Do your lefty/environmentalist politics haunt you each time you're ferried to the edge of the red carpet in a gas-guzzling, smog-spewing, 15-passenger Hummer limousine, but it's too hard to cram the hookers into one of those Back to the Future 2-looking hybrid cars? EVO Limo now has a Chevy Suburban limo that runs on natural gas and emits 80 percent less smog-forming emissions than a gas-powered stretch. Sold yet? Cameron Diaz likes them, as does Woody Harrelson (though we imagine his ride could run on the hemp fumes.) But if the idea of kicking back in an eco-friendly ride doesn't seem glam enough for the Hollywood A-list, maybe we can just tell them that the limos are made in a sweatshop staffed entirely by production assistants and junior agents. As long as someone's suffering, both the environment and a $20 million-per-picture star can both come out winners.

NBC primetime development president Kevin Reilly will become president of NBC Entertainment later this month, according to Variety. He'll still report to Jeff Zucker, who is president of NBC Entertainment, News, and Cable Group. [Ed. note—Yes, these titles are all perfectly clear.] "Kevin is perfectly positioned to help NBC continue its tremendous run," Zucker said Monday. "He's worked hard on a promising new development slate for next year."

The Blueprint was among the seemingly ten million revelers that were shoveled into the Indio, CA desert location of the Coachella festival. And, unlike yours truly, she didn't lose her camera phone ability when full of festival beer and assorted other substances. She grabbed a couple of cam-phone snaps of The O.C.'s Adam Brody ("insanely stoned," pictured at left from The Blueprint) and Mischa Barton ("literally dry-humped by her billionaire Davis boyfriend on the lawn.")

LA Voice's Mack Reed went to Universal Studios during the heat wave, and muses on the plight of struggling actors encased in foam-headed character costumes:

WENN reports that NBC may have failed once again trying to translate a British show for consumption in the states. Test audiences aren't loving the de-crumpeted pilot of The Office. Said a source, "...it was painfully clear that nobody was liking it. The lady next to me said that she found it depressing."

These are the numbers that tell you exactly what America thinks about the abuse of Iraqi POWs:

We returned from the weekend to discover a somewhat disappointing absence of writers' strike Armageddon. No writers with meticulously-written picket signs, no producers "accidentally" running their Hummers up on the sidewalk to get a "story by" credit stuck in the grill. The two sides have adjourned talks until Wednesday, following Sunday's 12:01 a.m. expiration of their contract. This gives both camps time to consider the proposals on the table, dream up synonyms for "greedy" that will look good on a sandwich board, and get those H-2s waxed.

The New Republic's Yossi Klein Halevi takes a look inside L.A.'s Kabbalah Centre, the mother ship of celeb-courting mystical mumbo-jumbo, and finds...Madonna in a trucker hat. (Ed. note—Any cult worth its tithe has some kind of dress code. Not that Scientology is a cult. We didn't say that, okay? We're just saying they have some great uniforms. They look like funny little sailors! And not in a cult-y way.)

BoingBoing points us to this article from MIT's The Tech, in which 82-year-old former Motion Picture Association of America head/digital rights management Kool-Aid drinker Jack Valenti is made to look borderline, um, senile. Not Charlton Heston at the end of Bowling for Columbine senile, but still.

-Teeny-tiny Dreamworks mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg found inspiration for his computer-animated NBC show, Father of the Pride, from hanging out at Siegfried and Roy shows. Modern CGI should be able to render a tiger attack in chilling detail.
-Heidi Fleiss is suing Tom Sizemore for domestic violence. Who would think that a former whoremonger could get entangled in a bad relationship?
-Keanu Reeves is being honored at the World Stunt Awards. Laurels from the American Rhetorical Society will be a little harder to come by.
-Multiple child molestation indictments can't slow the Michael Jackson money-making machine. Just imagine what a conviction will do for the Neverland Ranch's llama fund!

Actor John C. Reilly (Magnolia, pretty much everything filmed in the last 10 years), walked off the Swedish set of director Lars von Trier's Manderlay to protest the on-screen killing of a donkey. Said a spokeswoman, "We tried very hard to use a puppet instead of a real donkey because we really needed to show a donkey being killed for the film, but when that didn t work we approached a vet and asked him to provide us with an animal that was due to be slaughtered anyway."

Fox's The Swan, the makeover show that takes so-called "ugly ducklings," slaps enormous, fake tits on them, then prods the better experiment results into a Frankenstein's bride beauty pageant, has been picked up for a second season. They've already begun casting for the second edition's scalpel-fodder.

We've already predicted that Envy is not exactly going to set the weekend on fire; all indications are that it's more likely to be a brown paper bag full of dog shit aflame on Dreamworks's doorstep. Sure, giving Jack Black a Lollipop Guild hairdo and putting him in the center of a movie about feces sounds like box office gold on paper. Let's just be thankful they didn't give him a talking dog.

As if this picture isn't disturbing enough, there's a creepy Diane Keaton resemblance sure to haunt our Friday night dreams.

This week is a tough one, with four major releases joining the fray. (We're feeling generous and including Envy as a major release.) Predictions are for recreational purposes only, and any profits reaped from the misuse of these projections should not be used to greenlight any further remakes of marginal movies from the 1970s and 1980s.

Is the Matrix trilogy writer-director Larry Wachowski finally ready to chop off his Neo and unleash his inner Trinity? There's been longtime speculation in Hollywood that Larry (not to be confused with brother and partner Andy, who apparently was born into a correctly-sexed body), has been planning a sex-change operation to become "Linda." But in the NY Daily News, Rush & Molloy relate the Chicago Sun Times' assertion that "longtime friends" say he's ready for the big switch. Maybe if he'd made up his mind a little faster, the last two Matrix movies wouldn't have been so mind-bendingly confusing.

Richard Roeper, fifty percent of "Ebert and Roeper" (and recipient of one-hundred percent of Roger Ebert's incredulous, "The fuck you say?" stares) puts his staggering powers of prognostication and discernment on display in discussing this summer's upcoming blockbusters:

Banterist seems more than a little displeased with Elton John's loony accusations that last week's American Idol voting was racist. He writes an open letter to the pop legend turned Disney soundtrack factory:

The Writers Guild of America (WGA) says that they are willing to negotiate the past the Sunday expiry of their contract with the studios, as it doesn't appear that a deal will be done before the deadline, according to published reports. But the studios are anxious to resolve the discussions well in advance of the May 17th "upfront" meetings where networks and advertisers negotiate advertising rates for the upcoming TV season.

The Oregonian does us a favor and presents a list of celebrities who've at least dabbled in Kabbalah. Of course, individual cultish Jewish Mysticism mileage may vary. Madonna's all wacky for Kabbalah's blessed water and sells her book through the Kabbalah Centre; others may just have been spotted with a red string accidentally hanging off the cuff of a sweater, which provides absolutely no protection from the evil eye.