Entourage last night offered a fairly brisk half-hour that balanced the science fiction of Jamie-Lynn Sigler and Turtle display palpable screen chemistry with a fairly easier-to-swallow story involving Vinnie getting fired by a Wolfgang Petersen-type on the set of the extremely timely Smoke Jumpers. As Ari desperately tries to get the director replaced, loyal assistant/stapler target Lloyd runs through a list of names, offering only commode-demolishing Zack and Miri director Kevin Smith as being available. The suggestion tees up another Ari sledgehammer—we won't give it away except to say Red Velvet gluttony is involved—which elicited this reaction from Smith on his message board:

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Sometimes it can seem as though the glittering world of showbiz is so insane and illogical on a daily basis that nothing can truly shock us anymore. Well, that's what I thought - and then I read that HBO are apparently arranging for Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, and Paris Hilton to star together in a new sitcom. And my unflappable self was well and truly flapped. Surely this cannot be true?!

Britney Spears, Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan are rumoured to be in talks to star in a sitcom together. US TV network HBO, which brought us Sex and the City, are reportedly keen to sign up the blonde trio to appear as flatmates struggling to make it big in Hollywood.

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The Vampires Give Back. An operative deep undercover in Tampa writes us: "I am stymied as to why Sam Trammell and Rutina Wesley ("Sam" and "Tara") from HBO's True Blood are in my office's conference room giving out autographs and pictures with all 500 of the employees in my Tampa, FL cable company's office. Is it normal for a show to bring its actors on a tour of Florida suburbs to shake hands with call centre employees, tech staff, etc.? Is this kind of grassroots PR work a good sign for the show, or a bad one?" Gee, we don't really know, though when we stop to think about it, the Austin Nichols and Luke Perry John From Cincinnati Visits A Surf Shop Near You! tour did come just weeks before its cancellation. Take from that what you will. [Defamer]

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· Nicole Kidman will star in The Eighth Wonder, an action-adventure whose goal "is to be to Raiders of the Lost Ark what the Bourne movies are to James Bond movies." Damn—comparisons were always our SAT Achilles' heel. We're just going to darken the oval next to Romancing the Stone and be done with it. [THR]
· Miley Cyrus will star in a Disney movie tailor-made for the virginal superstar by author Nicholas Sparks, whom we hold personally responsible for the recent shmaltzalanche to devastate Hollywood. How can he make us blubber sufficiently if the lead actress can't even consummate her love for the soldier she reluctantly waves off to war from a sunlit dock? We shall see. [Variety]
· Michael "For My Next Song, I'll Play Beethoven's Concerto No. 5 in E-flat Major and Sparkle My Pants Off!" Douglas will first star as a horny auto magnate in Solitary Man. [Variety]
· David Spade will star in Divorced Guys. [Variety]
· True Blood already got its second season pickup after just two episode airings, with effusive network reps citing an "unprecedented" 24% increase in viewers since the premiere, who roundly found the show "a lot less awful and confusing than John From Cincinnati!" [THR]

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· True Blood's premiere drew just 1.44 million viewers—about a half-million better than Tell Me You Love Me, but 2 million short of what John From Cincinnati managed to score in its slot following The Sopranos's series finale. We haven't watched it yet, because we find vampires annoying. Enough with the biting and the capes, already! [LAT]
· "The expression I use is that a 747 can't make a sharp right turn," says studio head Katherine Pope about the dilemma of attracting new viewers to NBC's Life after the show's truncated first season. However, a 747 can make a sharp downward turn, tailspin, then crash and burn. Let's hope Life doesn't. We liked it. [Variety]
· Patricia Heaton and Treat Williams will star as the real world parents of a child with Tourette Syndrome in CBS MOW Front of the Class. Instead of swear words and racial epithets, however, the student in the TV version will involuntarily shout out Jell-O flavors. [THR]
· Johnny Depp and Gore Verbinksi re-team for Rango, a motion-capture CG animated film about a "pet who goes on an adventure." [Variety]
· Val Kilmer, Armand Assante, and Eric Roberts have been cast in indie thriller The Steam Experiment, about "six people trapped and terrorized in an urban Turkish bathhouse," pitched to investors of "Hostel with shvitzing." [THR

