• SIZZLER: The View vs. Law & Order! It's On! [BestWeekEver.TV]

America's profligate makers of undead cinematic fare may soon find their jobs outsourced to Pakistan's more efficient, burgeoning zombie-film industry, which recently produced Zibahkhana (Hell's Ground) quickly and cheaply with a 30-day, hi-def shoot. [Variety]
Universal picks up the dramedy Counter Clockwise, about a Harvard professor who attempts to reverse the aging process by making her subjects believe they're young, for Jennifer Aniston to produce and possibly star in. It's too soon to know who will eventually play the role of Aniston's love interest, with whom she will unexpectedly fall into a suspicious, real-life romance during shooting. [THR]
Sweeney Todd casting shocker! Tim Burton signs up muse/snuggle-buddy Helena Bonham Carter for the role of the musical's "diabolical meat pie-maker." [Variety]
· Dancing with the Stars continues to grow in popularity, getting its highest ratings of the season in the wake of contestant Sara Evans' abrupt, adultery-tinged exit from the show. [THR]
· Braveheart's Randall Wallace takes on the suicidal task of condensing Atlas Shrugged's 1,100 pages into a coherent screenplay. [Variety]

In a shocking, dispiriting twist that will tear all our romantic hearts asunder, Page Six reports that the current Bachelor, Prince Lorenzo Borghese, may be more committed to upholding the show's proud tradition of aborted relationships than he is to the One True Love he was supposedly seeking. At an ASPCA event honoring Maria Menounos, which Borghese allegedly attended to promote a line of socially vital pet cosmetics that are guaranteed to make whores of your animals and turn him into at least a hundredaire, the Prince apparently couldn't keep his paws to himself.

The airing of the second part of Mel Gibson's Good Morning America interview with Diane Sawyer today means that we might finally be done with soundbites explaining how the tiny, Tequila-swilling demon living inside the actor's liver is the one that's anti-Semitic, not Gibson himself, at least until his publicity commitments for Apocalypto require a new round of public healing. Above, we've pulled a clip of Gibson's previously teased heart wounds/"the last thing I want to be is that kind of monster" run, which lost much in the translation from squirmy, live-action performance to pullquote. And on the ABC News website, there's some additional transcription of today's segment, including Sawyer's request that Gibson explain the little "Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world" remark that ignited the entire controversy: [Warning: extensive blockquoting follows]

Rush & Molloy have independently confirmed a National Enquirer report (stories this utterly explosive require such a level of tabloid journalistic rigor) that "long-simmering" hunky-TV-doctor tensions between Grey's Anatomy co-stars Patrick Dempsey and Isaiah Washington finally erupted in a physical confrontation on-set this Monday, when Washington decided that he'd had enough of this Dr. McDreamy nonsense and that it was time to choke a bitch. R & M pass along the Enquirer report:

Knowing that Diane Sawyer's "get" of Mel Gibson for the first televised stop on his Official "Hey, Me And The Jews Are Totally Cool Now" Redemption Tour will be a ratings bonanza, ABC News has already started chumming the media's shark tank with sound-bitable morsels from the coming interview on its website (which, apparently, is so bursting with the supplicating goodness that only a recently humiliated Hollywood superstar can deliver that it must be spread over two days). The first such quote features Gibson's obligatory dismissal of his anti-Semitic tirade as the devil-juice-fueled ramblings of a monster, pretty much in those exact words:

This just in: Network executives are impatient, either cancelling or giving full-season orders to shows based only on a couple of weeks of ratings data. [Variety]
It's nice to see Mira Sorvino breaking out of TV movie jail and getting a part in an Actual Feature Film, joining Mark Ruffalo, Joaquin Phoenix, and Jennifer Connelly in Reservation Road. (And we're so proud of ourselves for not ruining the moment by perving on Connelly, which would be completely inappropriate on Sorvino's big day.) [THR]
New MTV FIlms/Nickelodeon Movies president Scott Aversano's bloody housecleaning claims 16, with "several" others getting reshuffled elsewhere within the MTV family. [Variety]
ABC signs Bonnie Somerville to a talent-holding deal. Yeah, we had no idea who she was until we ran her through IMDb either, but we're sure it's money well spent. [THR]
Warner Bros. TV's "low-cost" Horizon Television unit signs American Idol judge Randy Jackson's production company to a multiyear deal, hoping that Jackson's ability to discern amateur singing performance that he's "totally feeling, bro," from ones he's "not feeling, dawg" translates into a knack for developing TV shows. [Variety]

