Tagged onto the end of a NYT story describing director Wes Anderson's bid to bring his trademark quirkiness (read: small budget, small box office) to a mass audience (read: big budget, big box office) with The Life Aquatic is one studio executive's key to staying viable as an auteur in Hollywood:
We certainly don't expect much from the grunts writing headlines for CBS's celebrity coverage, but this one would look bad even on E!'s relentlessly punning website. In fact, the "Pretty Mother" thing is so offputting that we're momentarily distracted from her new twins' inevitably semiretarded names, Phinnaeus and Hazel (a mere 3 on the Retarded Celebrity Baby Names Scale, where 1=James Broderick and 5=Apple Paltrow), which we think she may have stolen from Madonna's Kabbalah children's book. We wish Roberts and her toothy infants all the best, and hope their pre-arranged paparazzi photo shoots go as smoothly as possible.
Awaken from your three-day turkey coma and head towards the light of the weekend box office numbers. (These are three-day weekend estimates, not super-sized five-day grosses.)
A reader's series of celebrity sightings on the eve of Thanksgiving confirms that the famous are just like us: They know that a crippling hangover is a wonderful buffer for all of the family drama that unfolds over a day pounding down turkey.
—Angelina Jolie shows considerably more pull than Tara Reid did in erasing pictures of a (small scale) wardrobe incident. Maybe it was the Oscar, or maybe it was the fact that her entire breast didn't plop out.
—This truly disturbing promotional video for Showtime's Fat Actress features Kirstie Alley devouring a huge bowl of spaghetti and jokingly requesting a Diet Coke to wash it down. We don't care how tongue-in-cheek it professes to be, it still made us want to swear off pasta (and eating, and television, and Cheers reruns) forever. [via IMDb]
—Rudy Huxtable is all grows up. All grows up!
—Finally, a case of celebrity exhaustion we can actually believe.
—Pee Wee's flack bans all mentions of "public masturbation" and "kiddie porn arrests" from his interviews. Well, that leaves a fascinating discussion of his role as a hairdresser in Blow or his super-flatulence in Mystery Men in play for reporters.
Hollywood PrivacyWatch celebrity sightings are sent in by our readers. Send yours to tips@defamer.com and let Cameron Diaz know her treadmill technique leaves something to be desired.
We hate to admit it, but we've become completely desensitized to Paris Hilton sex stories. Today's Rush & Molloy column in the NY Daily News reveals that Hustler will be running pictures of Hilton kissing a woman (and clothed pictures, no less), and we practically had to apply jumper cables to our privates to even get through the item. It's a sorry state of affairs when the atrocious grammar on her t-shirt does more to raise our blood pressure than the "lesbian make-out" she's now rendered utterly mundane. [Ed. note—Was the printer fresh out of apostrophes?] This is truly a sad day for us all. Let the cutting commence.
Please, don't be alarmed. Britney Spears' face is NOT twisted into a mask of indescribable suffering because she's in the thrall of a fiery attack of an STD that Kevin Federline "forgot" to tell her about—she's merely desperate to use the toilet at a Malibu Jack in the Box. Other photos in the series seem to reveal that Spears' bladder-voiding needs were so urgent that she forgot to remove her shoes before entering the public bathroom, but it's anyone's guess as to whether they remained on once she was in the safety of her own stall.
Bruce Willis is suing schlockhouse extraordinaire Revolution Studios over an injury he suffered on the set of Tears of the Sun. Willis was hit in the forehead by a "projectile" that struck him while some special effects "squibs" were detonated around him to simulate gunfire. If we hadn't written about him moments ago, we'd suggest that it's hilarious to re-read the complaint and substitute "injured by the projectile" with "injured by images of Ashton Kutcher having sex with the mother of his children in a variety of acrobatic positions." (We'd like to sue for that one as well.) Instead, we'll speculate that maybe Willis' injury is to blame for his extremely loud, public cellphone conversations.
When a reader first spotted the automotive abomination known as the CXT (picture a Mack truck raping a Hummer) at The Grove a couple of months ago, we knew it was only a matter of time before some high-profile jackass started tooling around town in one. So color us utterly unsurprised that Ashton Kutcher, ever on the vanguard of useless Hollywood fads, is among the ridiculous behemoth's early adopters. If he really wants everyone in town to know what's going on underneath his man-skirt, it probably would've been cheaper to drive around Beverly Hills in a tiny, shriveled version of the Oscar Meyer Weinermobile.
