The good times keep a-rollin' in Louisiana for the Stray Cat Gang — including
Josh Brolin,
Jeffrey Wright and a smattering of crew members
arrested at Saturday's W wrap party in Shreveport.
New reports allege Wright fielded at least one ethnic slur from an onlooker after being escorted out of the Stray Cat with unruly lighting technician Eric Felland. Brolin and company went down a little later when coming to Wright's aid — i.e. "interfering with that arrest," according to Shreveport police Cpl. Robert Elliott. Furthermore, "a rep for Brolin ... didn't say what the rehabbed actor was drinking," according to Rush and Molloy. Next up for the group: An encore on Dec. 2, when all are due back in court. Meanwhile, chalk up another incentive for filmmaking in Louisiana — the only state where you can cast, scout and produce an entire movie faster than the legal system can prosecute its stars. [
NYDN]
crime and punishment
If we had just produced an entire feature film in about 12 days like the gang behind Oliver Stone's W, then we, too, would probably have been in a bit of hell-raising mood when it was all said and done. We're not sure if getting arrested would have been on the agenda, but we'll grant newly shorn Josh Brolin and Jeffrey Wright the benefit of the doubt, anyway: The duo, who play President Bush and Colin Powell in the film, spent some time in custody early Saturday after coming to the aid of a rowdy crew member at a bar in Shreveport, La.
According to police called to the Stray Cat at 2 a.m., the actors and four other crew members "interfered" with the other's arrest:
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we want a pitcher, not a belly itcher
As the clock ticks down to the planned (and totally insane!) October 17th release date of Oliver Stone's W, more details are emerging about the plot and structure of what we're still fairly convinced is some sort of elaborate April Fool's Day stunt. We've seen the teaser poster, and now, the Los Angeles Times' John Horn checks in on the film and reveals what could go down in cinematic history as one of the medium's most outrageous structural devices:
DRESSED IN a suffocating Rangers warmup jacket earlier on that scorching June day, Brolin kept running into an outfield wall, trying to make a heroic catch as part of the film's baseball-oriented fantasy framing device.
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hollywood strikewatch
Everywhere we've been around the LA Film Festival this week, the chatter du jour is either oversexed studio minions or how folks plan to spend their off-days during the increasingly inevitable-looking SAG strike. The latter conflict came into even sharper relief today in Variety, which published a SAG-AFTRA Bullshit Scorecard (hardly an improvement over our SAG Strike Mad Libs™, but whatever) breaking down the lies, celebrity endorsees and various other spin the unions are wielding in their steel-cage labor war:
As SAG begins its 38th day of negotiations with the majors today, the pro-AFTRA forces have added Alec Baldwin and Kevin Spacey to their list of several hundred endorsers, led by Tom Hanks and Sally Field. ...
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eliter and eliter
Hollywood's power list got a little more diffuse Monday when
Diablo Cody,
Marion Cotillard,
Judd Apatow and
Sacha Baron Cohen were
among 105 new invitees to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The number is the lowest since 2004, when the Academy instituted its "Riff-Raff Rule" limiting the annual invitee total to 137; that said, we're not sure what kind of internal politics and/or pledge drives would necessitate inviting
Michael Haneke and
Jet Li to assume even 1/6000th of the Oscar vote. Follow the jump for more of this year's celebrated AMPAS Cub Club!
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defamer casting
While we long ago put to rest those rumors that
Oliver Stone's forthcoming George Bush biopic
W was a
fantastically sophisticated April Fools gag on the media and all modest Americans of taste and discretion, it's not like
Entertainment Weekly had to go rub it in with its
new cover story. But there they are anyway:
Josh Brolin and
Elizabeth Banks as the President and First Lady, all set to ham it up in the drama Stone is apparently location scouting as we speak. Alas, with Stone swearing up and down he can have the film in theaters by election time, one critical vacuum remains: Who,
who will play Dick Cheney?
