anthony pellicano

5:06AM STV | Prison Break: Die Hard director John McTiernan is the latest celebrity to clear jail waivers this week after the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals vacated his four-month prison sentence for lying to federal investigators in the Anthony Pellicano case. McTiernan, who at first denied hiring Pellicano to wiretap his Rollerball producer Charles Roven, pleaded guilty to the charges last year; soon after, he appealed to withdraw the plea on the basis of inadequate legal counsel and, in his words, “All this for Rollerball? Have you seen Rollerball?” Free to direct again, he has since been sentenced to four years of B-pictures, with time off for good behaviour. [AP] More »

Trade Roundup: Mel Gibson To Don His Actor’s Hat Once More

7:33AM Seth | Mel Gibson has signed on for his first acting job since Signs and We Were Soldiers back in 2002. In Edge of Darkness, a feature based on a BBC miniseries from the ’80s, he’ll play “a straitlaced police investigator whose activist daughter is killed, probably by the Jews.” [Variety] Could one-half of the lusty network coupling responsible for siring struggling, bastard offspring The CW be missing their former identity? Warner Bros. just launched TheWB.com, where you can catch streamed episodes of old programming and newly launched online series. [Variety] More »

Possible Pellicano Mistrial Haunts Courtroom as Testimony Winds Down

6:50AM Defamer Hollywood | Having apparently run out of the tantalising audio excerpts with which she’s been sustaining our interest in the Anthony Pellicano trial, Allison Hope Weiner is testing a new kind of bombshell today over at The Huffington Post — and it’s called “A Possible Mistrial.” It’s not as sexy as it sounds, but that’s not to say it won’t be eventually: A government witness testifying to have handled paperwork saying co-defendant Sgt. Mark Arneson was in bankruptcy — a claim he denied under oath — may have actually forged and filed the paperwork herself. Brilliant! More »

Tears, Sneers Ensue as Anita Busch Faces Pellicano’s Third Degree

4:10AM Defamer Hollywood | All kinds of drama unfolded Wednesday in one of the more turbulent days of the Anthony Pellicano trial, with ex-journalist Anita Busch following fork-tongued Michael Ovitz to a slow death on the witness stand. As if you had to ask, the cross-examination showdown between Busch and Pellicano — whom the writer all but accused in court of infamously harrassing her out of writing articles about Ovitz after joining the LA Times — did not go smoothly: More »

Witness Michael Ovitz Gives Thanks For the Gift of Anthony Pellicano

5:00AM Defamer Hollywood | Michael Ovitz hit the Pellicano witness stand this morning with a heart full of gratitude for his former private investigator, whose ongoing wiretapping trial became a state-sanctioned love-in as the ex-CAA/Disney/AMG boss recalled all the fun they had back in the day while paranoiacally destroying people’s lives: More »

When Kenny Met Taarna

11:12AM Seth | Yesterday, we promised you a brainmeltingly awesome new thing, and dare we say, you got it. We only wished the entire episode could have existed inside the cat-pee-induced, hallucinatory world of Heavy South Metal Park [South Park] HuffPo’s Allison Hope Weiner, who’s dutifully provided us with every juicy tidbit to emerge from the Pellicano trial thusfar, may be subpoenaed by the defence. That could transform her into the Hollywood Wiretapping Trial of the Century’s own Judith Miller, Patron Saint of Source Protection. [THR ESQ.] Will Paul Giamatti’s next role as a U.S politician require him to wipe his arse with the historical document John Adams helped create? [Vulture] As Kate Bosworth giggled with Paul Shaffer, UTA wept. [DHD] If you live in the Hills, a blog called The Daily Coyote isn’t something you’d likely need or want. For everyone else: Look! Coyotes! Daily! [The Daily Coyote] More »

Pellicano Shadow Hangs Over Reporter Whose Digging Started it All

5:53AM Defamer Hollywood | Speaking as someone who once had his own life threatened by a fairly powerful, decidedly unhappy source, I particularly empathize today with Anita Busch, the former star trade reporter whose receipt of a dead fish, a rose and a note screaming “STOP” foisted the Anthony Pellicano investigation horror on an unwitting Hollywood nearly six years ago. Rapidly approaching her testimony date in the Pellicano trial, Busch granted a rare interview in a NY Times profile that is about the biggest bummer we’ve read since, well, maybe ever: Ms. Busch’s discovery of the tap on her phones, prosecutors say, led to another search of Mr. Pellicano’s offices and a new phase of the investigation — one that metastasized into racketeering and other charges against him and more than a dozen accused co-conspirators. More »

Brad Grey Insists Under Oath That He Didn’t Want To Know How The Pellicano Sausage Was Made

8:08AM Seth | There was little that could have come from Brad Grey’s testimony at the Anthony Pellicano trial today that would have matched the sensationalism of the last bombshell to emerge from this ongoing saga of backdoor Hollywood intrigue–i.e., the Chris Rock: Accused Rapist tapes. Still, there was plenty of opportunity for another Moment, the diminutive studio emperor having a sizable axe to grind with Garry Shandling, who pulled no punches on the stand in a brutally frank testimony against his former manager. (It would surely have included some waterworks had the Larry Sanders Show star not years ago had his face pulled tighter than a conga drum, effectively sealing every one of his above-the-neck mucus membranes tighter than Tutankhamen’s tomb.) As it turns out, Grey did not use the opportunity to take some public jabs at his nemesis, instead delivering straightforward statements relieving himself of all knowledge of Pellicano’s shadowy surveillance methods: More »