With the sting of being named Hollywood's official scapegoat for John Kerry's election failure finally starting to fade, Ben Affleck is now taking heat for the bad career moves he didn't make. Affleck sensibly wanted to keep a low profile and rejected director Kevin Smith's overture to star with him in the Canadian teen soap opera Degrassi: The Next Generation, yet still winds up getting flogged for the very mention of his name. At this point, it might take five years on a media blackout vision-quest in the Himalayas to make the poll numbers even out. And even then he'd probably have to spend the first three years explaining Gigli to some Buddhist monks with an US Weekly subscription.
As always, we love how you turn our Thursday inbox into a repository of outrage, bemusement, and possibly actionable hearsay with your responses to the Blind Item Guessing Game. Take a quick refresher course in One Traditional Blind Vice:
The publicist denial is a delicate artform; a well-articulated naysaying by a practiced image craftsman can have the impact of a two-page spread in People (complete with candid photos of snuggling with a loved one on a couch and rolling in the grass with a favored pet). Compare Lindsay Lohan's flack's subtle and effective denial of a reported diva shit-fit at a recent Jane cover shoot with that of the magazine editor's attempt:
Wherein we invite our readers to pin the preschool crayon word-portrait scrawled by humpy E! gossip paste-eater Ted Casablanca to the fridge and stare at it until they can divine the identity of his weekly blind item. We were forsaken by last week's blind-item-free column, but Ted offers us redemption in this week's beatific return to form. Revel in One Traditional Blind Vice:
We can't be sure if mere proximity to Jenny McCarthy causes a woman's clothes to fall off, or if McCarthy is puckishly tugging on Mandy Moore's dress strap to initiate some full-blown Tara Reid buzz at the American Music Awards. The pair will have to try a little harder if they're after another Reid-level incident; McCarthy needs to tug more insistently and Moore still requires dozens of dollars in shoddy plastic surgery.
· ABC will develop erstwhile feature script The Flyover States as a red-America drama series. They're showing admirable restraint in not retitling the project The People Who Ruined Our Lives Because Gays Kissing Is A Sin to pander to viewers on the coasts. [Variety, sub. req'd.]
· ABC (again!) gives the Jennifer Love Hewitt comedy project a six episode midseason order. For our thoughts on this unfortunate shitergistic exercise, go here. Then close your eyes and say, "How bad could it be if they dub Hewitt's lines into Pig Latin and make her wear tight shirts?" Well, we'll probably get the tight shirt part without too much of a fight. [THR]
· Catherine Zeta-Jones and Ocean's 12 producer Jerry Weintraub are teaming up again for The Ivy Chronicles. Adapted from the book of the same name, the film would star Zeta-Jones as a Wall Street woman who starts a kindergarten referral service. And the world will team up again with a DVD of Mask of Zorro. [THR]
· ABC publicists obviously worked serious overtime yesterday: ABC submits ratings world-beater Desperate Housewives in the comedy category at the Golden Globes. Good idea to stay clear of those HBO shows. [Variety]
· Michael Goldenberg will adapt the fifth Harry Potter book, as Steve Kloves has opted to work on another Warner Bros. project, adapting The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon. Please, be gentle: That book doesn't deserve to be fucked up by some executive who has "ideas" about talking dogs. [THR]
—The fearless, fashion-lashing gals at Go Fug Yourself take on fugtastic wild child Bijou Phillips—and Bijou never stood a chance. Good luck picking her handbag out your asses should your paths cross at a party, ladies!
—Before we ever sat down at the computer today, we just *knew* that Lionel Richie's ex-wife was going to get busted for letting her new boyfriend run an illegal wrinkle-injection clinic out of her home. It's like Spider-sense or something.
—Shitergy in brief: ABC admits that having Nicollette Sheridan pretending to bang Eagles receiver Terrell Owens before a game to cross-promote Monday Night Football and Desperate Housewives might not have been the best idea. [via The Media Drop]
—Lindsay Lohan throws a diva shit-fit over some some fucked up plane reservations, leading us to believe that Fez was a much-needed moderating influence on her. Oh, how we miss the Fez days!
Today's Page Six outs West Wing creator/Psilocybin Aficionado coverboy Aaron Sorkin as the making-outingest writer in Hollywood. Sorkin was caught demonstrating his vaunted "overlapping dialogue" technique on back-to-back nights with different partners, including recurring WW actress Kristin Chenowith. If he can't keep his PDAs out of the tabloids (isn't this why God invented bathroom stalls and VIP lounges?) he might soon find himself running lines alone at home.
