·It's never too late to wish Manoj a happy 38th birthday!
·Bomb and anthrax threats temporarily made MGM Tower the baddest-arse studio HQ in town.
·A lucky Morgan Freeman escaped a serious car accident with only a broken marriage.
·Alas, Christina Applegate, Bernie Mac and a pair of SYTYCD finalists faced more dire diagnoses.
·Matthew McConaughey's breakthroughs in placenta husbandry narrowly edged Clay Aiken in the race for the title of Best New Daddy.
·Was TV's highest-paid star among those accidentally exposed by a clumsy Hollywood madam?
·It was a close call, but Shia's pinkie will pull through.
·Defamer's political bureau stayed busy with Gwyneth Paltrow, Paris Hilton and Scarlett Johansson.
·Behold! The Chosen Blobs!
·Pineapple Express started big and will end bigger — kind of like co-star James Franco, if you catch our drift.
·Tropic Thunder RetardGate came and went.
·Meanwhile, Robert Downey Jr. will answer your stupid fucking questions now, sir. Yours, too, Debbie Matenopoulos.
·Drink, Play, F@#K and Puke, Broke, AIDS supplanted The Hobbit as the planet's most anticipated two-fer.
·RIP Bernie Brillstein.

Read More »

· We spotted this juicy little nugget of gossip just moments before last night's episode of Chelsea Lately aired on E! last night. One of the show's staffers maintains a Tumblr called C'est L.A. Vie, in which she often details the mundane things that happen on the show. Yesterday, all that changed when she alleged that someone who was wired with a hot mic was caught doing coke on set. Our handy video clip runs down the list of all the on-camera guests last night's episode; leave your guesses (and investigative rationale) in the comments! [C'est L.A. Vie]
· Our hearts just broke a little — scratch that, a LOT — when we read this anecdote about Life Goes On star Corky and his racist streak. [Byron Crawford]
· Chuck Klosterman's latest Esquire column features a lengthy diatribe on Jennifer Love Hewitt's left femur ("Love Hewitt's left thighbone strikes me as unusually long, and I feel like it lacks the convincing self-assurance of her right femur"), which he grades a B+. [Esquire]
· Ignore Lindsay Lohan's nipples for a second and, instead, focus on her mouth. Is she wearing braces? Grillz? Is she chewing tin foil? [Egotastic]
· And we know the day is almost over, but here are 88 ways you can enjoy 8/8/08. Our fave? "Call up Eddie Furlong and ask why there are 8 of him to a mile. Then, find out how he's doing. Let us know." Guaranteed to be the best list until the 99 ways you can enjoy 9/9/09 comes out next year! [Best Week Ever]

Read More »

All good things must come to an end, and so it goes for comedienne Kathy Griffin and her bearish beau, Apple gazillionaire Steve Wozniak. Sure, we knew this day would eventually come (and that it would most likely be filmed), but you'll excuse us if we need a moment to compose ourselves before climbing back onto our Segways. In this clip from last night's My Life on The D-List, Griffin and the Woz start running down the clock on their chemistry while attending an animal benefit known as the Fur Ball (kinda like Woz himself!). Eventually, as midnight approaches, a tiara-clad Griffin must leave the Woz behind, her mascara running as her three loyal assistants turn back into mice and the Woz, sadly, becomes a penniless pumpkin. [Bravo]

Read More »

Jon Voight's recent toe-dip into the murky pool of political commentary attracted more than a few piranhas, the hungriest of whom may have been Hollywood Elsewhere's Jeffrey Wells. And after a July 29 blog item suggested freezing Voight's career as payback for his public condemnation of Barack Obama ("If I were a producer and I had to make a casting decision about hiring Voight or some older actor who hadn't pissed me off with an idiotic Washington Times op-ed piece, I might very well say to myself, 'Voight? Let him eat cake'"), Bill O'Reilly came a-calling last night with a theory about a new Hollywood blacklist against conservatives. While we (and Wells himself, apparently) had hoped for a more bloodthirsty offensive from Wells, we're endlessly engrossed by his session on Dr. O'Reilly's couch, elucidating the vengeful feelings inherent to angry industry bloggers everywhere. Seriously, Bill, this is nothing — wait until Oscar season. [Fox News]

Read More »

There's money in them thar tweens, and Forbes knows it. The magazine has just published its Rich Tween list, a ranked list of moneymakers who appeal to the elusive eight-to-14 demographic that is like, so over Spongebob. Coming in at #1 with $25 million is Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe, who had middle school playgrounds abuzz with his daring take on Equus (coming to Broadway this fall!). But wait! Could a precocious teen starlet have tied him for the pole position? Where are the Olsens? The Jonases? The High School Musical-ites?

