quite as punk as writing a novel about male poet's "transcendent affair with a 17 year-old boy": Richard Hell reads Godlike at Book Soup.
· It might cost you more in gas than for the ticket, but M.I.A. seems well worth the drive to The Glasshouse in Pomona.
· You may not know that the motion picture Academy does anything but put on stuffy, overlong awards shows, but, amazingly, they do. Tonight, they host “Oscar’s Docs: The First 20 Years of Academy Award–Winning Documentaries, 1941–1960,” featuring Hitler Lives?, The True Glory, and Seeds of Destiny in their Linwood Dunn Theater. We're pretty sure that they haven't digitally inserted a singing and dancing Billy Crystal into footage of Hitler Lives? for the screening, so it should be a pretty pleasant evening.

We're so very proud of Deadspin, the Gawker Media International Blogging Concern Unlimited, LLC™'s new sports blog, which has been tapped as Yahoo's Pick of the Day. (More importantly, our boss, the generously becraniumed semi-evil Hungarian blogging overlord Nick Denton is happy, subtracting 300 cruel lashes from today's whipping in celebration.) We especially love the way that editor Will Leitch has been tracking bloated vitamin B-12 enthusiast Barry Bonds' website and pointing to sites that pile up stats on former quarterback Phil Simms' homoerotic ramblings. You know what we also love, secretly? Those 300 lashes we won't be getting for posting this. Daddy's tough love hurts so good.

On Friday, Michael Eisner officially stepped down as Head Mouse in Charge of the Walt Disney Company, ending his roughly two decades astride the Magic Kingdom. A Defamer spy stood in the sweltering heat to listen to Eisner's final address to his "cast members," filing this report:

A high-level Defamer operative found this discarded business card on the street while walking his dog in front of Beverly Hills High the other night. Did our man-on-the-street stumble upon an artifact of a Lolitaesque relationship gone bad? Was a forward-thinking E! producer scouting a target-rich environment for True Hollywood Story's future class of Tinseltown flame-outs? Or, unimpressed by a basic cable come-on, did a savvy high-schooler toss aside the card, withholding the jailbaity goods until someone from a network show strolled by? We could be way off on all counts, but we love a mystery.

Nicolas Cage has finally made a clean break with reality, saddling his newborn son with the name Kal-el. As in Superman's Kryptonian birth name. We're genuinely concerned for the baby boy's future safety, and not solely because the tyke will almost certainly return from school each day wearing his underwear on the outside of his pants. No, we fear that whatever drugs Cage ingested before naming the baby also make the proud father believe that the infant's been imbued with superpowers, leading to a tragic incident in which the actor realizes too late that little Kal is not, in fact, bulletproof.

· Preparing for the day that a lucky photographer captures him changing into a bathing suit and sells the resulting photographic evidence of his shrunken testes to the Enquirer, Governor Schwarzenegger signs a bill that triples the amount of damages a celebrity can sue a photographer for and holds their employers responsible as well. [Variety]
· ABC and Kelsey Grammer's Grammnet Productions are developing a sitcom for American Idol also-ran Constantine Maroulis, representing ABC's best chance to ruin the momentum it's gained over the past season. Credit Maroulis' canny agent with turning down ABC's first offer of a short guest stint as Eva Longoria's hairdresser. [THR]
· Var confirms CAA's poaching of UTA partner Dan Aloni and many of his top-shelf director clients, but UTA saves a shred of dignity by retaining Judd Apatow. [Variety]
· The WB forces its comedy and alternative departments to mate, hoping the that evil, inbred offspring will produce funnier reality shows and non-traditional sitcoms. [THR]
· UPN stops production of Sex, Love and Secrets after just one aired episode, but it seems unclear on how many of the seven shows they've already shot will air. Our completely wild guess is one more, just to observe the early-cancellation benchmark set by Fox's Head Cases. [Variety]
· HBO continues to enable Bob Saget's comeback. After a whore-banging turn on Entourage last season, they're giving him his own show to co-write, direct, and star in, an R-rated remake of The Courtship of Eddie's Father. The best part: Sags will play a gynecologist. [Variety]

Saturday's LAT provided us with another opportunity to play our favorite parlor game, Journalists Making Studio Executives Admit That Their Summer Movies Were Shitty. This latest round of insincere sackcloth-and-ashes fun stars Sony's Amy Pascal and Brian Grazer of Imagine, who do their part to promise the ticket-buying public through gritted teeth that this time, they really, really mean it when they say they're going to rededicate themselves to quality:

Since there's an outside possibility that you won't have a chance to watch a model blow some rails until you go out for lunch, we dutifully direct you to the video of Kate Moss's infamous hoovering of some unsuspecting lines of booger sugar. The "exclusivo" video is in Italian, which serves to restore some of the exotic allure that coke lost for you once you moved to L.A. and saw your first punch bowl full of the stuff at a party.

