When Rosie O'Donnell was describing on a recent installment of The View how Danny DeVito's adorably soused appearance on the show had made international news, she shared her rather ill-chosen impression of a Chinese newscaster who spoke almost entirely in "chings" and "chongs." (Our Gotham sibling site Gawker posted the clip, punctuated by a gong sound effect that is being hilariously misreported as being added by The View producers themselves.) The bit has not surprisingly escalated into a full-fledged controversy: The Asian American Journalists Association released an official statement, condemning what they perceive as "a mockery of the Chinese language and, in effect, a perpetration of stereotypes of Asian Americans as foreigners or second-class citizens."

Two people have been arrested for stealing an Academy member's awards screeners and illegally posting them online. The DA has yet to file charges, but is expected to ultimately deny the MPAA's request that the pirates be summarily stabbed in the kidneys and left to bleed to death on the sidewalk in front of the Kodak Theatre. [Variety]
ABC shuffles its Wednesday schedule, sacrificing new comedies Knights of Prosperity and In Case of Emergency to the Nielsen gods by putting them up against the return of American Idol, hoping that better-loved hit Lost might be spared their wrath in its new 10 pm timeslot. [THR]
George Clooney's production company tries to help re-ignite Hollywood's stalled love affair with legal thriller typist John Grisham, buying the movie rights to produce the book The Innocent Man: Murder and Justice in a Small Town for Warner Independent. [Variety]
The IATSE/WGA feud over reality jobs heats up, as IATSE president Thomas Short accuses the WGA of "irresponsibility and incompetence" for delaying producer talks. Only nine more months left of bickering over accusations of Guild posturing and de facto studio work stoppages! Enjoy them while they last. [THR]
The week in ratings: NBC takes the weekly 18-49 demo victory, The CW posts its strongest numbers yet, ABC has the week's most watched show, CBS remains the overall most watched network, and Fox is just happy they're not being beaten by Telemundo. [Variety]

Sorting through the fallout of yesterday's announced reorganization at Yahoo! is a job best left to tech-dirt-shovelling sister site Valleywag (we could never hope to equal our boss's facility with neon green arrows), but we've seen corporate reshuffling victim and former ABC bigwig Lloyd "Ever Hear Of 'Desperate Housewives' And 'Lost'? Yeah, Those Were Mine Before They Fired Me'" Braun's headshot enough times this morning to seek out what he had to say about leaving the internet company that hired him in an ill-conceived attempt to make their operation more "Hollywoody." Reports the LAT:

A reader informed us that the ladies of The View were all sipping conspicuously out of the same ceramicware this morning: The View Winter Mug, artfully adorned with snowflakes and the disembodied heads of the show's four co-hosts, and available for purchase at the ABC online store. A perfect stocking stuffer for the "has everything" agent who will delight in adding an authentic craquelure to Barbara Walters' suspiciously supple portrait by launching it at an assistant's head, the reader went directly to the website to purchase one of the mugs, whereupon they found the following prominent warning:

NBC demonstrates its ongoing commitment to struggling, behind-the-scenes- at-sketch-comedy-show programming, picking up 30 Rock for a full season after last night's ratings spike. [Variety]
The Office's John Krasinski join George Clooney in the romantic comedy Leatherheads, in which the two stars try to convince audiences that Renee Zellweger is sexually desirable enough to fight over. [THR]
Columbia and Scott Rudin acquire the screen rights to a still-unpublished "new take" on Cleopatra by biographer Stacy Schiff and producer Scott Rudin. Even though the book centers on Cleopatra as a "a firm ruler and military tactician" rather than as a sexbomb seductress, we wouldn't be surprised if the studio quickly determines that Angelina Jolie is "firm rulerish and tactician-y enough" to send out a big offer. [Variety]
Grey's Anatomy leads ABC to a Thursday night ratings win against the token resistance of CBS's CSI rerun. In other news, no one is watching The OC anymore. [THR]
· The Producers Guild will give Jerry Bruckheimer their Norman Lear Achievement Award in Television, celebrating the superproducer's unparalleled ability to land procedural after procedural on CBS's primetime schedule. [Variety]

