Have you ever experimented with a woman?
Yes, I had my rite of passage. I was 16, and I wasn’t really in control of the situation, if you know what I mean. It was much more about a male fantasy of seeing two women together. But I loved the girl a lot; she was one of my closest friends. I think falling in love is actually more about falling in love with an individual. We’re all potentially bisexual; it all depends on your circle, your upbringing, and all kinds of things. Or maybe I’m just talking about myself. I could’ve easily fallen in love with a woman over a man. My husband Ol’s kind of a man-woman. Look, I once loved Tim Curry, so there you go.

Upon reading Newton's interview, Oliver Stone immediately scheduled reshoots for an elaborate lesbian dream sequence to accompany George W. Bush's 2002 preztel-choking incident. "Laura, Condi, why don't you root out each other's infidels. No, I'm just gonna hang back. I'm the Decider."

[Photo Credit: AP]

• Big Gay Following [The Advocate]

[W]e were turned down by everybody for money, including your Aunt Gertrude. It was humiliating. I make no bones about it. I think this is a great subject. I don’t think I have a bad track record. I needed a star, though, and Josh Brolin was not a star. Originally I went for Christian Bale. We did some rigorous prosthetic tests and spent a lot of dough—thousands and thousands of dollars—and then Christian said, “I just don’t feel like I can do it.” I met Josh and liked him. He was more rural Americana. But man, he was scared shitless. ...

[Bush] is a different man; he’s not as dark or deep as someone like Nixon. The style is a time trip through three different eras, to give you a sense of young, middle, and old. It’s light. [...] [I]t has to be done with an ebullience and a certain fun, because the guy is goofy. He’s a goofball! And I think he endeared himself to people because he couldn’t get anything right. Kubrick was an idol of mine. I grew up on Strangelove and movies like Network, and they made a big impact on me. So yeah, W. is a satire.

Yeah, whatever — again, we knew that. But what "rigorous prosthetic tests" must Bale have gone through to try out for President Bush? And how lucky is Stone to have went with the guy who got locked up for sassing the police and not for allegedly assaulting Momzo the Clown? Maybe this whole thing is meant to be after all.

• Bush Gets Stoned [GQ]

• Bush Gets Stoned [GQ]

If Brolin comes off as a good ol’ boy, he’s actually a Hollywood scion, the vigorous sprout of a six-foot-four tree named James Brolin. “My dad is probably one of the handsomest guys ever,” says Brolin. “I was making a joke and I said, ‘If I was a chick, I’d f—- you.’ He was like, ‘You can’t say that! Shut your mouth!’”

While we admire the younger Brolin's candor, we hope he left his paternal fixation at the palatial Streisand residence instead of bringing it onto the set of W. The audience appetite for two more hours of George W. Bush may be further diluted by a scene in which W., high on peyote and aroused by a marathon session of brush-clearing at his Crawford ranch, places a late-night, naughty call to his father, whispering, "How'd you like to make a preemptive strike against my Fruit of the Looms, Poppy?"

[Photo Credit: AP]

• Josh Brolin [W]

1. Brad Pitt will win an Academy Award. We know the post-Toronto establishment has all but engraved Mickey Rourke's name on this year's Best Actor Oscar (hell, even Rourke has engraved his name on this year's Best Actor Oscar), but taking both The Wrestler (release date TBD) and Pitt's epic The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (12/25) sight unseen, we'll take the aging-backward-on-other-people's-bodies gimmick over the gritty indie comeback 10 times out of 10. Not that it won't be close: Brad Grey will spend more on his old pal's campaign than Fox Searchlight is probably ready to drop on Rourke's, but Rourke will be the more accessible nominee to the media. Look for dark horse Sean Penn (Milk) to split the field late; Focus Features won't settle for another 0-fer in '08.

2. W. (10/17) will tip the election to the GOP. Opening less than three weeks before Election Day, the film will be too muddled to move the Democrats yet irreverent enough to galvanize the Republican base against Hollywood one more time before voting. Oliver Stone will be recognized as the new Ralph Nader.

