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Today's Rush & Molloy column in the NY Daily News reports that the War of the Worlds folks have finally tired of "journalists" and their insistently suppressive prose and banned all print media from tonight's premiere in New York City. Well, not all print media, as they've granted something of a exclusive to People magazine, whose planned twenty-page spread of Tom Cruise personally feeding an entire nursery full of crack-addicted kittens from a medicine dropper probably had nothing at all to do with their Most Favored Rag status.

But who needs red carpet access when we have the journalistic free-for-all of junkets? A reader sends us a report from yesterday's WOTW press orgy, where a new hero for these troubled times emerged:

I just came from the WAR OF THE WORLDS press junket, which featured a joint press conference between Spielberg and Tom Cruise. There were two highlights - that it took 20 minutes for a Katie Holmes question to be asked (Spielberg timed it) was one. The best, though, was the reporter from the Boston Phoenix asking Tom Cruise if the fact that the aliens in the film have been on Earth for a million years waiting for the invasion resonated with him due to Scientology's belief in aliens.

Tom sputtered for a few moments and got very visibly annoyed (he was otherwise in super-creepy cheerful mode the whole time) and denied the alien/Scientology connection, asked if the Boston Phoenix was a reputable paper and then listed about four Scientology books the guy should read to educate himself on the matter.

I was not able to see if Thetan-clear thugs took care of the reporter after the press conference.

Unfortunately, our spy didn't relate the titles of the Cruise-recommended literature, but we suspect one of the books was the excellent primer Everybody Clears: My First Dianetics . The Boston Herald confirms the story, including Spielberg's endorsement of the Phoenix: "Told that the question came from a Phoenix writer, Cruise looked at director Steven Spielberg, who assured him quietly, 'That's a good paper.'"

And because every tragic bit of hard news needs a water-skiing squirrel story to cleanse the palate, Page Six says that Cruise and Holmes' parents are getting to know each other in NY. It's so sweet that the Holmeses have a final opportunity to spend some time with their daughter before she's placed in a rocket and launched into the vast expanse of space.

UPDATE: Susman discusses the junket and the Scientology question on the EW blog.