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Are you sick of hearing about the Moneyball movie that Columbia put on ice three weeks ago following concerns over Steven Soderbergh's screenplay? Of course you are! Which is really too bad, since the studio has tapped Aaron Sorkin to revamp Steve Zallian's earlier script in the hopes of reviving the project. Brad Pitt is reportedly still attached, though Soderbergh is no longer involved. [THR]
Because the man simply isn't busy enough these days — what with his upcoming album, new record company, and war on T-Pain — Jay-Z is in the final stages of negotiating a deal with Random House shingle Spiegel & Grau to write a book "commenting on and telling the stories behind his lyrics," reports the Observer. But that's apparently not all! Jay's literary agent, Matthew Guma, purportedly approached publishers earlier this summer with plans for the Jiggaman to pen three books — the one being acquired by S&G, plus a memoir and a business book. Also, look out for his impending Joyce Carol Oates dis track.
Tom O'Neil, the Los Angeles Times blogger who has never met a story he couldn't work an awards reference into, wrote a fascinating column today that explains how he came into possession of the Emmy Award that Bette Midler won in 1978 for Best Variety Special and, ultimately, how he came to discover he had purchased hot goods. He then reached out to Midler's people and returned the stolen statuette. Now that's what we call journalism! [Gold Derby/LAT]
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This week, after months of advertising, the Sci Fi network becomes Syfy, and it’s not hard to see why. Sci-fi is a genre, not a name; Syfy is a copyrightable word, and a brand-new one, with undetermined associations or attachments. NBC Universal, the network’s owner, says it wanted to freshen up the brand. They also wanted to “broaden” its appeal, which is to say that they’d like to soft-pedal any association with little green men — not to mention the little gray men who watch them on TV.
So why does this sound like the dopiest idea ever to touch down on planet Earth?
As any subscriber to Bobblehead Monthly will tell you, the apex of this decade's bobblehead movement was when NBC released the now-legendary Dwight Schrute edition. Since then, the industry has suffered from a clear-cut case of overexposure. That said, if we were heading to Comic-Con later this month, we'd definitely wait in line to get our mitts on one of these limited-edition Benjamin Linus bobbleheads. Although, we'd vastly prefer one of Frogurt. [Daily What]
About two months ago, Mary-Louise Parker expressed regret for agreeing to film a scene in Weeds while in the nude. At the time, she confessed to More magazine that "I didn't think I needed to be naked. I fought with the director about it, and now I am bitter." Well, from the looks of her NSFW photo spread in the new issue of Esquire, it appears that she didn't experience the same issue with the photographer who conducted this particular shoot. As a supplement to the interview, Esquire shot a video of (a clothed) Parker reading aloud from a copy of Alice In Wonderland alongside a giant teddy bear and a plate of milk and cookies. We're not quite sure that this two-minute video will hold up to Tim Burton's upcoming, trippy feature film, but one thing is for certain: Mary-Louise Parker's version definitely won't give you any nightmares.
In the unlikely event that you decided not to take a bathroom break during Texas Representative Sheila Jackson-Lee's never-ending eulogy at Michael Jackson's funeral on Tuesday, you might've heard her mention plans to introduce a congressional resolution to honor the deceased King of Pop (this would've been shortly before the TelePrompTer instructed her to "Please end your comments"). Well, Speaker Nancy Pelosi has scuttled the whole thing as it might "open up to contrary views that are not necessary at this time to be expressed in association with a resolution whose purpose is quite different." By this we can only imagine she means that such a resolution might spark a debate among House Republicans over who can do the best moonwalk.
Pelosi Nixes Jackson Memorial Resolution [Caucus/NYT]
We live for paradoxes like the one presented by “Robot” and its video. Abetted by a young fellow named Buckshot, KRS-One — the great rap curmudgeon and self-declared arbiter of hip-hop “authenticity” — makes a typical argument (preordained, impossibly broad, supposedly self-evident) about the state of rap music: specifically, that many MCs are robots, replicants who rely on technological gimmicks like Auto-Tune. The paradox is, of course, that the song and the cleverly robot-themed video are themselves gimmicks. Which is great: Rap grew out of gimmicks — rhyming, record-scratching, samples, and indeed, the very idea of hip-hop authenticity. But more important, the song and its clip are more appealing and poppy than anything we can remember KRS-One doing in years. (We look forward to his and Buckshot’s album collaboration, Survival Skills, due in mid-September.) Still, Kris, we have to ask: If rap’s such an institution, why are you always trying to tear it down?