Mummified ABC legend Barbara Walters recently went to the Australia Zoo to film an interview with Crocodile Widow Teri Irwin, whose husband, Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin, was killed a month ago by a stingray. Now this is completely unconfirmed, but a zoo staffer present during Walters' appearance sends us the following:

• We bet you're so excited for tonight's premiere of ABC's 32nd season of The Bachelor! In the latest incarnation, 25 psychotic single women compete in Rome for the affection of exotic Prince Lorenzo Borghese, who calls the city his second home. Except Borghese barely speaks Italian, had never been to Rome until he signed on with ABC, and is actually from Jersey. You could probably tell that to all 25 contestants, and they'd still go rabid competing for the final rose. [Radar]
• From here on out, the stupid smiley emoticon — :) — will be known as the "Foley." [Wonkette]
• The tables finally turn, and a Harvard man makes his bid to be a Trophy Husband. Alas, the best trophies would have no chance of getting into Harvard. [Feministing]
• Ever-increasing hotel prices keep tourists away from New York. Awesome! Jack the room rate on up! [Crain's]
• A very special, rocking evening with Don Rickles, the only man edgy enough to host the "2006 Music-Magazine Awards." [Idolator]
• A glossy magazine for pretty people who pretend to recycle. [NYSun]
• Giants/Eagles rivalry escalates to bagel-throwing, tire-slashing proportions. [Philadelphia Will Do]

HarveyMania! The Weinstein Co. finds a home for their book business in Little, Brown and Warner Books, partners with international distributor UIP for releases in the UK, and has a variety of exciting film projects on tap, including Untitled Rob Marshall Musical and the Denzel Washington-directed Great Debaters. Hurray for Weinsteins! [Variety]
· Eric "Dr. McSteamy" Dane gets a regular gig on Grey's Anatomy, giving his character a full season to pit his abs against those of rival Dr. McDreamy. In the end, we suspect, there will only be room at the hospital for one cutely nicknamed, hunky doctor, and Grey's producers will have to find a new exotic disease or gory, freak accident with which to dispatch the newcomer. [THR]
Foreign moviegoers prefer World Trade Center's tragic rubble to Adam Sandler's magical remote, as WTC tops Click at the international box office. [Variety]
· Showtime extends its upcoming free preview weekend by offering programs to Yahoo users, hoping to hook the broadband crowd on its lineup of pot-selling soccer moms and lipstick lesbians. [THR]
Fox Atomic's upcoming, sequeltastic slate includes 28 Days Later, The Hills Have Eyes 2, and a remake of Revenge of the Nerds. Atomic was created to produce cheap films targeted to teens, who market testing has proven "totally hate" any idea they haven't seen before. [Variety]

· Apple and Wal-Mart are in talks to figure out a way to work together on movie downloads, perhaps with Wal-Mart getting some kind of kickback from iTunes offerings in return for the retail giant dropping its threats to cut off the DVD sales of any studio that dares cooperate with Apple in undercutting their profit margins. [Variety]
Ugly Betty edges out Survivor: Race Wars in their second half-hours, while CSI beats Grey's in viewers, not the 18-49 demo. The demo always knows that skinny, whiny, lovesick doctors trump pointy-headed crime scene investigators. [THR]
In an attempt to cut down on the sale of counterfeit Superman Returns DVDs, Warner Bros. joins in a price war with the pirates, offering cheap, encrypted copies—at least until the MPAA and the Chinese Government round up and kill everyone with a DVD burner and an internet connection, allowing them to safely raise prices again. [Variety]
The simultaneous release of The Guardian and Open Season presents moviegoers with the undesirable dilemma of choosing between live-action and animated Ashton Kutcher vehicles. We expect a rash of multiplex lobby suicides as ticketbuyers collapse under the incredible pressure of having to make such a difficult choice. [THR]
An investor advisory service urges News Corp shareholders to protest COO Peter Chernin's excessive compensation, but have so far turned a blind eye towards Rupert Murdoch's weekly ritual of burning $10 million in front of the Fox lot's News Cafe, during which he offers a variety of obscene hand gestures to any underling looking askance at his fiery display of corporate profligacy. [Variety]