Hollywood Out Of Ideas, Now They're Really, Really Out Of Ideas, We Mean It This Time Edition: Paramount, Eddie Murphy, and producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura will work closely to "reinvigorate" and "update" the Beverly Hills Cop franchise. We expect that Paramount will immediately hire Moby to re-record the "Axel F" theme, put in a call to Josh Hartnett's people to gauge his interest in being "the next Judge Reinhold," and deposit $30 million in Murphy's bank account to prove to the star how important retaining the integrity of the franchise is to them. [Variety]
Warner Bros. signs up George Clooney to star in and produce an adaptation of the James Ellroy novel White Jazz and to direct the heist flick The Belmont Boys, and in return for his involvement in these more creatively satisfying projects, Clooney has agreed to appear in Ocean's Fourteen through Twenty-Eight for the studio. Under this latest art-for-commerce swap, should Clooney expire or lose his Old Hollywood good looks before the production of the latter sequels, Warner Bros. has the right to use a digital recreation of the actor to complete his commitment. [THR]
Disney's screening Apocalypto for just about every group that might be remotely interested in the film (even the media!), hoping that the public will forget about Mel Gibson's interesting, tequila-amplified thoughts on Jews and judge the films on its own, Mayan-talkin', graphically violent merits. [Variety]
Facelift enthusiast Meg Ryan now officially unrecognizable enough to play a thinly veiled Carrie Fisher. [THR]
· On the last day of November sweeps, ABC discovers that Show Me the Money and Day Break are pretty poor substitutes for Dancing with the Stars and Lost. [Variety]

Production has already begun on CBS's latest foray into the "marginal celebrities performing activities for which they're hilariously ill-suited" genre of reality TV, Armed and Famous, in which Erik "Hey, I Once Played A Motorcycle Cop!" Estrada, LaToya Jackson, Jack Osborne, and Wee Man will train to become gun-toting members of the Muncie, Indiana police force. We expect that reports of Muncie's first parking ticket-related fatal shooting will soon surface. [Variety]
House pulls in its best ratings since its season premiere, crushing the debut of ABC's new comedy, Big Day, which stars that guy from all those short-lived sitcoms whose name we can never remember. [THR]
Universal casts Martin Lawrence in the Malcolm Lee comedy The Better Man, a project that strips him of the acting crutch represented by the latex fat suits he's recently relied on to portray the titular character in Big Momma's House 2 and John Travolta in Wild Hogs. [Variety]
According to a USC study, parents think their kids are online too much, robbing them of the vital life experiences provided by the rainbow parties their internet usage is causing them to miss out on. [THR]
The Real World's ratings are off 53 percent from last season, indicating that basic cable audiences might finally be tired of watching drunk assholes scream at each other while living rent-free in lavishly decorated apartments. Even if these discouraging results makes MTV give up on the series, we hope they continue on with Real World/Road Rules Challenge, as drunk assholes screaming at each other while bungie jumping off hot air balloons floating over active volcanos still has some entertainment value. [Variety]

A seemingly still-intoxicated Danny DeVito showed up at The View today admitting he had yet to sleep after an all-night bender with Sexiest Drinking Buddy Alive George Clooney (actually, the slurring made it sound something more like "Cheorlge"), before promptly launching into a heavily bleeped "Bush as the fourth Stooge" routine, and a fond recollection of the erotic adventures he and wife Rhea Pearlman once shared in the Lincoln Bedroom. As unexpectedly gonzo as his inebriated appearance may have been, however, it came nowhere near the extreme heights reached by Monday's show, when DeVito's Deck The Halls co-star Matthew Broderick insisted on removing his shoe and sock and injecting heroin between his toes during Elisabeth Hasselbeck's fawning monologue about how much the character of Carrie Bradshaw means to her.