Pali Research's Richard Greenfield, the guy who three months ago predicted Up would be a commercial failure, has admitted he was "dead wrong" after the movie made $265.9 million and became Pixar's second-biggest hit behind Finding Nemo. Miraculously, he continues to be employed. [NYT]
In Brüno, Sacha Baron Cohen's new movie ostensibly designed to expose real American homophobia, some of the most damning footage comes from a cage-fighting match in Fort Smith, Arkansas, during which Brüno, disguised as cage-fighter "Straight Dave," upsets the audience when he starts making out with his opponent. Chairs and epithets are hurled, and while there's obviously no excusing either, Newsweek today has the details of how the scene was shot, which sort of makes the reaction seem slightly less spontaneous.
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"I was never at a place where rehab would have been appropriate … Booze was what would make me want to stay out all night and do some blow or smoke a joint or whatever, so shutting that off was key. It's like ketchup and French fries — I don't want one without the other. So that's the moment: Do you want to continue being great at being in your 20s, or do you want to step up and graduate into adulthood?"—Jason Bateman on how he got back on top of his game [Details]
"That used to drive me mad. But I recently did a panel with some other lead actresses and January Jones was there and she told me she gets scripts the day before [as well], so that made me feel a lot better."—Rose Byrne is only happy when her colleagues are unhappy [Age]
"I guess I'm guilty of that, although I didn't try to fool anybody. I would have been happier if I'd been cast as a young lawyer or something; I definitely didn't want to be in a teen comedy. It was the opportunity that presented itself. When I was 18, I didn't look like a fully formed human being. I was so skinny and so baby-faced. I was kind of a late bloomer, and that's how that happened."—Alan Ruck didn't really want to be in Ferris Bueller's Day Off at age 29 [LAT]
Talk about a chest-off! The dreamy duo of Hugh Jackman and Daniel Craig are confirmed to take the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater by storm this fall in a production of Keith Huff's play A Steady Rain. Previews are scheduled to begin on September 10, with the official opening set for September 29. [Arts Beat/NYT]
All those kids who bawled endlessly and shit their pants during that infamous test screening of Where the Wild Things Are must've had extremely fragile emotions, because the MPAA just rated the film PG for "mild thematic elements, some adventure action and brief language." Guess this means we won't be seeing any of the Wild Things' wangs. [Playlist]
Photo: Getty Images
Eighteen different television networks carried live coverage of Michael Jackson's memorial service on Tuesday afternoon, and now we know how many people tuned in to watch it. Despite the fact that the ceremony was held on a workday and aired during the daytime, some 31.1 million people managed to find a way to get in front of a television to watch the tribute. While this is undoubtedly a massive audience, the numbers failed to surpass the 32.2 million who tuned into watch Princess Diana's funeral in 1997 or the 35.1 million prime-time viewers who watched Ronald Reagan be put to rest in 2004. This isn't quite an apples-to-apples comparison, though, as a number of gainfully employed people understandably turned to the Internet to get their coverage. MSNBC.com reported that they served up nearly 19 million video streams of the service, and CNN says that they had 10.5 million live streams. Now, if only there were a way to track how many office drones deployed the old Alt-Tab keystroke to switch back to their Powerpoint presentations and/or Excel spreadsheets as their bosses sauntered by their desks ...
Photo: Courtesy of Universal
Borat was the spastically hilarious reflection of Bush: a blundering bigot who exposed the sorts of blundering bigots who elect blundering bigots to public office. If Sacha Baron Cohen made money — and his fame — in large part by duping hicks,* it was cool, since his exploitation of the purportedly ignorant was done in the name of DailyShow–ish comedy for the greater liberal good. And, in 2006, it was cathartically fun to make fun of American ass-hats.
Brüno seems to want to go further. [Sorry, but everything below is a big SPOILER.] As David Edelstein has pointed out, the movie exists to satirize homophobia just as gay marriage is in the public eye. Goading and agitating, Baron Cohen stacks the deck relentlessly and hammers some easy targets, but the homophobia rarely erupts. And while this might be a comic failure, it becomes an almost Obama-like success — reminding us that there’s not such a difference between red-staters and blue-staters after all.