Hugh Jackman joins William Baldwin and Henry Winkler in the cast of indie film A Plumm Summer, which as far as we can tell from a very brief blurb contains no musical theater component whatsoever—a nice change of pace for the noted song-and-dance man. [Variety]
Busty period-piece staple Scarlett Johansson continues her quest to spend most of her prime earning years trussed up in a corset, signing on for the title role in Mary Queen of Scots. Not that we're complaining about her predilection for elaborate, cleavage-enhancing costumes. [THR]
Peter Jackson teams up with Microsoft to create Wingnut Interactive, which will produce two video game/interactive projects, including a "Halo" spinoff. [Variety]
Barbara Walters' 20/20 interview with Steve Irwin's widow proves just as popular as CSI: NY with the 18-49 demo, who seem to be morbidly fascinated with both real and fictional deaths. [THR]
...and recognizing that death is red-hot right now, ABC is developing three "murder-themed projects," including Bret Ratner's Women's Murder Club, the story of a quartet of sexy serial killer hunters with an inexplicable sexual attraction to hacky directors. [Variety]

Universal beats out DreamWorks, Warner Independent and the Weinsteins for the movie rights to Peter Morgan's play Frost/Nixon, whose ideas Ron Howard will eventually dilute for mass consumption and producer Brian Grazer will claim as his own. [Variety]
Cate Blanchett is attached to star in the adaptation of "graphic memoir" Cancer Vixen: A True Story, in which she will depict cartoonist Marisa Acocella Marchetto, who "wore killer shoes to chemo sessions and strove to get married on time." [THR]
Viacom is cutting the salary of skeletal executive presence Sumner Redstone to bring it in line with that of the officers he recently installed to run the company, but Redstone will be able to boost his base compensation considerably through bonuses for cutting ties with too-expensive movie stars or unexpectedly firing popular underlings. [Variety/AP]
Pirates of the Caribbean finishes first overseas for the 11th time in 12 weekends, boosted by continuing support in Pacific Island territories in which Johnny Depp is worshipped as the demihuman incarnation of Toronga, a million-year-old, gay-pirate god. [THR]
ABC's Sunday ratings were still strong despite moving Grey's Anatomy to Thursday, with Desperate Housewives drawing nearly 24 million viewers eager to see what mirthlessly outrageous antics the ladies of Wisteria Lane will be up to in their third season. [Variety]

SAG looks to increase dues for the first time in seven years, a move that could put an unwelcome financial burden on your favorite bartender, valet parking attendant, or Starbucks barista in between slow-arriving residual checks. [Variety]
· On fledgling network The CW's premiere night, America's Next Top Model carries them to a win in the only demographic they truly care about, 18-34 year-olds, as the kids obviously put in the effort to figure out which channel is the new home of Tyra Banks' trademark sassiness. (Disclosure: We still have no idea what channel The CW landed on here in L.A. We suppose we'll figure it out eventually.) [THR]
· Adorably quirky superproducer Brian Grazer's Imagine TV is hooking up with the FBI to develop a drama about its role in the post-9/11 government. In the meantime, The Graze and his partners are hoping that new CBS series Shark will be a hit and make them incrementally richer. [Variety]
Justin Long will join Bruce Willis in the cast of the fourth Die Hard flick, Live Free or Die Hard, playing an obnoxious Mac enthusiast who scoffs at Willis' every frustrated attempt to download pictures from his digital camera onto his PC. [THR]
Thursday night ABC newcomer Grey's Anatomy defeats CBS timeslot stalwart CSI in both overall and key demographic viewership, leaving Les Moonves no choice but to promise his network affiliates that he plans on having the entire Grey's cast murdered by the end of the month. [Variety]

Had she gone to college, you just know that Angelina Jolie would have been the girl conspicuously toting around her copy of Atlas Shrugged to parties just so she could go on and on about how much Ayn Rand changed her life. Now she gets her chance to live that experience on the set of a movie adaptation of the book. Grips, stay away from her at the craft services table. [Variety]
Entourage gets an official fourth-season pick-up with a 12-episode order from HBO. Spoiler alerts: Johnny Drama will seem a little gay, Turtle will spend most of the season high, and Ari will continue to be the only character really worth watching. [THR]
At yesterday's 900-member WGA unity rally, president Patric Verrone declared that "every piece of media with a moving image on the screen or a recorded human voice must have a writer. And every writer must have a WGA contract," a boldly inclusive statement probably not meant to cover people who record cameraphone videos of their drunk friends singing karaoke and post them to YouTube. [Variety]
Mel Brooks tries to prove there's no movie on his resume he's unwilling to cannibalize for a different medium, teaming with G4 for an animated series based on Spaceballs. [THR]
ABC's "Feel Thursday" campaign to publicize Grey's Anatomy's schedule shift was carefully engineered to finally drive all straight males from the show's viewership. The network anxiously awaits tomorrow morning's demographic ratings breakdowns, which should reveal how well the marketing strategy worked. [Variety]