Read More »

Ah yes, the dog days of summer. These are the kind of days where nothing sounds finer than sitting 'round the backyard with a few of your closest chums, tossing back a few cold ones and firing up the grill. But this weekend, instead of cooking up some Hebrew Nationals and a few burgers, might we suggest that you bring all the fixins for a nice Dirt Sandwich instead? The ingredients are pretty simple, and you can't beat the calorie count: all you need is an internet connection, a computer and an internet browser that's pointed right here. If you have a laptop computer and a WiFi connection then, well, that's even better. Gather your friends round the warm light of your computer screen and click play. Because nothing says summer time like topless supermodels, a John Stamos marathon make out sesh and Katherine Heigl's continued emasculation of her husband Joshua. Enjoy!

Read More »

The 2008 Olympics literally have us 19 ways of excited at Defamer HQ, where we've retrofitted our dungeon workspace with one television for each of the NBC channels broadcasting the summer games. But don't get the wrong idea — we couldn't care less about the pole vault or women's rowing. No way. We're talent scouting, babe, in search of the next Olympian to break through the ranks as a Hollywood star. It's kind of a ritual around here, really, going waaayyyy back to the days when our old-media ancestors at the Defamer Star-Courier foretold gold-medalist swimmer Johnny Weissmuller's ascent to fame as Tarzan.

Read More »

There's something about Hollywood dads and afterbirth. Unlike Tom Cruise, who greedily pledged to gobble up every last drop of the nutrient-rich biological matter, however, Matthew McConaughey instead told CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta that he has something far eco-friendlier planned for his own son's:

Read More »

So we hit the open warehouse, and let's just say, if we had $5 million kicking around, we'd have found the ideal windowless converted foundry from which to run our punk rock mini-empire/host all-night after-Junction ragers with a few hundred of our closest neighbourhood drunks. Yes, Kiefer is leaving us, friends. But that doesn't mean we can't still check in with him from time to time, albeit in the altogether less intimate arena of nationally televised talk show appearances. On Late Show last night, Kiefer recalled our collective nightmare—his incarceration for a parole-violating DUI—from inside the Glendale City Jail. Explaining that his celebrity status (translation: perky little arse) earned him unwanted attention, the simple act of communal showering became a perilous manoeuvre worthy of Jack Bauer himself, requiring slippery neck-snappings and shivs-to-the-eye if he planned on getting out with his bitch-virginity intact.

Read More »

It's well-known that the conceptual period preceding The Dark Knight was an exceptionally fertile time for all involved — smooth Batsailing for a creative team responsible for reimagining the heroes and villains of Gotham City. Chief among those visions was The Joker, preliminary sketches of whom are now appearing in a new coffee-table book for the fanboy who has everything, The Art of The Dark Knight. An attentive reader points out today, however, how one of the early, nastier Joker mock-ups reminds him of an old friend of Defamer — a guy whose uncanny likeness would have no doubt stirred more controversy, trouble and tragedy than all the accursed Dark Knight infamy we've observed over the last year.

Read More »

The gloomy state of print media can drive a man to do funny things and Los Angeles Times writer Bill Plaschke is no exception. In the face of layoffs and blog mandates, the sports columnist (currently in Beijing covering the Olympics) bravely took one for the team, eschewing a business dinner of prime rib and caviar for something a little cheaper: penis. Lucky for him, there's a restaurant in Beijing that only serves penis (both a la mode and with a soupçon of testicle), and lucky for us, the whole meal was captured for posterity. Hit up the video after the break. Hope you've already eaten lunch! [KTLA]

Read More »

· New Line is developing a movie about Parkour—"a free-jumping extreme sport in which agile practitioners run and jump from rooftops." Set to star is Channing Tatum, who'll play a self-taught rooftop-jumper who falls for a beautiful, classically trained Parkourist from the other side of the tracks. Several thousand copycat deaths to follow. [Variety]
· Maverick Films president Mark Morgan is splitting with partner Guy Oseary, and rebranding the studio under the new name Imprint Entertainment, though we prefer the sound of Pooped My Corset Productions. [Variety]
· Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless have been hired to write the Flash Gordon remake no one has been clamoring for since Dino De Laurentiis's gay-acid-trip take on the material in 1980. [THR]
· 24 EP Carlos Coto has paired with Brett Ratner for Wild Boys, an action-comedy pilot about Iraq war vets turned suburban dads. [Variety]
· Russian bodybuilder and action star Alexander Nevsky—this man—will play Hercules in a $12 million production, eventually going on to become America's first completely incomprehensible Russian President. [THR]

