The Writers Guild of America and the Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Producers are back at the bargaining table today after a week-long recess to consider proposals. Nobody expects a deal any time soon, but with the networks revealing their Fall schedules to advertisers next week, the pressure to get some kind of agreement in place will be severe. It would be profoundly tragic if CBS's Les Moonves didn't squeeze every nickel out of the 30-second spots between their ten shows with the cute wives and the dumb, insensitive husbands.

NBC and Universal officially merged on Wednesday, creating the world's fifth-largest media concern, according to THR. Check out this steamy, conglomerate ugly-bumpin' action: "The merged entity will be able to leverage its scale by, for example, more aggressively using and cross-promoting content or negotiating better carriage deals with cable and satellite distributors." Hott! Come on, NBC Universal, get a room or we might have to turn a hose on you!

Both the L.A. Times and N.Y. Times are investigating Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter to see if he is benefiting financially from the magazine's Hollywood coverage, according to the L.A. Weekly's Nikki Finke. A possible windfall for Carter because of his regime's loving salad-tossing of its celeb cover story subjects? Sounds juicy to us...DEVELOPING.

The Edmonton Journal's Misty Harris examines the phenomenon of anonymous/pseudonymous supposed-celebrity bloggers such as Rance, asking pointy-headed types like a sociologist, a pop-culture-expert college professor, and a "noted expert of celebrity fandom" why the famous might want to engage in stealth-blogging. Predictably, they come up with the sort of goatee-stroking jibber-jabber we'd expect to hear from such experts: they want to project characters and court intimacy with fans, and so on.

We'd love to take credit for the recent American jailbait craze spreading to the Continent. Unfortunately for Defamer, the French have a much longer history of inappropriately sexualizing the young in film and probably thought this up all by themselves.

For the low, low price of $1,000 per plate, you may be able to get a front row seat for a strangling. Next week's Steven J. Ross Humanitarian Award dinner will honor Disney CEO Michael Eisner, who will leave the safety of his impressive office fortifications to be feted in New York City. Harvey and Bob Weinstein are Journal Chairs (whatever that entails) for the event. And we all know that Eisner is blocking the release of the Michael Moore documentary, Fahrenheit 911, that the Weinsteins are dying to distribute

How did Van Helsing not finish under $50 million in its first weekend and cost half of the Universal staff their jobs? USA Today has a story on the time-worn studio strategy for counteracting negative buzz and horrible reviews: throwing piles of cash at the marketing budget. Van Helsing's promotional budget is rumored to be over $30 million. The article quotes Adam Fogelson, Universal's head of marketing, about VH's opening:

For those of you who would accuse us of suggesting that Los Angeles is entirely populated by B-list actors, wannabe screenwriters, and obscenely rich producers hiding behind electrified fences in Bel Air: We now have an account that proves that L.A. has at least one professional basketball coach and one crazy homeless guy:

Bangles singer Susanna Hoffs has recently sold a script to Revolution Studios (albeit with two writing partners). Her Exorcism For Dummies is about a slacker who pretends to be an exorcist, but then discovers he actually has "the gift" and has to undo the damage he unleashes on the world. No director is attached yet, but does Hoffs' husband, Austin Powers director Jay Roach, love her enough to get involved with this, ahem, sterling logline?

Perhaps the only thing creepier than our America's recent obsession with the jailbait movies dominating the recent entertainment landscape is some guy applying practical mathematics to the quantitative comparison of said jailbait stars' talent levels. Blog The Snoozeletter crunches the numbers:

Yesterday, protesters from minority advocacy groups held a press conference at L.A. City Hall to criticize Nielsen Media Research's upcoming People Meter, which the groups fear will undercount minority television viewership, particulary in urban areas. Nielsen has already launched what Broadcasting & Cable calls a "public-relations counteroffensive," sending out 500 DVDs entitled "Everyone Counts," which assures people that their methodology strives to ensure that "all television audiences are fairly and accurately represented in our samples."

The retirement community halls haven't seen this much electricity since Double Tapioca Night. The Op-Ed pages of Quietly Waiting to Die Daily are abuzz with anticipation. CBS airs The Dick Van Dyke Show Revisited tonight, catering as usual to the entertainment-underserved Greatest Generation. The return of Dick Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore should easily carry the coveted 59- to-ashes-in-an-urn demographic, crushing such token, counterprogrammed sops to the body-piercing set such as ABC's According to Jim and PBS' Alan Alda in Scientific American Frontiers. Thanks, CBS! Our grandparents will have an hour where they're not nattering on about World War II.

The Smoking Gun has Diane Lane's contract rider, which details her demands for appearing in a movie.

Sightings are sent in (and written) by our readers. Send yours to tips@defamer.com. Don't pretend you're too good for this just because you live in L.A.

Variety television editor/Franklin Avenue blogger Michael Schneider has a rundown of the orphan heat that Hollywood's currently warming its derivative hands over, with at least four sudden-orphan-custody projects on the horizon:

This is what happens when you leave Quentin Tarantino alone for even a minute—if he's not running off to Japan to film a two-part epic splatterfest, he's insinuating himself into a music video to give those silent-acting chops a whirl. Drew's Blog-o-rama points us to Tarantino's starring turn in a Leonard Cohen video. Warning to those of you with heart problems, mild food allergies, or eyes: Beware a shirtless Tarantino engaging in a love scene near the end of the video. One day, they'll probably use the footage of his pigeon chest to slow population growth in China.

Variety reports that Josh Schwartz, The O.C's. boy mastermind, is close to a deal with Fox to develop a "companion" series to the hit drama. It won't be a spin-off, but will "mirror The O.C.'s mix of younger and older characters, but with the overall skein skewing slightly older than The O.C." But it looks like we're going to have to wait until January for the tough kid from Cerritos to stir up shit in Laguna Effing Beach.

Did Mean Girls star/jailbait box office champ Lindsay Lohan reinvest some of her Freaky Friday cash into her Torso Fund? Awful Plastic Surgery seems to think so. And if the speculation is killing you and you want to apply a more empirical approach to your questioning, our deranged cousin at Fleshbot chewed through the ropes long enough to post some more revealing pics (NSFW). Seems like Lindsay hasn't had them long enough to have mastered the fine art of keeping them inside her dress.

An insider offers observations on the negotiations between the Writers Guild and the studios, and it looks like the real winners are going to be the pharmacies and the realtors. (Actually, the pharmacies win pretty much every day in Hollywood, but we digress.) After last week's "negotiations broke down, pharmacies were flooded all over town with refill requests for Ambien, Xanax, Valium.....because lots of people are terrified, here, frankly."

Poor Scientology. Kabbalah's the inclusionary spiritual inspiration society* getting all the press these days, supposedly marrying off Demi and Ashton, inspiring Britney to get gibberish Hebrew tattoos, and hawking Madonna's awful children's book. But L.A. Voice's Mack Reed spent his Mother's Day brunching at the Scientology Celebrity Centre, sampling the decor, and somehow escaping without a strange urge to give John Travolta ten percent of his salary: