Joe Dolce: Finita la Asshat Commedia
Toward the end of the day on Friday we received an e-mail from a co-worker of douchebag Star EIC Joe Dolce, presumably at Dolce's behest, saying "You need to put Joe Dolce tidbits up today... To quote him just moments ago, 'Doubebag [sic] is depressed' that nothing is up." So, two things: Dolce is now apparently referring to himself as "douchebag" (or, quite possibly, "doubebag") on a regular basis (victory!) and he appears to be enjoying our collection of his greatest hits, which means it's time to wrap the thing up. After the jump you'll find the detritus of our Dolce anecdotes; we will refrain from further coverage until he does something new and douchey, which, if past performance is any predictor, is probably happening as we speak.
In the final days of his Details stint, I had an interview with him. I put on my snappy new $150 suit, and went to the Soho Star, where we were supposed to have breakfast. Four Cokes and a full hour later a waitress asks my name, then brings me to the phone, at which point Dolce's assistant informs me that he'd just remembered our appointment and summons me to his office. I wait another half hour there. When I finally was brought into his office, he had his feet up on the desk, naturally. I remember being confused by almost everything that came out of his mouth. It was all slogans and catch-phrases. The one that stands out in my mind is when he zeroed in on me with thatfrightening stare and said, "Let me guess. You want to calm up!" "Um... Huh?" "You want to calm up. As opposed to calm down." "Oh uh... Yeah. Yeah. I want to calm up."
I was a fact "checker" at Star when Bonnie Fuller was initiating Dolce, and we were always getting asked to check actors' weight, especially those whose weight fluctuated a lot. Kirstie Alley, Oprah, etc. Totally impossible, as publicists of course don't respond to shit like that and are paid to lie anyway, so the already low standard for sources plummeted even lower. The writer's source for one particular poor fat-ass's weight was something like celebrityweight.blogspot.com, and, to conceal how shoddy the source was and the fact that we only had one, Joe just changed the last couple of numbers, from, for example, 210 lbs to 214 lbs. So it looked like original reporting. He did this more than once, when he and Bonnie weren't just brazenly making the number up (which I overheard them crowing about). And his voice sounds like Thurston Howell, the imperious shit. In a way, he's more despicable than BF, because he doesn't seem to be borderline retarded like she is.
In a cover meeting about the Britney Spears quickie Vegas wedding to that pre-Federline dude, there was a lot of speculation that the duo had been doing Ecstacy prior to going to the chapel. The speculation was courtesy of a very reliable source the drug dealer. But you know those drug dealers, always so paranoid, especially when it comes to signing sourcing agreements with an upstanding organization such as AMI. So the Ecstacy theory couldn't be "validated."
But Dolce wasn't buying the story anyway, because, he said, "Apparently, they were having sex all-night in their room, which means they couldn't be on Ecstasy, because everyone knows you can't have sex when you're on X." He threw this (personal?) patently false statement out there in front of the whole staff, including Bonnie. It was bizarre, to say the least.
Back when the whole Brad/Angelina affair started while they were filming Mr. and Mrs. Smith and all the media had was speculation that the two were hot-and-heavy off the set, Dolce offered to pay a source thousands of dollars for an eyewitness account of them making out. When the source wouldn't sign a legal agreement with AMI, Dolce refused to pay the source, then proceeded to fuck over said source by using most of the information he provided anyway.