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defamer investigates
The hyper-sensitive Defamer April Fool's Bullshit Scanner went off again moments ago as we browsed ABC.com's exclusive screenplay review of W, Oliver Stone's upcoming biopic about the transition of George W. Bush from spoiled drunk Texas asshole to election-stealing, malaprop-slinging, Jesus-loving Texas asshole. To this very moment, in fact, we can't verify the legitimacy of Marcus Baram's trenchant read-through whose very headline — "Daddy Issues, War Lust in Oliver Stone's W" — flirts with incredulity. To that end, we combed through Baram's script review in an attempt to determine the moments that seem authentic versus those that appear to be inexplicably hacky:
We Think We Buy: "When his father cries after losing to Bill Clinton in 1992, Bush sticks it to his dad by telling him that he would have won if he'd ousted Saddam at the end of the first Gulf War."
Bullshit, Right? "When he hears about French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac's desire to give weapons inspectors 30 more days to work in Iraq, Bush explodes: 'Thirty days! I'd like to stuff a plate of freedom fries down that slick piece of s—'s throat!' "
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casting
With the fourth installment of The Terminator franchise (discounting, of course, that new Fox series Tween Terminator: The Jailbait Killing-Machine Chronicles) in pre-production, director Joseph "McG" McGinty Nichol, still euphoric from landing Christian Bale in the pivotal role of Adult Eddie Furlong, now has some serious, Governator-sized shoes to fill for the sequel's time-traveling robomercenary. From the213.net interview:
(213): Come on, who would be McG's "dream Terminator"?!
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Via our friends at
BoingBoing, we bring you The 10
Star Wars Toys that Unintentionally Look Like Other Celebrities, a highly amusing gallery of action figures and their accidental doppelgangers that's guaranteed to entertain. Meanwhile, fanboy memorabilia collectors who can't wait until the end of spring for
The Dark Knight merchandising to hit store shelves might finally be tempted to crack open that mint Slave Leia specimen and slip her into something a little more black-latexy. [
toplessrobot.com]
trade roundup
· This should make up for Hannibal: Oliver Stone's next project is a G.W. biopic titled simply, Bush. (Why is the frat boy in us suddenly compelled to add the words National Lampoon's to the beginning of that?) To play the Greatest American President Currently Holding Office—Josh Brolin, who's looking forward to taking on a role in which he gets to turn the figurative pitbulls on everyone else for a change. [Variety]
· Just days after the DGA reached a quick and dirty deal with AMPTP, the WGA announces that they have ended the negotiation stalemate, and that "informal" talks have been set, just as soon as the two sides can settle on which Koo Koo Roo sides would be acceptable for the catering. [Variety]
· DreamWorks Animation entered into a multibillion-dollar deal to build a theme park in Dubai. Michael Jackson must be rolling in his oxygen chamber for having left the country so tantalizingly close to the grand opening of Donkey and Puss n' Boots's Wacky Wave Pool. [Variety]
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milk'd
There's more A-list casting goodness for Gus Van Sant's Milk, the late-70s biographical drama about San Francisco's beloved openly gay city supervisor Harvey Milk, an American civics story that probably wouldn't have two major, competing productions in the pipeline had Milk and then-S.F. Mayor George Moscone not been shot to death at City Hall by political rival Dan White. Reports THR:
[Josh] Brolin will play Dan White, the rival politician and supervisor who shot Milk and San Francisco Mayor George Moscone to death at City Hall.
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hollywood privacywatch
PrivacyWatch celebrity sightings are submitted by our readers, and are posted several times a week, so send them in often! Submit yours to tips[AT]defamer.com (please put "sighting" or "PrivacyWatch" in the subject line so we don't lose them) and tell everyone about the time you secretly wished you had the balls of that creepy dude at The Grove Apple Store hitting on Gabrielle Anwar:
In today's episode: Josh Brolin; Al Pacino and Beverly D'Angelo; Jamie Lee Curtis; Michael Cera; Michael Keaton; Adam Brody and Scott Adsit; Faye Dunaway; Gabrielle Anwar; Joel Madden; Cynthia Watros; Becki Newton; and Rami Kashou.
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Defamer