3. You're going to miss Don LaFontaine a lot more than you think. Otherwise execrable trailers like this one for The Haunting of Molly Hartley (10/31) acquired bittersweet relevance overnight:

4. The Weinstein Company will muscle its way back to prominence. Harvey had a relatively hemorrhage-free summer, closed out by his $16 million-grossing (and counting) Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Meanwhile, Zack and Miri Make a Porno (10/31) left Toronto with goodwill to spare, the LA immigrant saga Crossing Over (10/24) has Harrison Ford, Sean Penn and others channeling Crash, and the company bumped up The Reader for Kate Winslet Oscar consideration. (NB: The Rourke Factor also reportedly inspired Harvey to finally slot his long-shelved Killshot on Nov. 7.) The Weinsteins being the Weinsteins, of course, the operation could crash at any time, but at least the ensuing conflagration promises Hindenberg levels of spectacle. That's our Harvey.

5. Owen Wilson will emerge from, return to hiding after explaining the trailer to Marley & Me (12/25). That is all.

6. The Soloist (11/21) will be better than it sounds. But it sounds great, right? Robert Downey Jr. and Jamie Foxx, directed by Pride and Prejudice/Atonement helmer Joe Wright? Alas, the logline: "A schizophrenic, homeless musician from Skid Row, Los Angeles dreams of playing at Walt Disney Concert Hall." Based on a true story, natch: Downey Jr. plays the real-life LAT reporter who befriends him, warning Foxx behind the scenes about the perils of going full-schizo. All things being equal, we like their chances.

7. Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York (10/24) will be this year's unlikeliest tearjerker. Not just for its devastating, beautiful final act, but also for the probability that Sony Classics will weep red ink when it makes about five cents at the box office.

8. Twilight (11/21) will only be the second-best vampire movie released this fall. You won't find Let the Right One In (10/24) on the cover of EW, but you'll find the Swedish export in a lot of festival juries' hearts since last spring. Half coming-of-age romance and half vengeful horror epic, it picks up the story of a bullied 12-year-old boy whose sweet new girlfriend next door ends up being several thousand years older than she looks — and behaves accordingly. Genre distributor Magnet Releasing might only get this on a hundred screens, but watch the word-of-mouth and top-10-list acclaim bump it into sleeper status by the end of the year.

9. Extreme Movie will open to a $0 gross after viewers confuse it with the other, less-illustrious Movie franchise. But you can be prepared: Extreme Movie is the teen sex comedy starring Michael Cera and Frankie Muniz; Disaster Movie et. al. are the ones whose auditoriums smell faintly of piss. Know the difference!

10. Daniel Craig will miss 2006. Casino Royale was a surprising, sporadically brilliant reboot, but the honeymoon is over: Quantum of Solace's trailer isn't dazzling anyone; the title is stillborn; Sony couldn't settle on a US release date (it finally chose 11/14); and unfairly or not, franchise obsessives want nothing to do with new director Marc Forster. And all this after the Bond curse cost Craig part of his finger. It's a cruel world, but not as cruel as it'll seem after Defiance (12/12), the WWII Jewish resistance drama in which he and screen bros Liev Schrieber and Jamie Bell fight off Nazis during the invasion of Poland. Among the last of Paramount Vantage's orphaned prestige titles, and opening opposite Doubt, an expanded Frost/Nixon and The Day the Earth Stood Still, it's bound to knock Craig back to stardom's second tier for a while to come.

11. Beverly Hills Chihuahua (10/3) will astonish and amaze. But you already knew that.

• Access Hollywood [via Hollywood Elsewhere]

• 'W. 'Gets Misunderestimated With New Posters in Denver [Film School Rejects]

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:

A Brolin insider told the Daily News that the actor was not involved in a physical scuffle, as several news outlets previously reported. "He was released very soon after the incident," the source said. "It was not a bar fight. It wasn't a physical situation."

Brolin was released from jail after paying $334 bail; Wright wasn't listed in police booking records as of Saturday evening.

Nevertheless, there's Wright's mug shot, boosting Team W pride just in time for the Vanity Fair delegation reportedly en route to visit the principals that day. And what a scene that would greet them: No different than any authentic Bush kegstand, really, with four squad cars, bike cops and a canine unit arriving to squelch the fun. We can't wait to see what carnage ensues if these guys actually do premiere before election day — in character as Dick Cheney, Richard Dreyfuss alone is good for at least a couple overhead beer-bottle smashes before he breaks out his shotgun.