On Friday night, 20/20 will air Barbara Walters' interview with Fox News screamer Bill O'Reilly. The two prance around his Long Island McMansion, talk about how he's so fucking tall and marvel at how nice Walters looks when they use that soft, fuzzy lens. Then they get on the topic of why Bill O'Reilly is so bitter, and he drops the dirty bomb: "The FBI came in and warned me and a few other people at Fox News that Al Qaeda had us on a death list."

In addition to flogging the tired spookiness of the whole six degrees of separation meme, ABC's upcoming Six Degrees show has dared to mount not just any viral campaign, but a viral campaign where hirelings accost random citizens while masquerading as characters from the show:

Realizing that incumbent Governator Arnold Schwarzenegger's views on crucial issues like gay marriage, the environment, and having Los Angeles officially declared the capital of Earth pander to are in alignment with their own, Hollywood liberals find themselves supporting the—gasp!—Republican for reelection. [Variety]
In what could easily result in the most annoying entry in the history of the talent competition genre, ABC greenlights The Impostor, which will seek out the best celebrity impersonator in the country. We anticipate mass suicides during either the fourteenth Captain Kirk impression or the twentieth Travis Bickle-era De Niro. [THR]
A marketing study shows that about one-third of the moviegoing public researches a film on the web before seeing it, a promising finding reassuring studios that they still can exploit the other uniformed two-thirds of their potential audience without online interference. [Variety]
· THR refers to The CW as "television's first patchwork quilt network," a description that aptly captures the new network's salvaging of programming scraps and stitching them together into an aesthetically incoherent, unsightly whole. [THR]
The producers of the Janis Joplin biopic The Gospel According to Janis decide that it's better to have an actress who can sing rather than a pop star who can't sing play Joplin, replacing Pink with Zooey Deschanel. [Variety]

Strong-jawed triple-threat George Clooney will star in, direct, and rewrite the oft-in-development, football-related period romantic comedy (yeah, we don't get it either) Leatherheads for Universal, while Renee Zellweger is in negotiations to play his inevitably pouty, yet adorably plucky, love interest. [Variety]
CSI creator Anthony Zuiker is developing the cop drama The Man for LL Cool J, who will star as the titular alpha-male who raises troubled kids by day, and runs so-deep-undercover-he-doesn't-know-which-way-is-up-anymore sting operations by night. [THR]
Simpsons writer Josh Lieb and David O. Russell are developing a series for FX described as an "Upstairs, Downstairs" dramedy set at a Los Angeles country club. We put the over/under on the amount of time it takes for a mouthy actor playing a haughty tennis pro to find himself on the wrong end of a Russell headlock at two days. [Variety]
· New Fox shows Justice, Til Death, and Happy Hour can now be streamed online as early as the next morning after their initial TV broadcast, allowing you to catch up on missed episodes at virtually the same time executives get their Nielsen overnights and try to decide which of the series to cancel first. [THR]
Hollywood Out of Ideas, Exploiting a Classic Edition: ABC is developing a weekly series based on Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation, with Coppola signed on to oversee the network's needless adaptation and updating of his film. [Variety]

"There is a theory that anyone on the planet is connected to any other person through a chain of six people," intones ABC's website for its upcoming coincidental conspiracy show Six Degrees. Unfortunately, it turns out that the whole six degrees of separation theory — a popular staple of party conversation, and the inspiration for a film about such a party conversation, which featured Will Smith gettin' all pre-superstar gay — may be a load of hooey. The theory was first popularized by Stanley Milgram, a researcher who had test subjects try to get letters to unknown (but named) recipients through their circle of acquaintances. The letters took an average of six leaps to reach their addressees, hence the six degrees of separation. Another researcher recently examined Milgram's original notes and found that 95% of the letters never reached their targets at all. But at least we still got a tasteful man-smooch from Will Smith, right? Apparently not, as Smith reportedly refused to actually film that scene, requiring a stand-in to take the gay heat. So many illusions, shattered. Bet that new ABC show rocks, though.