In case the raw number of $66.2 million that Casino Royale took in at the international box office isn't enough to impress you, that amount was more than double the combined totals of its four closest competitors. We're cowed by the drawing power of Blonde Bond, at least when he's not having his spy-junk stomped by dancing penguins. [Variety]
Jada Pinkett Smith and Will Smith set up two TV comedy projects, one at The CW about single moms "making lunch and making love" within the same apartment complex, and one at ABC about what happens when a pair of mothers-in-law move in with "an upper-class black man from a conservative family and his Jewish wife from a liberal lower-middle-class family" who are trying to raise twins (what, no talking dog?), a project apparently created when an overly ambitious writer set her Random Sitcom Premise Generator to its highest wackiness setting. [THR]
· New Line's The Nativity Story premiered Sunday at the Vatican without the Pope in attendance, with rumors that he opted out of the event because the movie's unwed, pregnant, teenage star did not conceive through appropriately immaculate means. [Variety]
Carson Daly is supplementing his TV hosting duties with a producing career in online content, hoping to realize his longtime dream of becoming the "Ryan Seacrest of the Internet." [THR]
Fox, CBS, and NBC continue to fight FCC over new indecency regulations, while ABC and The CW haven't yet been fined enough to join the fray. [Variety]

The idea that a hit TV series could affect the fashions of the times is hardly new, as anyone who has ever attended one of those Miami Vice-inspired sock-burning protests of the mid 1980s can attest. But current ABC ratings juggernaut Grey's Anatomy has added yet another wrinkle to the concept of primetime-influenced style, by transforming traditionally conservative hospital dresscodes into hotzones of skirt-hiking, five-o'clock-shadow-growing medical professionals hoping to score like their McHorny TV counterparts:

Today's Page Six takes a stand against the creeping commercialization of public spaces in New York while chastising a news organization for unseemly gloating. Under the hed "Desperate Sign," the Sixers report that:

· Hot on the heels of the launch of NBC Universal's online humor site DotComedy (it's still around a week later, apparently—so far, so good), AOL and HBO announce plans to erect This Just In in January, a novel idea centered around the unprecedented use of blogging technology to explore current events in comedic fashion. [Variety]
The Academy announces the Oscar documentary shortlist, which includes Dixie Chicks film Shut Up and Sing and Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. Among the snubbed: Wordplay, Who Killed the Electric Car?, and This Film Is Not Yet Rated. [THR]
Warner Bros. suddenly moves up the release of Clint Eastwood's other World War II drama, Letters from Iwo Jima, to late December to put it into awards contention, hoping to snag some of the nominations that may elude his floptastic DreamWorks effort, Flags of our Fathers. [Variety]
· 27.2 million viewers tune in to watch Emmitt Smith stiff-arm Mario Lopez on the way to the Dancing with the Stars championship, while temporary Lost timeslot-filler Daybreak's premiere was "trounced" by Criminal Minds. [THR]
Fox decides that since it might look bad to cancel all of their new shows, they might as well pick up additional episodes of Til Death and Standoff in hopes that they might eventually draw some viewers once American Idol and 24 return. [Variety]

· Following in the footsteps of fellow sickly A-lister Jim Carrey, M. Night Shyamalan shitcans his longtime rep at UTA, succumbing to CAA's promises to lovingly suckle him back to health with the career-restorative milk flowing from its pair of demon teats. Details are sure to follow, but we're sure that the sudden dumping occurred at the end of a meeting in which the twist-happy director deceived his former agency into believing he would remain with them forever, no matter how cold his career had become. [Variety]
· AOL is close to poaching NBC TV Group president Randy Falco. Feel free to be utterly titillated or completely uninterested by this executive-shuffling development. [THR]
Variety eulogizes the VHS tape. You will weep openly for the obsolete format that once brought you so much joy, then smash your tape-rewinder in agony over the loss. [Variety]
Astounding numbers of people continue to be interested in Dancing with the Stars, which scores 26.7 million viewers with its last performance show. Additonally, the premiere of William Shatner's gameshow, Show Me the Money, proves decidedly less shat-tastic than its exuberantly shat-punning ads promised. [THR]
The Weinstein Company signs an exclusive four-year video rental deal with Blockbuster, cruelly withholding titles like Bobby and School for Scoundrels from the world's crap-craving Netflix queues. [Variety]

