Congratulations are in order this morning for
Wayne McClammy, the first director ever to parlay a pair of unprintably named viral videos into a movie deal at a major studio. McClammy, whose
Variety-redacted,
Sarah Silverman-starring
I'm Fucking Matt Damon and Jimmy Kimmel follow-up
I'm Fucking Ben Affleck blew up earlier this year, was handed the reins for the Fox comedy
Cool School, about "ad executives in their early thirties who are sent back to high school to learn how to be cool again." We'll reserve judgment for the time being — the script isn't even finished, and any way you slice it, it could be worse: At least Kevin Smith didn't wind up with a feature deal tied to that
ill-advised Elizabeth Banks parody I'm Fucking Seth Rogen. What? He did? All right, well, no pressure, McClammy! No, literally — no pressure at
all. [
Variety]
hollywood privacywatch
PrivacyWatch celebrity sightings are submitted by our readers, and are posted several times a week (depending on volume), so send them in early and often—without them, global warming will surely accelerate at an even faster rate! 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 watched Janice Dickinson eat two buckets of popcorn during the course of just one movie.
In today's installment: Janice Dickinson, Quentin Tarantino, Ellen Page, Sarah Silverman, Jason Schwartzman, Scott Speedman, Gene Simmons, Kristen Bell, Rachel Zoe, Adam Levine, Mila Kunis, Seth Green, Stacy Keibler, Reggie Bush, Dave Holmes, Holland Taylor, Busta Rhymes, and Lil Wayne.
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pound puppies
Perhaps as some sort of karmic payback for forcing thousands of Americans to endure
Ellen Degeneres' terrible dance moves each and every weekday, it seems that
The Ellen Degeneres Show is attempting to make things right by playing a part in getting
Paris Hilton busted for overzealously breeding dogs. After Paris
admitted to Ellen last week that she owns 17 dogs and likes to sleep with "all of them," the Los Angeles Department of Animal Services
paid a visit to the Hilton home to investigate. While it's too early to learn this offense will land Paris back in the slammer (or, for that matter, the pound), we can't help but be reminded how similar this storyline is to a Season Two episode of
The Sarah Silverman Program.
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hollywood strikewatch
As the writers strike creeps into double digits (we wish we had a photo of the WGA Ring Girl defiantly holding up a DAY 10 sign, but we suppose one of Kathy Griffin with a dick joke will do for now), here's today's morning round-up of news:
· The WGA responds to the "Setting the Record Straight" ad the AMPTP has run in the trades over the past couple of days (we posted the text of it here, or you can see it here), clarifying the "misleading statements" the studios made about the payment of digital downloads (not zero, but close!) and residuals: "However, the reason for this message is the AMPTP has been making some misleading statements. I want to make sure you know the truth. They say writers are already paid residuals for digital downloads. That's true. We are paid one third of one cent per dollar made by Studios for digital downloads.
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short ends
· Just in case you need to see video of a relatively intact
George Clooney working his red carpet magic to know he's really going to be OK, here you go.
· Say what you will about
Britney Spears, but she did
learn to put on shoes when using public restrooms. That's measurable progress, even if the leap forward came because of a session with a court-ordered bathroom-hygiene coach.
· And while we're talking about her,
Sarah Silverman shrugs off her "adorable mistakes" joke from the VMAs.
· Sometimes we
really worry about the folks at TMZ. We hope they run footage of the staff meeting pitch that resulted in that post on tonight's show: "OK, remember Baby Spice? Well, she's selling pasta sauce. What do you say we Photoshop up something where it looks like Chef Boyardee took a dump on her head?"
· And finally:
Tiny couch lizard.
Sarah Silverman expresses remorse over hurting
Paris Hilton's feelings at the MTV Movie Awards, where Hilton was just innocently sneaking in one more chance at free camera time before heading off to jail: "I thought, 'She's got to know there's going to be a joke about her,' so I went for it. But then I looked down and saw a man in her face with a camera. I was there to be funny and I was, but that doesn't mean I can't feel bad about it." We hope Silverman is just setting up Paris for a gag where she shows up at her house with a jail cell made up of penises instead of iron bars. [
FemaleFirst]
sarah silverman
There's really no winning with Christian television-watchdog groups: Write a catchy country-western ditty in which a paranoid cowboy express his fear that Jesus is involved in a little homosexual voyeurism, wind up
on the wrong end of an outraged press release; try to dramatize the Creator as a Being who engages in heterosexual relations, ditto.
Multichannel News reports that the Parents Television Council is protesting the season finale of
The Sarah Silverman Program, angry that the lack of a la carte cable channel choices makes it all too easy for impressionable children to stumble upon blasphemous programming concerning a Jewish comedienne's post-coital rejection of "the sex-obsessed Deity." (Deadpans a
Comedy Central spokesman in response: "We've never been terribly popular with the Parents Television Council.") A clip of the offending material is above; after the jump, we pass along the
PTC's painstaking, blow-by-blow inventory of each sacrilegious story beat:
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short ends
·
Dune's Feyd-Rautha, the band leader from the
Dennis Miller Show, and an unnamed drummer have announced their intentions to
embark upon a worldwide tour as a musical act. This "super group," as it were, will travel under the name of
The Police. Should be interesting.
· Someone needs
to option this sentence immediately: "No one disputes that an on-duty Irvine police officer got an erection and ejaculated on a motorist during an early-morning traffic stop in Laguna Beach." We're thinking Paramount Vantage could really do something with material this gritty. Or, to go a different direction, maybe it's more of a Farrelly brothers thing. [via
BoingBoing]
· Keeping track of the Danielynne Smith paternity sweepstakes is so much easier
in photo gallery form.
· Let us join the list of those pleased that
Sarah Silverman's show is
already getting a pick-up for a second season. Who didn't instantly fall in love with her big, orange, and gay neighbors?
·
Fred Goldman's lawyer vows to "burrow to the center of the earth" to find out where O.J. Simpson's movie residuals are going. Surely, somewhere near our planet's molten core lies a secret cache containing Simpson's
Naked Gun 33 1/3 riches.
sarah silverman
We realize that it's customary to trumpet one's achievements by taking out full-page ads in
Variety, but
Comedy Central could be a little more careful about how it sucks up to the talent; while they're understandably proud about the early success of
The Sarah Silverman Program, they shouldn't be so freely offering access to their proprietary methods to their rivals. Now that competing networks know the key ingredient in Silverman's secret chocolate sauce, soon everyone from Bravo to Lifetime will offer their own, inevitably inferior variations (FX will screw it up by attempting to explore how schizophrenia impacts a gruff proctologist's scat-obsession) on the formula, littering basic cable with shows in which female comics sing cute songs about
blinding their mothers with various feces-encrusted implements.
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sarah silverman
Some stars' contracts demand the most spacious double-wide trailers on the lot, or a nicely appointed office staffed by a phalanx of freshly shaven, glistening man-servants to de-brad scripts on their way to the recycling bin. Over on the Sunset Gower lot,
Sarah Silverman, it seems, has had her people arrange for her to have a place where she can safely dispose of balled-up notebook paper containing aborted rape jokes without them commingling with another office's trash. It's so nice to see the comedians we admire finally make it in this business.
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