On Friday afternoon, US Weekly has once again laid waste to everything we thought we knew about romantic love. Strap yourselves in, grab a box of Kleenex and a large, plastic bottle of wino-quality whiskey, and listen to the sound of your heart rapidly turning to anthracite:

Without further—or, really, any—ado, your Monday morning box office numbers:

Friday
· It's time for the Fred Segal annual sale—risk grievous personal injury at the hands of your fellow excited shoppers for the chance to find a bargain on clothes you probably couldn't afford on any other day.
· RESFEST Los Angeles kicked off last night, but continues on through Sunday with screenings, panels, and (of course) parties. There's even a sneak peak at Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly Saturday night, for those who are dying to see what a rotoscoped Keanu Reeves looks like.
· The play Just Us, tonight and tomorrow at the Elephant Theater, is about "two couples, one 'Blue State'' the other 'Red,' who must survive the night together when their Maine rental cottage is double-booked." It's also put on by some talented friends of ours who will pound beers with you during intermission. That's good theater!
Saturday
· It’s October, time to get out of town and get ready for Halloween. The Halloween Harvest Festival runs all month at Pierce College, and features a 10,000-square-foot haunted house, a haunted trail, haunted hay rides, haunted pony rides, and a haunted petting zoo. There's nothing scarier than a haunted goat when you've holding a fistful of hay near its mouth.
· One show doesn't qualify for a round-up, but at least you get three bands: Nine Inch Nails, Queens of the Stone Age, and Autolux play the Hollywood Bowl.
Sunday
· The Actor's Fund stages an all-star benefit reading of Casablanca at the Pantages, with Theodore Bikel (The Defiant Ones, African Queen), James Cromwell, and Jennifer Tilly.
· Spend an evening with literary superstar (she's graduated from literary "It Girl") Zadie Smith as she reads from her new novel, On Beauty, at 826LA.

According to Broadcasting & Cable, Tyra Banks has grabbed a fistful of Martha Stewart's blonde hair and told the ex-con lifestyle empress to get her gang of ass-kissing honkies off her Wednesday night turf. (Well, not in so many words.) Says B&C:

A Defamer spy grabbed her Trapper Keeper and infiltrated CAA's "Back to School" party last night, mingling among the drunk ten-percenters, drinking up their free booze, and gawking at their clientele:

Another Friday afternoon, another jaw-droppingly accurate* set of box office predictions:

Oh, Tara, Tara, we say that we believe in your efforts to shed your party girl image and you repay us like this? Posing with a martini in your hand while wearing what appears to be a sopping wet plastic grocery bag was bad enough, but floating in a pool full of Grey Goose was a real slap in the face. That's the last time we ever defend you.

We'd like to pause, as we do for a moment each Friday, to thank this week's sponsors, the kind people whose green, green cash keeps this party boat from sinking. If you'd like to advertise on Defamer and tempt the world's sexiest consumers with your wares, see this page.

Hey, Bob Iger, you're taking over as CEO of the Walt Disney Company! What are you going to do now? "I'm going to Disneyland!...And firing members of Michael Eisner's regime to show everyone I'm in charge!" Jim Hill Media, your source for all things Disney inside baseball, reports:

· Further proving that his desire for camp knows no bounds, Desperate Housewives mastermind Marc Cherry is working with Chucky creator Don Mancini on a "suspense drama" pilot for ABC tentatively titled Kill/Switch. One thing is clear: Cherry's about to produce television's next great, overrated guilty pleasure! [Variety]
· Renee Zellweger continues to wash that gay-seeming ex-hubby right out of her hair, will star in the Tom Cruise-produced The Eye, a remake of the 2002 Hong Kong thriller Jian gui. [THR]
· Every so often, Variety gets a little loopy and uncorks a headline worthy of celebrated wordsmith Ted Casablanca. Today is of one of those days: "Pix get das boot: Titles tripped by tapped-out Teutons." [Variety]
· Today Disney officially cuts ties to the Weinsteins, sending the brothers and their infant, but ambitious, company to suckle at someone else's billion-dollar teat. We didn't realize how disturbing the image of a nursing Harvey Weinstein was until we actually typed that last sentence. Please accept our apologies for scarring you on a Friday. [THR]
· Mike Myers will star as Who drummer Keith Moon in a biopic produced by Roger Daltrey. You know what that means: Myers gets to do yet another British accent. Puncture your eardrums with a meat thermometer now and save yourself the eventual, much more acute pain. [Variety]