The entertainment industry is predictably enthusiastic about the Democratic gains in this week's elections, especially MPAA head Dan Glickman, who expects that his organization's agenda will be immediately adopted by the Hollywood-loving, liberal legislators that now control Congress. [Variety]
ABC wins Wednesday with Dancing with the Stars and Lost, while a special Wednesday night airing of The OC doesn't manage to improve on last week's "horrible start." We suggest more cagefighting with Chino. [THR]
Call it a "vote of confidence" or "a desperate move to save a poorly rated show," but ABC is moving Men in Trees to the well-protected post-Grey's Anatomy timeslot on Thursday nights. [Variety]
Time Warner pulls out of China, searches for a more hospitable place in which to insert its throbbing cinema operations. Yeah, we're not proud of that one, but it is what it is. [THR]
Believing that American Idol also-ran Kellie Pickler's adorable inability to pronounce the words "calamari" and "salmon" is sufficient evidence of comedic talent, Fox is now developing a sitcom to take better advantage of her photogenic bimbitude. [Variety]

Borat's popularity grows overseas, with the movie taking in $17.7 million over the weekend at the foreign box office, including $11.5 million at 426 British theaters. Despite the film's instant international success, Fox still has no plans to induce riots in Kazakhstan by showing the movie in Borat's much-maligned homeland. [Variety]
Desperate Housewives is Sunday's most-watched show, but a strong performance by NBC's Sunday Night Football may give the beleagured network the win for the night once the final ratings come in. In the event of a Nielsen victory, NBC will strongly consider shifting to a primetime schedule consisting of nothing but football games (high-level negotiations with the NFL for revolutionary Every Night Is Football Night In America broadcasts are ongoing) and Deal or No Deal. [THR]
Awards Season Art Film Platform Release Mania! The Queen, Volver, and Babel perform well over the weekend, rolling up gaudy per-theater averages at their strategically limited showings. [Variety]
The budget-slashing NBC gives midseason sitcom The Single's Table a no-confidence vote, cutting back its order from 13 to 6. [THR]
· CBS rescues the comedy pilot the The Papdits from development hell, consigning it to a slightly higher circle of its network Inferno, an online run on their Innertube broadband channel. [Variety]

A press release in our inbox alerting us to the upcoming nomination announcements for the 33rd Annual People's Choice Awards isn't typically the sort of thing we would bother mentioning, regardless of how thrilled we may be at the prospect of George Lopez getting the popular recognition he so richly deserves as one of America's Favorite Television Actors. But something about the lineup chosen to read this year's nominees struck us as noteworthy:

It's time again for studios to clog the mailboxes of awards voters with their screener DVDs, but this year, some are sending out two versions: plain ones featuring just the movie itself to groups that are uptight about superfluous goodies influencing their principled voters, and fancier ones with extras and nice packaging for associations with looser reins on their swag-whoring membership. [Variety]
The Wachowski Brothers will write and direct a big-screen adaptation of Speed Racer for Warner Brothers. Are they still "brothers"? We've kind of lost track of where they stand in the gender reassignment process. Oops, there we go again, distracting people from the work with some salacious personal stuff. Apologies. [THR]
· We thought that all of the getting-high-and-gorging-on-junk-food questions raised in Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle were sufficiently addressed in the first movie, but we were obviously wrong, as a sequel is now in the works. This time around, the toke-happy pals will be suspected of being terrorists after trying to smuggle a bong onto their flight to Amsterdam. [Variety]
With an episode powered by a completely unexpected plot twist in which its titular, wisecracking doctor makes a crazy diagnosis that was later proven to be accurate, House returned to the Fox lineup with the highest demographic rating of the night, but still lost to Dancing with the Stars in total Tuesday night viewers. [THR]
· Var introduces new blog Wilshire and Washington, which will cover the intersection of entertainment and politics, as illustrated by incidents in which people toss liquids at Barbara Streisand for expressing negative opinions about the President. [Variety]

