Paramount Pictures has optioned the rights to former hit television series/paisley fever dream The Partridge Family. Just in case you were momentarily afraid that some iconoclastic, genre-bending genius is behind the Partridge plans, producer Billy Gerber said, "We aren't looking to make it some campy remake but a mainstream family movie in the vein of School of Rock." Whew, that was close. We feared a producer was going to have an original thought and deprive us of a comparison to a recent hit.

From Saturday's NYT's story on Michael Jackson's not guilty plea on 10 counts of sexual abuse of a 13-year-old boy:

BREAKING!!! MUST CREDIT "ACTUAL" REPORTERS FROM THE TRADES!

·"Whore Presents" stops giving it away.
·Fred Durst is perhaps worse at blogging than singing.
·Tattoo artists still hate Britney Spears.
·Kelsey Grammer unabashedly loves Bush and yet reporters don't light him on fire.
·MGM puts off its meeting to ponder getting taken over by Sony.

The Smoking Gun has a stack of FCC complaints filed against Oprah Winfrey for her infamous March "salad tossing" show, in which a frank discussion of teenage sexuality lead to a graphic description of licking assholes. Many of the complaints were apparently the work of irate Howard Stern fans, who has been repeatedly fined for often less graphic shenanigans.

This might be the strangest thing we come across all day. Page Six reports that a "mysterious" group of European backers have approached Mel Gibson about a possible takeover of Disney, impressed at how Gibson turned two hours of a billion Christians' personal savior getting his ass kicked into huge financial gains.

Ghen Maynard, the CBS/UPN reality executive behind Survivor, Big Brother The Amazing Race and America's Next Top Model, is dumping Les Moonves for Jeff Zucker and joining NBC as executive VP of primetime development, according to stories on Variety's and THR's websites.

Today, pseudonymous blogger/supposedly A-list actor Rance cheekily writes a letter in the guise of his parents, who apologize for their boy running around the Internet and pretending to be someone famous.

We admit to being woefully uninformed about current events that don't feature Hollywood or jailbait. But sometimes, geniuses like the guys at Low Culture bring us a beautiful intersection of what we like and "shit that matters."

We obtained a copy of ABC's Jessica Simpson sitcom pilot (the tentatively and eponymously titled Jessica) and with the help of some toothpicks propped under the eyelids, managed to sit through its 22 minute run.

Our pristine national pasttime has finally been penetrated by Hollywood's tainted lucre. ESPN reports (via a WSJ story) that advertising for Spider-Man 2 will be littered about major league baseball stadiums this summer. Webbed logos will appear on the bases and the batters' on-deck circles during play, and covers bearing advertising will be placed over home plate and the pitching rubber before the games start.

Here's the actual launch memo announcing "fox 21," Fox's new, low-budget production arm that's "aimed at producing edgy and inventive scripted and alternative series on lower budgets." [Ed.note—"Alternative series" sounds a little like "strike insurance." But what do we know?]

All of the filthy details of a former Friends writers' assistant sexual harassment lawsuit against the show's writers came out a week or two ago (we like page 7). But FindLaw columnist Joanna Grossman discusses whether the writers' comments on their "personal sexual preferences and experiences...emphasizing anal sex, oral sex, big breasts, young girls and cheerleaders," their doodles of "cheerleaders with exposed breasts and vaginas," or their pantomimed "male masturbation" might be legally permissible as a job requirement, justified by "creative necessity."

After a two-day break to consider proposals, the Writers Guild and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers are returning to negotiations, trying to avert a strike that would wipe out the world as we know it. The WGA's agreement with the studios expired at 12:01 a.m. Sunday, but talks have continued amid a media blackout.

Disney is blocking Miramax (a Disney division) from releasing bullhorn-wielding/Oscar night grandstander Michael Moore's documentary Fahrenheit 911, which criticizes President Bush's actions surrounding September 11th and links the Bush family to prominent Saudis, including the bin Ladens. Way to go, embattled Disney CEO Michael Eisner! Taking a stand to protect your President! Maybe you sympathize with him—you know, two swingin' young guys desperately trying to hang onto their jobs. Sure, it might sound like censorship, but that's all the rage now. You gotta ride what's hot, even if you have to mud wrestle with Harvey Weinstein.

In discussing the possibility that Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher might have recently married in a top-secret, Kabbalicious ceremony, we wondered what said ceremony might look like. Protocols (tagline: "A group of Jews endeavors towards total domination of the blogosphere") blogger Steven I. Weiss actually picked up a phone and tried to find out. [Ed. note—That sounds uncomfortably close to "reporting." You're a blogger, now put that vodka bottle back in your craw and keep typing, monkey!] Of course, what follows is totally expected, except that Weiss doesn't mention the part where they try to sell you a case of their magical water:

A Full House reunion at the New York Minute premiere. We're sure that Bob Saget has never even heard of the Olsen Twins Countdown Clock, so don't even try that stuff around here.

The sickies over at Fleshbot have pointed out that pictures from the Gena Lee Nolin sex tape have finally hit the internet. This doesn't have nearly the same world-shaking implications of the Paris Hilton tape (anorexic socialites don't snap in half during sex? Damn!), but there's something to be said for seeing naked celebrities, even if they're so far off the radar that it takes "leaked" doggystyling video to get people to say "Oh yeah, she used to be on Baywatch or something, right?"

The London Daily Telegraph has an early review of the upcoming mega-budget, mega-blockbuster, Troy. According to critic John Hisock, it's so sweeping that it "comes close to justifying the enormous amount of money spent on it." Just how much money Warner Brothers poured into it is, as usual, up for debate—the studio claims $175 million, but others guess at a quarter of a billion dollars. (Apparently, thousands of sweaty Greeks in metal skirts don't come cheap. Who knew?)

Movie Poop Shoot's "Hollywood Elsewhere" columnist Jeffrey Wells puts out a plea to find his son a summer job in Los Angeles. The kid's got his own car, and according to the proud papa, "good-looking"—he included pics of the kid (nope, we're not posting them, but that's Dad on the left) just in case someone wanted to pre-screen based on purely superficial criteria. This is Los Angeles, and without your own car and some nice features the best you're going to do is, well, he'll probably wind up running Disney next week. And, according to the elder Wells, he works cheap. (He's an Internet columnist's kid, not a Katzenberg.) Hey, is he Jewish? Maybe we can get him hooked up with an Olsen, too.