Read More »

Scene of the Crime: Though Britney Spears probably won't be reprising her woozy, indifferent performance of "Gimme More" at this year's edition of the VMAs, MTV was able to convince the newly (and unprofitably) sane starlet to record a promo poking fun at the 2007 trainwreck. Improvising her way through the ad with VMAs host Russell Brand, the two bantered on without ever mentioning the elephant in the room — in this case, an actual, 9000-pound elephant grazing behind the stars. The scene soon turned ugly when Brit-Brit wrapped the shoot by offering the tempestuous animal some Cheetos and chicken fingers; five PAs and a Real World alum working the catering table were trampled in the ensuing rampage. [Access Hollywood]

Read More »

This is turning out to be the week that was at MGM, where the studio celebrated Harry Sloan's recent re-upping with a bomb threat, a building evacuation and now, according to officials, a good old-fashioned anthrax scare inside MGM Tower. We hear the threat came in more than two hours ago, but MGM staff was only officially notified at 11:40. No mandatory evacuations are taking place during the investigation, though staffers have been advised, "If you feel uncomfortable remaining at the Tower you may leave upon notification to your Supervisor." Century City is the new Gotham — who knew?

Read More »

Today brings the joyous news that ovary-shaking Idol demigod Clay Aiken has become a father to a healthy baby boy through the miracle of cutting edge fertilization techniques (the specs of how it was all accomplished are available here, if you care). In honour of this most improbable celebrity parenthood, we thought we'd compare and contrast Clay's siring achievement to that of another unlikely new dad, Matthew McConaughey:

Read More »

It seemed like the upcoming horror-comedy Jennifer's Body had a foolproof formula for success: take Oscar-winning writer Diablo Cody, cast sexy Mother Teresa-assayer Megan Fox, throw in a nude scene, and laugh all the way to the blood bank. Sadly, it looks like producers may have trimmed one of the film's main selling points, if a new review posted at JoBlo is any indication. Though the amateur critic had not been keen to see the film, a friend lured him in with what proved to be false advertising:

Read More »

Legendary talent manager and producer Bernie Brillstein died Thursday after months of battling complications from heart disease; he was 77. Credited with influential (and lucrative) deals for clients including Jim Henson and the geniuses who brought you Hee Haw, Brillstein was perhaps best known for nurturing John Belushi's rising star before his own devastating death in 1982.

Read More »

Some things are simply too fragile for this world, and so it goes with our newfound toleration for Paris Hilton. After building up unexpected goodwill with her on-point McCain rebuttal, Hilton has immediately moved to quash the memory of those kudos with a mercenary cash grab: she's rushing out a line of "Paris for President" T-shirts (to be sold exclusively at Kitson, natch). E's Marc Malkin has more on this flagrant abuse of the campaign finance system:

Read More »

Having played everything in his long career from Barbra Streisand's sodomy-repressing patient in The Prince of Tides to a hook-handed war diarist in the upcoming Tropic Thunder, it seems a small tragedy that the single image most associated with permagrizzled thespian Nick Nolte is his infamous mugshot. Generally regarded as the gold standard to which all celebrity booking photos are held, there was virtually no aspect of the portrait that failed to convey a purity of wrongness: the sunken features, the pained grimace, the waterlily print buttoned up to the neck, and, of course, that shock of stringy chaos atop his head, defying all laws of physics as if fashioned by some oversugared pre-schooler out of a box of golden pipe-cleaners. Entire post-graduate seminars were dedicated to exploring its mysteries and beauty. So imagine our shock when the model himself finally revealed the true story behind its conception on The Tonight Show. This wasn't a mugshot at all, it turns out, but Nolte's selfless contribution to the Sacramento Policemen's Annuity and Benefit Fund.

Read More »

Welcome back to Defamer Attractions, your regular guide to what's new, noteworthy and/or totally stillborn this week at the movies. For the second straight week, The Dark Knight has a legitimate challenger for box-office supremacy, while a smattering of other releases — including one of the year's best documentaries — reinforce this summer's unusually strong vintage. Even the latest DVD's are impressive. Who knew? So screw the Olympics and read on for the real must-sees; as always, our opinions are our own, but with 99.999996% accuracy, we wouldn't have it any other way.

Read More »