Neil Patrick Harris, Cubed
Neil Patrick Harris is hosting a three-dimensional game show. Conan O'Brien saves the best for last. "Drunk History" gets an award, and there is a show called Emergency Sex about humanitarian workers boinking it. The Roundup will take you there!
•Game shows are like one of England's biggest exports, and Neil Patrick Harris is potentially hosting a new one. The Cube is a show which centers on people trying to "win big bucks by completing simple tasks inside a chamber designed to induce stress." NPH just flew to London to shoot a pilot for CBS. He'll also be an executive producer on the show if it's picked up. Jeez, NPH, leave some entertainment work for the rest of us. [TheWrap]
•Sundance is wrapping up Sunday, which means the place is turning into a volcano spewing molten lava hot deals all over the place. The biggest deal: Focus Features bought rights to The Kids Are All Right for $4.8 million. The film stars Annette Bening and Julianne Moore as a lesbian couple whose children meet their donor dad. Meanwhile, Hanover House picked up Joel Schumacher's "Twelve," for $2 million. The Joseph Gordon-Levitt vehicle "Hesher" was bought by Newmarket for $1 million. In the film, JGL sits around with his shirt off and smokes a lot. Everyone else was just wandering around the streets of Sundance with copies of their movies asking random passersby for a deal. [Variety]
•J.D. Salinger, the author whose work touched millions and became a cultural touchstone for a generation of American teens, died today. Now The Hollywood Reporter asks the important question: Will any of his books become movies? Obviously Catcher in the Rye is ripe for adaptation, but since Salinger's story "Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut" was adapted in 1949 into the atrocious My Foolish Heart Salinger was always cool on selling the rights to his work. Salinger's work is controlled by the J.D. Salinger Literary Trust, and the head of the Trust told THR that "Everybody knows that he did not want it to happen, and the trust will follow that." But we have so many suggestions for who could play Holden! [THR]
•Another piece of evidence for the Conan-leaving-was-an-NBC-stunt conspiracy: Conan O'Brien's final week on The Tonight Show brought the biggest ratings of his seven-month stint. 10.3 million people tuned in, compared with 9.2 million for his first show on June 1. [NYT]
•Viral video makes good at Sundance: Do you remember those funny Internet videos where someone got drunk and talked about history and then people acted them out in cheesy costumes? One of those films, Drunk History: Douglass & Lincoln won the jury prize in short filmmaking at Sundance. The film stars Will Ferrell and Don Cheadle as Lincoln and Douglass. But it's not on the Internet because apparently the series' creators, Jeremy Konner and Derek Waters, have gotten big heads and decided to desert the medium that made them in the first place. [THR]
•There is this show called Emergency Sex to be launched soon on HBO. This sounds like something that should exist in real life: Like, if you really need to have sex you just yell "Emergency Sex!" and some hot person comes out of a glass case on the wall and bones you, and it'll paid for by our taxes and finally our taxes will be doing something worthwhile. But this show is about UN peacekeepers who met in Cambodia during the 1990s. It stars Maria Bello, is written by "Slumdog Millionaire" writer Simon Beaufoy, and executive produced by Bello, Beaufoy, Russell Crowe and Bello's agent. [THR]