It's a big mess over at Warner Music. Warner is suing Madonna's label, Maverick Records. Madonna's Maverick Records is suing Warner Music. Warner says that Maverick's been hemmoraging money since they bought them. Maverick claims to have turned Warner a big profit.
Variety reports that Viacom Chairman-CEO Sumner Redstone has been authorized to greenlight bigger film budgets for Viacom-owned Paramount Pictures. Said Redstone, "The creative community wasn't going to Paramount with movies that cost over $100 million. Now Paramount has hundreds of millions to make the movies they believe in."
Shock-jock under fire/Porky's producer Howard Stern revealed that he has a secret blog on his radio show this morning. Stern said he writes as "another character" and that only "about 4 people are in on the joke." OK, he's almost certainly not Rance, who repeatedly claims to be an actor and not a fat guy eating Twinkies in his basement, laughing at a credulous, gossip-starved public.
NBC is gauging advertisers $2 million for each 30-second ad spot on the Friends finale. We can think of a lot of uses for that kind of cash, and using it to sell feminine hygiene products or light beer in between incidents of Chandler sarcasm isn't very high on that list. Of course, the good news is that is that after an hour of commercial breaks, the Friends producers will be able to afford to pay off the lawsuits of twenty irate former writers' assistants traumatized by being forced to endure speculation about the contents of Courteney Cox's uterus.
Stereogum's got some pics of Britney Spears having a beach day in Santa Monica with dancer Kevin Federline. Taking a look at Brit's thighs, it's hard to know if the love affair is between the pop star and the dancer or the pop star and the orange cheese residue on her fingers. Click here to get a better look.
Our spies have uncovered Sony's official letter of interest for purchasing MGM:
Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban is taking his billions and doing the natural thing for a guy with too much money: becoming a movie producer. Cuban has an executive producer credit on the upcoming Robert De Niro flick Godsend, and he was all kinds of excited to walk down the red carpet at the film's recent Hollywood premiere:
Fuck that dead Atkins guy. Apparently, Renee Zellweger is helplessly addicted to the skinny-minnie to fatty-boom-batty yo-yo diet. She's reportedly open to yet another orgy of ding-dongs to get up to Bridget Jones fighting weight for a third time, now that Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason is in the can. Really, how many times are we supposed to pay to see her puff up?
Supposedly A-list actor/secret blogger Rance sees a Kabbalah-like outbreak of Asian Mysticism in Hollywood. He offers this warning to those who might find themselves in the thrall of a horny producer with rudimentary cooking skills:
The Cell writer Mark Protosevich has been hired to update 1972's boat disaster movie The Poseidon Adventure. Further cementing the painfully-obvious observation that Hollywood is completely out of ideas, Wolfgang Petersen is producing it (and we assume will wind up in the director's chair). Petersen, if you recall, is the director of The Perfect Storm, a boat movie, and Das Boot (German for "boat movie"). We'd further mine his IMDb profile for other nautical fare, but our German-translation intern is out scoring us some coke.
This from Variety: "Paramount Pictures has tapped Scarlett Johansson for its Tom Cruise franchise sequel Mission: Impossible 3.
Mel Gibson is throwing some of his Passion of the Christ cash into developing a movie about Boudica, a female warrior who led Britain against the Roman Empire and was named Britain's first queen after her death, according to Variety. There are at least three other Boudica films in development at different studios.
While many expected Disney's board of directors to emerge from their retreat with the head of CEO/whipping cast member Michael Eisner on a pike (or at least with a plan for getting his head on a pike), they instead returned with a "ringing endorsement," according to the LAT. However, the board didn't make any decisions about extending Eisner's contract and did begin evaluating possible successors.
Steven Bochco, creator and executive producer of NYPD Blue, crows over his and former ABC President Susan Lyne's accomplishment of slipping the word "bullshit" into his show.
Blogger Paul Davidson has "uncovered" the Movie Viewer Construction kit, which assists in the creation of pullquote-ready review blurbs. Just choose phrases from each of the columns and you're ready to be immortalized on a full-page ad for The Alamo. Example: "You'd better believe...[The Alamo was] ...the most endearing, happy-go-lucky, colorful film of......the decade, which is ten years, and that's saying a lot because 10 years holds a lot of movies!!"
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Ridiculous eyewear model/spendthrift crooner Elton John thinks that American Idol's audience is "incredibly racist" after several black contestants found themselves on the bottom of viewer voting.
If the lede begins with "former Baywatch star," the odds are pretty good that it's going to end with "sex tape." Gena Lee Nolin, onetime Baywatch lifeguard and titular jungle monarch from Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, is starring in a sex tape that's about to hit the Internet. Page Six (which manages to misspell "Gena") says the tape, featuring Nolin and her ex-husband, is being shopped around to porn sites for $1 million. Nolin's lawyer claims that the ex's ex-wife is probably responsible for the hott jungle action being leaked to the public.
