The New York Times' Sharon Waxman takes a look at the boatloads of money movie studios are making on DVDs, which often subsidize a box office failure by recouping losses in the video market. Take Kill Bill, everyone's favorite multipart, splatterfest epic:
Carrie-Anne Moss will star in Mission: Impossible 3 alongside Tom Cruise. The latest, bound-to-be-overplotted installment of the Paramount Pictures franchise will start shooting this summer for a 2005 release.
Sitcom rerun factory TV Land will go dark during the series finale of Friends. As a further tribute to the comedy juggernaut, the channel will preempt their regular, rerun programming to play reruns of long-cancelled shows featuring the Friends cast, like the short-lived Ferris Bueller adaptation that starred Jennifer Aniston in the Jennifer Grey role, before either of them had undergone thousands of dollars in plastic surgery.
Obscure kitsch aficionado Quentin Tarantino is guest-directing tonight's Jimmy Kimmel Live.
Even the scions of Hollywood's super-wealthy need a little sweaty action, too. LA.com's insidery-monikered The Insider dishes a little about the love lives of Jennifer Meyer (daughter of Vivendi Universal's President Ron Meyer), who's shacking up with Spider-man, and David Katzenberg (son of Dreamworks SKG's "K," bite-sized Jeffrey Katzenberg), who's dating Mary-Kate Olsen.
In this first edition of Hollywood PrivacyWatch, where our Los Angeles-area readers send in their public sightings of their favorite stars (send them to tips@defamer.com), Carmen Electra is disgusted to ride the airways with the hoi polloi.
Writers Craig Moss and Steve Schoenburg have been hired to pen the remake of classic, risqu -for-its-time, adolescent sex romp Porky's, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Shock connoisseur Howard Stern is executive producing.
The FOX Network, which has revolutionized reality television by bringing us the millionaireless Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire and trying to find right-size brides for a dwarf on The Littlest Groom, is now trying to destroy the traditional, seasonal TV schedule.
Variety reports that 73% of participants in the Disney 401(k) plan voted against retainnig CEO Michael Eisner on the Disney board. The results are widely viewed as a no-confidence vote for Eisner's leadership of the company that's recently given us Home on the Range and The Alamo.
We've often reflected on exactly what effect a Tara Reid siting has on us, but historically we are too shitfaced to recall much past a hazy jumble with a blonde in too much eyeliner, an empty Absolut bottle, and shouted reminders to the effect of Don't you know who I am?
Blogger Jim Treacher reviews Kill Bill Vol. 2 in a one-stanza haiku:
We know that you've ignored all of the PSAs and have TiVo'd every instance of Seinfeld in protest, but today marks the start of TV Turnoff Week.
In a diary for Slate, writer Toby Young (How to Lose Friends and Alienate People) describes his temporary move from London to Los Angeles to write a novel featuring Matt Damon and Ben Affleck as characters. In Young's Starmaggeddon, a sweeping Second Great Depression ravages America, and the public turns on the celebrity class, who are herded into concentration camps.
MSNBC's Jeanette Walls reports that Tom Cruise is once again calling his lawyers over a newspaper story wondering aloud about his sexual preference. (Ed. note—Cruise says he's straight.) This time, the London Independent interviewed a former acting coach who said that she tutored Cruise and then-wife Nicole Kidman on how to give a "convincing sexual performance" in Eyes Wide Shut .
Blogger-actress Christen Nelson encounters hatchet-faced auteur Quentin Tarantino at The Grove (Ed. note— The Grove is an outdoor shopping mall constructed to mimic the actual kind of sidewalk shopping district that can be found in any city but L.A.)
These are the numbers that define our Monday morning universe:
