les moonves
Les Moonves Confident ‘CSI’ Will Crush Leno: ‘By A Lot’
3:32AM Seth | As Jeff Zucker foists his last hopes for NBC on Jay Leno and his arsenal of funny little newspaper-clipping typos, his arch nemesis—future galactic despot Les Moonves—couldn’t help but hijack the opportunity to engage in a favourite pastime: an old-fashioned, TV honcho dick-measuring contest! Talking today at the same New York media conference where Zucker dropped jaws by announcing his plan to scale back on programming hours, Moonves temporarily blinded the audience with a smile, before pledging that it wouldn’t be long before David Caruso would be scraping Leno off the bottom of his Italian loafers. THR reports: More »
CBS Not Reinventing The Sitcom And Cop Show Wheel Here, Folks
3:00AM Seth | Following a detour in last season’s CBS programming strategy which saw the network throw a few wackier ideas against the fridge to see what stuck (Drac Steele, Vampire P.I. and The Singing Venetian, Hugh Jackman’s addition to the musical-casino genre, were what stuck), it seems they have returned to the dependability of laugh-tracks and procedurals for the fall 2008-09 season. At their upfronts announcement this morning at their New York offices, Les Moonves and trusty commandantes Nina Tassler and Kelly Kahl made official their last-minute, 22-episode order of The New Adventures of Old Christine, the unlikely story of what happens when Elaine loses her balls and spends the majority of her leisure time bickering with her ex-husband and his new girlfriend. Following them on Wednesdays is a new sitcom, Project Gary, starring Jay Mohr, while another new, single-camera comedy, Worst Week, joins the Monday night lineup, alongside all the wisecracking nerd-geniuses and Britney guest spots you’ve come to expect.
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 »
Viacom PR Admits ‘Public Crapping’ May Not Bode Well For New Pay Network
5:25AM Defamer Hollywood | The week that started with Les Moonves and Phillipe Dauman kickboxing in Sumner Redstone’s corporate steel cage will apparently end with Dauman retreating to his corner of the Viacom boardroom for medical attention. Or at least that’s the impression we glean from today’s gloom-and-doom survey of the Great Pay-Cable Cockfight of 2008, during which Paramount broke off from cousin network Showtime after failing to renegotiate an output deal for its titles. On their own now with partners Lionsgate and MGM/UA, even Viacom/Paramount flacks acknowledge finding little comfort in the TV wild: The marketplace reaction to the fourth feevee was predictable: Who needs it? More »
Paramount, Showtime, CBS Spend Weekend Fighting in Grandpa Sumner Redstone’s Sandbox of Death
7:00AM Defamer Hollywood | While most of us fled the office to enjoy early spring, Sumner Redstone spent another relaxing weekend watching his corporate children at Viacom gouge each others’ eyes out. And this time around he got his money’s worth, with Paramount finally breaking free from CBS/Showtime to start its own pay-cable and VOD service with MGM and Lionsgate. It’s an untidy, somewhat shocking scenario that we (and seemingly the rest of the Web) can’t yet make sense of, but join us after the jump to parse the winners and losers at a glance. More »
Tyra Banks And Ashton Kutcher Combine Deadly Reality Forces
6:17AM Seth | If the concept of the two names Tyra Banks and Ashton Kutcher (Tyrashton?) melding into a single, reality-TV -producing force for ABC would drive you to incontinence with excitement, well, maybe you should take a bathroom break before reading this story. [THR] Quarterlife, the drama from the creators of thirtysomething that started as a pilot at ABC, then got resuscitated for MySpace, and finally was resurrected on NBC, tanked last night, posting a 1.6 rating/4 share. The series about “twentysomethings coming of age in the digital generation” was doomed to be outdated before it ever reached a wide audience, already replaced with far more timely takes on the same material, like ABC’s mid-season replacement, Tumblr Road. [Variety] More »
McG’s ‘Terminator’ Stakes A Spot In The Distant Future
6:09AM Seth | Any plans for Memorial Day weekend 2009? Great! That means you can catch the opening of Terminator Salvation: The Future Begins, McG’s utterly essential contribution to the futuristic-robot-killing-machine franchise that keeps on giving. [Variety] The WWE entered into a deal with Fox, giving the studio “a first-look deal” for any project starring one of their wrestlers, and first dibs on John Cena to voice an irascible musk ox in Ice Age: Boot Camp. [Variety] A three-month Chinese government ban on Hollywood product has ended, with a March release set for National Treasure: Book of Secrets and 10,000 B.C., after government censors screened both films to ensure they contained “no fingerprints of that lie-spreading Spielberg-devil.” [Variety] More »
Hollywood Hills Real Estate Listing Brings Us One Step Closer To Mt. Mogulmore
10:03AM Seth | With news that 138 acres of land just west of the H in the Hollywood sign have been put up for sale yesterday by Chicago investors, the last impediment to Mt. Mogulmore–Les Moonves’s masterplan of constructing an enduring companion monument to the nine-letter icon–is but a mere $22 million check away. More »
Short Ends: Last Negotiator Standing
5:30AM Defamer Hollywood | Cobbling together various reports about what transpired between the WGA and the studios before negotiations were abruptly halted at the end of last week, the creators of Hollywood Rumble have produced this dramatic recreation of the unfortunate events of late Friday afternoon. · You know who’s not going broke even if the strike lasts until 2105? Les Moonves. · Why are famous people so damn crazy? A crazy stylist-to-the-stars offers his exciting theories! · Those too impatient to wait for Sweeney Todd’s release can get a small measure of relief for their barber-blueballs here. You can’t have The Office right now, but you can have An Office. More »
