There were even some conquering summer box office heroes on hand, in the guise of Tropic Thunder stars Robert Downey Jr., Jack Black, and Ben Stiller, digitally inserted into a vintage Gladys Knight performance as her backing Pips. (Downey wisely decided to leave his black face makeup kit at home.) The entire video is available for purchase on iTunes—the profits also going to some (non DeBargeian) charity—but we've included a short clip above. In it, Black and Downey abandon their Pip-marks, leaving Stiller to handle the complex hand-spins and toe-taps of the legendary backing trio's choreography on his own. What follows is not exactly clear: Shortly thereafter, Black tumbles back into the frame with his pants around his ankles; a contented Downey soon follows. Are we to infer that the pair just rode an express Midnight Man-Train to Georgia? We'll just assume we are.

• American Idol

At an industry screening Tuesday night of the forthcoming comedy Tropic Thunder from Paramount Pictures and its unit DreamWorks, Tom Cruise brought down the house with his surprise portrayal of a bald, hairy-chested, foulmouthed, dirty-dancing movie mogul of the kind who is only too happy to throw an actor to the wolves when his popularity cools. ...

[T]he performance is likely to draw attention, since Paramount is weighing a plan in which it would build buzz with extensive screenings of Tropic Thunder before its Aug. 15 release, much as 20th Century Fox did in 2006 with Borat... At Tuesday's screening Mr. Stiller told attendees that his new film was still in rough form. "If you have any suggestions, feel free to post them directly on the Internet," he said.

More specifically, please post them directly in our inbox. Presuming Redstone has already seen his nemesis' handiwork, we'd like to know if, say, any morning coffee was spit out, how far, what it was chased with and, of course, whether or not Tropic Thunder is either the surest signal or the certain ruin of a Cruise/Redstone rapprochement. Operators are standing by!

• Tom Cruise, in Bit Role, Nips Studio's Top Gun [NYT]

And while Owen Wilson pulled out of the production due to, uh, the incident, his enabler Steve Coogan appears to be relishing the opportunity to play the director of a runaway production. And we haven't yet even touched about the (Jack) Black confusingly alluded to above-the-title. (We're now honestly beginning to question if Downey Jr. relinquished second billing just to get that visual joke on the promotional material.)

• www.tropicthunder.com

Robert Downey Jr. plays Kirk Lazarus, a very serious Oscar-winning actor cast in the most expensive Vietnam war epic ever filmed. Problem is, Lazarus's character, Sgt. Osiris, was originally written as black. So Lazarus decides to dye his skin and play Osiris, um, authentically.

'At the end of the day, it's always about how well you commit to the character,'' [Downey] says. ''I dove in with both feet. If I didn't feel it was morally sound, or that it would be easily misinterpreted that I'm just C. Thomas Howell in [Soul Man], I would've stayed home.''

Ignoring for a moment that cheap shot at Howell's fine work in one of the seminal minstrel comedies of the 1980s, we actually think we get what Downey is trying to say: Making blackface work is all about establishing that the actor's—or in this case, the actor within the actor's—intentions are true. Angelina Jolie's beafro'd depiction of the biracial Mariane Pearl in A Mighty Heart, for example, received only positive notices. Even Jack Black, who plays a comedic actor in Tropic who insists on playing all the parts in his movies (see: Murphy, Eddie), dabbled recently in blackface in Be Kind Rewind—yet another tale of movies-within-movies that required of him to take on multiple roles. In that case, his own admirable commitment to sweding to the best of his ability, and his seeming obliviousness to the taboo, paid off in laughs. Downey should take note.

• First Look: 'Tropic Thunder' [EW.com]

What industry watchers are interpreting as a self-lampooning and uncredited cameo done as a favor to his longtime friend and frequent caricaturist Stiller we fear is something far more foreboding: Realizing his days of selling himself as a viable action-hero draw are winding down, Cruise is now set on closing in on the same middle-aged, body-hair-heavy roles that typically go to Robin Williams.

• Cruise is fat & bald [joblo.com]

Once the actor befriended Wilson on the set of A Night of the Museum—the two men played warring diorama figurines—it was only a matter of time, Love suspected, before they mounted their miniature horses and galloped off into the dark abyss. Now Coogan, who was set to have a cameo in the same Ben Stiller-directed movie from which Wilson just pulled out, has rushed back to town for what will likely be the greatest damage control performance of his life. From Page Six:

Our source reports, "Coogan was in Hawaii when the news [of Wilson's suicide try] hit, but he came back Wednesday night and is trying to get in touch with Owen, Luke [Wilson] and Ben [Stiller]. He's trying to make sure that the movie ['Tropic Thunder'] doesn't fall through now."

Coogan fired back on "Access Hollywood," saying, "I do want to set the record straight and say that the allegations . . . are completely and utterly false." [...]

Love hasn't had contact with Coogan in months, except for an e-mail she sent him after Wilson's suicide attempt. It read, "You must feel really great right now. Does this feel life-affirming?" Love has said on her Web site she'll have no further comment.

There would, of course, be more comment—lots more—including this choice one from an interview with The Sun: "Hopefully the guy will leave us alone in this town and go back to Brighton or wherever the hell he's from...and stay there." If Coogan does manage to salvage his Thunder cameo, we suspect the production will quickly become The Most Awkward Set in Hollywood, marked by excruciating moments in which the actor idles up to the craft services table to see what Stiller, Jack Black, and Robert Downey Jr. are laughing so heartily about, only to have the three stars fall deadly silent, before ringleader Downey Jr. pipes in, "At least I never took anyone down with me, you fish n' chips-eating enabler."

• OWEN BUDDY: DON'T BLAME ME [NY Post]
• Love: Coogan should go home [The Sun]