[Photo credit: Josh Brolin, Jeffrey Wright, others on Oliver Stone film arrested [NYDN]

• "Bush," "Colin Powell" Nabbed In Bar Fight [CBS]

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.

Oh boy. While this is neither the first nor certainly the last time that Stone has sprinkled a bit of his patented blend of cinematic crazy into one of his scripts, this framing device sounds like it might have been concocted during an acid flashback that ended with Stone huddled in a corner of a room watching video of Willie Mays' miracle catch on ESPN Classic. Bonus points to Stone for showing a dirty and bloody Bush (pictured above), but if the film ends with Josh Brolin making a leaping catch in centerfield (scored, of course, with John Fogerty's "Centerfield") interspersed with documentary footage of the statue of Saddam Hussein falling down in Baghdad, we'll be the ones leading the charge to petition a judge to toss Stone in Movie Jail and to throw away the key.

• Oliver Stone and 'W.,' a story of President Bush [LAT]

And why not? His nasal-y, insistent deadpan is a fine match for zingers like, "Anyone can go to Baghdad. Real men go to Tehran," and his tightly wound, liberal Jewish disposition should dovetail seamlessly with the Wyoming native's unbridled Republican blood lust. Nope, no stunt casting here! What — Cate Blanchett wasn't available?

• Richard Dreyfuss heads to the White House [THR]

Page 10 on Bill Clinton: "My mother waddles faster than that larda - -." Page 11: "We'll move these terr'ists to Guantanemera." Cheney: "Guantanamo." Bush: "Right." Then Bush to Cheney: "Vice, when we're in meetings I want you to keep a lid on it. Keep your ego in check. Remember, I'm the president."

Flashbacks have college-boy W. boozing, slacking off from work, in jail, calling his then-congressman father "Poppy." Sr. praising Jeb, castigating Jr., asking if he's "knocked up" a girl named Susie, complaining, "You never kept your word once . . . you're only good for partying, chasing tail, driving drunk . . . You deeply disappoint me." Repeat father and son arguments. Father: "I've had enough of your crap." Son: "I've had enough of you for a lifetime." Mama Barbara breaking up the near fisticuffs with announcing Jr. just made Harvard and Sr. responding, "But who do you think pulled the strings?" ...

Page 42. Checking a map, being told it passed "Humint," whereupon the President of the United States asks, "What's 'Humint' again?" and being told "It's Human Intelligence." A scene in which, auditing an Iraqi intercept, W. asks, "Wolfowitz, got any Maalox on you? . . . and while you're at it, trim your ear hairs." And Cheney checking his heart pills.

Then it struck us: Cindy Adams's distillation is W's shooting script. How else could we expect Stone to turn the film around in five months? And anyway, if it's not the script, then it should be; pair this up with the Uwe Boll Movie Challenge (Jeb Bush could be the requisite "little brother") — instant classic! In any event, we'd gladly crew up for any filmmaker with the vision and wherewithal to commit this to celluloid or tape. We promise not to tell the WGA.

• FILM HAS A FEW WORDS ABOUT OUR PRESIDENT [NYP]

"We don't really know much about Mr. Bush beyond the controlled images we've been allowed to see on TV. This movie's taking a bold stab at looking behind that curtain," Stone said in a statement. "I'm real pleased that Lionsgate has the independence necessary to bring this provocative story to an American audience."

Distribution deal was made by Tom Ortenberg, Lionsgate president of theatrical films. , who said, "With W, (Stone) again demonstrates his creative vitality and genius for speaking to our times."

Hence the W rumor mill once again whirring into action, deploying hints and whispers from the Louisiana set that Stone would probably "just play the son-of-a-bitch Cheney [himself]." He has alleged this could be his first comedy, after all, and it couldn't hurt to try on one of his films' quintessentially terrible hairpieces and take one for the team in the interest of time. Our democracy evidently depends on it.

• Lionsgate books Oliver Stone's 'W' [Variety]

W didn't just make studios nervous; the script gave lots of movie stars cold feet, too. Stone denies rumors that Robert Duvall turned down Cheney. And he won't comment on reports that he's talking to Paul Giamatti about the part. But casting has clearly been challenging. ''You'd be amazed how many male stars of a certain age in Hollywood are Republicans,'' says Bill Block, CEO of QED, one of the film's producers. ''I'm not going to name names, but a lot of them just didn't want to have anything to do with it.''