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· Noted shlockteur Stephen Sommers will write and direct Warner Bros.'s splashy Tarzan remake, set to push the flimsy-loincloth envelope further than any version to come before. [Variety]
· Ravenous Spanish pantry-pirate Gwyneth Paltrow has hopped aboard a space skiff and escaped the CAA Death Star, having signed on with UTA on Tuesday afternoon. The direct implications this has upon your day-to-day lives should be negligible. [Variety]
· Ted Danson has been cast in HBO comedy pilot Bored to Death, playing the "pompous but articulate magazine editor" mentor to Jason Schwartzman's "struggling Brooklyn writer with a drinking problem." [THR]
· The Wonder Years writer-producer Bob Brush has been given a very strings-attached pilot order of Lost in the '80s, pitched as what happens when "Fast Times at Ridgemont High meets The Ice Storm," then sleeps with The Ice Storm's best friend Square Pegs, accidentally getting her pregnant and producing a son named Ordinary People. [THR]
· Surprise! SAG and the AMPTP are fighting. The latest: SAG sent a 12-page letter to members outlining their problems with the producers' final offer, which they characterize as "one-sided and filled with misrepresentations." [THR]

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With just a little over a week until the new season of Entourage begins, we thought we'd take a moment to salute the most complex and rewarding of all relationships in that ongoing industry sausage fest: that of Ari and Lloyd. And no better examples of their glorious co-dependency exist than in those moments when everyone's favourite double-banger-securing Zeus completely loses his shit on his fiercely loyal Gaysian henchman. Defamer videographer Molly McAleer combed through the Entourage archives to find the greatest of all spittle-flecked Ari-Lloyed exchanges—though call us biased, our favourite one didn't make the cut.

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· Oh, goody! Eight-ball-faced (literally, not in the Andy Dick sense) Looney Tunes character Marvin The Martian will get his own Warner Bros. feature, in which he shall finally be reunited with his beloved eludium pu36 explosive space modulator. [Variety]
· HBO secured rights to Liza Palmer's chunk lit classic, Conversations With the Fat Girl. [Variety]
· In more HBO news—these guys are desperate for a hit! Everyone's tuning over to AMC! FUCKING AMC!!!—they've returned to executive producer Mark Wahlberg's muscled embrace, greenlighting his pilot How to Make It in America. It's about "three enterprising downtown twentysomethings who hustle their way through New York City determined to achieve the American dream," aka NYCtourage. [THR]
· ABC purchased French sitcom Fais pas ci, fais pas ca for Americanization by Samantha Who? co-EP Bob Kushell. [THR]
· Josh Lucas will star in Tim Robbins's Showtime pilot Possible Side Effects, about a pharmaceutical dynasty. The title is a humorous play on the common warnings you find on prescription drug literature. [THR]

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One of the most stirringly batshit films we've seen this year, Heidi Fleiss: The Would-Be Madam of Crystal debuts on HBO tonight after a successful premiere run at last month's Los Angeles Film Festival. We've tipped you previously to some of the harrowing dynamics herein: Ex-madam Heidi Fleiss nabs a land deal in Pahrump, Nev., where she'll attempt to make her comeback with an all-male brothel for women. Civic outrage, meth relapses and an inheritance of tropical birds conspire to scuttle her dream. Hilarity decidedly does not ensue.

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Like it or not, it's time to let go of any qualms you may have about welcoming a successor to Harry Potter's tween-bewitching throne and embrace what will surely become the zeitgeisty-est franchise of the decade. Twilight is here, it's a little bit queer, and don't even try ignoring it. The dewy, sexy, hickey-adorned film version of the hugely successful books centered around hot teenage vampires has begun garnering its first feature stories in the glossies, and the millions of "fan girls" obsessed with the tales are mad as hell and not gonna take it anymore. The new issue of EW features the film's two newbie stars on its cover, and the odd photo is setting message boards and fan sites ablaze with criticism from the series' longtime devotees. And angry fans aren't the only obstacle Twilight faces — too-cool-for-school Alan Ball has a vampire show premiering on HBO later this year and, unlike "powdered donut" Edward and "plain" Bella, his blood-suckers sit at the cool kids' table...

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