There's still no script for the Superman Returns sequel planned for summer of 2009, but Warner Bros. has decided to give director Bryan Singer another crack at trying to break the $300 million budget mark he fell a little short of in his first attempt. [Variety]
Behind Desperate Housewives (that show's still on? We always thought that series ceased existing after we delete their TiVo season passes), ABC "tramples" the Sunday night ratings competition. [THR]
· Tori Spelling attempts to stave off destitution by renting herself to Oxygen for a reality series, which will chronicle her and her husband's attempt to buy and refurbish a bed-and-breakfast somewhere in SoCal. [Variety]
· The Devil Wears Prada wins its fourth straight week at the international box office. [THR]
Warner Bros. bumps up the release of Blood Diamond to December 8th, setting up a showdown with Mel Gibson's Apocalypto, which the studio hopes to defeat through an ad campaign focused around the phrase, "Hate Conflict Diamonds. Not Jews." [Variety]

New Line is the latest studio to prove that any pitch in the form of "Will Ferrell is a(n) [occupation for which Will Ferrell seems hilariously ill-suited] is an instant greenlight, signing up the actor for Semi-Pro, in which Ferrell will put on the ball-huggingest pair of shorts ever conceived by a wardrobe department while portraying "Jackie Moon, the flamboyant owner-player-coach of the fictional Flint, Mich., Tropics in the final year of the American Basketball Assn." Woody Harrelson will co-star, though it's not clear if he's playing the complimentarily dim-witted sidekick or Ferrell's cocky rival. [Variety]
Arrested Development creator Mitch Hurwitz and Arrested Development writer Richard Day are adapting the BBC series The Thick of It for American television, apparently hoping to find some way to translate the wholly foreign concept of "bureaucratic ineptitude" in British governance to the flawless law-making processes of Congress. [THR]
The Weinstein Co. claims that NBC and The CW are refusing to air commercials for the Dixie Chicks documentary Shut Up and Sing because they criticize the president, a burgeoning censorship controversy that should cripple Harvey Weinstein's efforts to raise public awareness of their free-speech-centered film. [Variety]
ABC orders four more scripts from Help Me Help You, The Nine, and Men in Trees, while NBC orders three more from Studio 60; we'll leave it to you to figure out which series the networks actually want to nurture with a show of faith, and which ones they're hoping will write themselves out of a full-season episode order with further sketch-comedy musings on Nancy Grace's inadequacies as a cable news journalist. [THR]
Hollywood Out Of Ideas, Faux Snuff Films Edition: Rogue Pictures is remaking Faces of Death, the cult horror flick supposedly depicting the actual deaths of its accidental "stars," promising enough gore and shock value for a YouTube-desensitized generation no longer stirred by endless replays of "trampoline basketball." [Variety]

· The Coen Brothers and George Clooney—the inspired pairing to which we attribute our ongoing addiction to huffing Brylcreem—reteam for Burn After Reading, "a spy caper about a CIA agent who loses the disc of the book he is writing." Yes, he plays the CIA agent. No, he doesn't lose any fingernails. [THR]
· ABC has won the 18-49 demo for the first five weeks of the season, thanks to returning powerhouses like Grey's Anatomy and Lost, and new, breakout hit Ugly Betty. NBC points to Powerpoint projection reading, "Heroes: #1 with America's men!" emits faintly audible fart, slinks back to chair. [Variety]
· David Cunningham, director of ABC's controversial The Path to 9/11, is shifting gears to direct The Dark Is Rising, a fantasy film based on a series of children's books in which a lazy, horny Warlock-in-Chief named Klinton allows unimaginable atrocities to beset a peace-loving people. [Variety]
· Sarah Jessica Parker replaces Rachel Weisz in Smart People, playing widower Dennis Quaid's love interest. Dennis Quaid's best acting in years comes when he feigns excitement at news of the recasting. [Variety]
· Bravo picks up six more episodes of Work Out, the gripping reality drama in which we follow lesbian trainer extraordinaire Jackie Warner dodge whatever flying stemware her latest de-institutionalized girlfriend happens to launch at her head at any given moment. [THR]