According to Stone, even some of the town's young Democrats couldn't be persuaded. ''They hate Bush so much, they can't understand why I'd want to make a movie about him,'' he says. ''They hate him so much, they can't even imagine themselves playing him or playing anybody around him.''

We agree Giamatti would make a decent Cheney, but we're for a little more adventuresome casting to wash out the flat taste of the script (the recently distributed version of which, EW also notes, is at least a couple of drafts old). On one hand, Woody Harrelson would seem to fit the bill with just enough irony to hold us over to the closing credits, but a Stone/Val Kilmer reunion would be truly Earth-shattering. Or, no! Get Javier Bardem, who conveniently just quit Rob Marshall's Nine and is Brolin's BFF anyway. Maybe Robert Downey Jr? Cate Blanchett? Hurry!

[Photo Credit: Entertainment Weekly]

• First Look: 'W,' Oliver Stone's Bush Biopic [EW]

"It leaves you with the impression that the White House is run as a fraternity house with no reverence for hierarchy, the office itself or for the implications of policy," said Robert Draper, author of Dead Certain: The Presidency of George Bush. "Everybody calling everybody else nicknames and chatting about whether to go to war as if they were chatting about how to bet on a football game really misses the mark of how many White Houses, including this one, are run." ...

"The problem here is it goes to this notion of Bush as being the passive receiver of policy and the White House being run by (Dick) Cheney, (Donald) Rumsfeld, (Karl) Rove and others," Draper said. "Bush's adversaries have been ill-served by this belief that Bush is an observer to his own presidency. This notion that his schedule is driven by what's on ESPN is ludicrous."

Damage control is underway at Stone's office, where the director immediately summoned behind-the-scenes dirt for his rewrite of the protracted Bush/Rove World Series of Poker standoff of 2006, which ended with Bush turning off an episode Rove hadn't seen, thus planting the seeds for Rove's resignation and prompting a verrrrry high-stakes, all-night Texas hold 'em bender with visiting Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf.

• Bush biographers mixed on script for Oliver Stone's 'W' [THR]

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!' "

We Think We Buy: "Before the invasion, he tells a shocked British Prime Minister Tony Blair about alternative plans such as baiting Saddam by painting a U.S. spy plane in U.N. colors and assassinating the Iraqi leader."
Bullshit, Right? "In one scene, Bush practices his parachute landing in the White House pool but forgets to properly release the harness and sinks to the bottom."

We Think We Buy: "At one point, Bush describes giving up sweets as 'my personal sacrifice to show support for our troops.' "
Bullshit, Right? "Bush explodes in a profanity-laced outburst , 'Did you tell her I don't like motherf— who gas their own people! Did you tell her I don't like a— holes who try to kill my father! Did you tell her I'm going to kick his a— all over the Middle East?' "

We Think We Buy: "But the film also strives to paint a humanistic portrait of the commander in chief, with Bush once telling the Rev. Billy Graham that 'there's this darkness that follows me.' "
Bullshit, Right? "During the planning of the war, Bush and his top advisers are shown locking the war-wary Powell out of a room, erupting into laughter when they finally let him in."

So wait — it's a comedy? Try as we might, we cannot envision an Oliver Stone so out of touch with reality that SNL-grade practical jokes would elude broad editorial snips. That said, we've also long suspected the Animal House qualities of the Bush 43 Cabinet, and at the end of the day (even April Fool's Day) we can't imagine ABC foisting a gag this political on its readers. Did we miss a clue somewhere that gives this away, or are we actually supposed to be looking forward to this?

[Photo Credit: ABC News]

• Daddy Issues, War Lust in Oliver Stone's 'W' [ABC]

· More Oliver Stone's Bush (it's actually called W) casting news: James Cromwell and Ellen Burstyn are attached to play George Herbert and Barbara. [Variety]
· Elisha Cuthbert returns to primetime, maybe, as she was cast as the lead in CBS pilot Ny-Lon, playing the role of the "bohemian New York record store clerk" originated in the UK version by Rashida Jones, who got screwed over by signing herself over to that crappy Farrelly sitcom on Fox. [THR]

*We're informed by someone well-versed in Disney princess castles that Cinderella's Castle is in Orlando and Tokyo, while Anaheim is the home of Sleeping Beauty's Castle. We apologize for any castle confusion.