The social commentary just seems more patronizing, staged, and ineffective. 
Os Gemeos, the influential Brazilian street artist duo, have started work on their new mural on the corner of Bowery and Houston where the Keith Haring mural used to live. Animal New York has some cool photos of the work in progress. [Animal New York]
Back when Monsters vs. Aliens opened in March, a majority of the film's somewhat surprising $58.3 million opening weekend gross came from theaters showing the film in 3-D. This proved to be good news for both Hollywood studios and multiplex owners, as it demonstrated that consumers were willing to shell out an average of $3.18 more for the privilege of seeing a film while wearing a pair of black-rimmed glasses. However, as Ben Fritz of the Los Angeles Times reports, it looks as if Joe Moviegoer's appetite to seek out a film playing in a 3-D theater is lessening.
Hours after Michael Jackson's death two weeks ago, reports surfaced that Jackson might've bequeathed the 267 Beatles songs under his ownership to Paul McCartney, the guy who wrote half of them, in a bid to "make things right" between the former friends. (We didn't really buy it, but wouldn't it have been awesome?) Then, days later, the will was released and the whole story was revealed as nothing more than a tabloid hallucination. In an official statement, McCartney says he wasn't fooled either.
We're not entirely sure why Heeb decided to put a phone call into eighties-era cult-movie icon Larry B. Scott, but we're certainly glad that they did! In the interview, he discusses a multitude of important issues, like what happened to the famous floppy javelin he threw in the original Revenge of the Nerds and how Wormser had his way with bikini-wearing extras on the set of Revenge of the Nerds II. [Heeb]
Despite lukewarm reviews from Cannes and Brad Pitt's accent in the trailer, we continue to hold out hope that Inglourious Basterds might actually be good. Dampening our enthusiasm somewhat, though, is the fact that everyone involved seems to be so much more interested in promoting the hypothetical, not-yet-written Basterds prequel than the already-completed movie scheduled for release next month. Harvey Weinstein talked it up to GQ recently, making it sound exciting and mysterious ("Brad [Pitt] wants to do Inglourious II. We all want to do it ... But unfortunately I cannot give away the plot") and now, in an interview with Variety, Quentin Tarantino does pretty much the same thing.
"All through the movie, Brad Pitt and Eli Roth just kept saying, 'Prequel. Prequel.'"
What?: Will Smith is producing and may star in City That Sailed, which would re-team him with his I Am Legend director, Francis Lawrence. The movie, originally scripted by Truman Show writer James Lassiter but currently undergoing rewrites, is about a father and a daughter living on opposite sides of the Atlantic whose love is so strong it causes Manhattan to break off and sail across the ocean. Hey, Will, maybe next time you can just play a barista with relationship issues or something? [THR]
Money Money Money: Michael Moore’s upcoming documentary on the financial crisis, hitting theaters October 2, will be titled Capitalism: A Love Story. The director announced the title yesterday, explaining "It will be the perfect date movie. It's got it all — lust, passion, romance, and 14,000 jobs being eliminated every day. It's a forbidden love, one that dare not speak its name. Heck, let's just say it: It's capitalism." Good to know Moore's legendary wit is still intact. [Variety]
overnights, abc, chat room, kudos, nbc, trailer mix, twilight, new moon, quote machine, video, fox, mad men, news reel, vampires, adam lambert, avatar, james cameron, slideshow, glee, 2012, hbo, precious, right-click, up in the air, beef, broadway, chris weitz, flashforward, how i met your mother, jay leno, michael jackson, oprah, oscars, robert pattinson, saturday night live, snl, 30 rock, box office, curb your enthusiasm, james franco
By Dan Brown, September 15, 2009
Copyright © 2009, New York Magazine Holdings LLC. All Rights Reserved.
A Single Man Premiere
The Lovely Bones Screening
Museum of the Moving Image Salutes Clint
IFP Gotham Awards
Me and Orson Welles Screening
Opening Night of Fela!
The Transformation of TV Into an Art Form
The Draw of Dream Worlds in Film
Gosselin, Prince of the Professional Nobodies
A Decade of Defining Moments in Pop-Culture
