Just because People owns Brangelina doesn't mean Us Weekly is giving up the fight. This week's issue has what looks like an oddly high-res cameraphone pic of Katie Holmes on the cover, robotically clutching a cooing Suri. Okay, fine, so they couldn't get the Brangelina pics in Vietnam, so they went for a decent Katie-Holmes-is-being-controlled thingie. But inside the mag, Janice Min's well-manicured claws really come out.
Angelina Jolie's mission of orphan-gathering mercy, it seems, is finally complete: Despite a last-minute sprint in which she barely evaded the giant butterfly nets of corrupt Vietnamese adoption officials trying to capture new son Pax Thien in hopes of reselling him to another wealthy celebrity, Jolie managed to board her plane with her precious cargo, safely stowed the child in its urchin-hold, and successfully smuggled him onto the cover of this week's People. The actress exclusively! tells the official in-flight magazine of Air Jolie:
The date: March 18, 2007
The place: 72nd at West End Ave.
Sighting: I saw Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston getting into a car today. Hooray!
· Things had mostly remained civil between Angelina Jolie and the paparazzi during her ongoing orphan-gathering trip to Vietnam, but earlier today the frustrated actress commanded her bodyguard to fire a warning bird at the swarming photographers; luckily, new son Pax Thien was safely behind the curtain with the actress, where the impressionable youngster would be safe from any emotional scarring should the conflict escalate, forcing Mommy to order her protector to press some ham against the passenger-side window to drive away the rude shutterbugs. [Photo: Getty Images]
· Asthmatic Krelboyne wins potentially Pyrrhic victory over greedy manager!
· That Sanjaya kid sure has some funny hair, doesn't he? At least it's not Phil Spectoresque. Oh, we spoke too soon! Silly us.
· A concerned Page Six hopes against hope that airborne cocksman Ralph Fiennes had the presence of mind to use protection even while in the throes of Mile High passion.
When the celebrity weeklies come out tomorrow, nearly all of them will have some version of the story of Angelina Jolie's adoption of three-year-old Pax Thien Jolie last week. But only one magazine will certainly have it as a photo-heavy cover. Only one gets the exclusive access to Jolie and her adoptees that the other tabs can only dream about.
· Angelina Jolie will star in Universal's action flick Wanted opposite Morgan Freeman and James McAvoy. Shooting is scheduled to start in May in Eastern Europe, allowing the child-hoarding actress to finally tap that region's relatively underexploited orphan supply. [Variety]
· Oh, how cute: Jolie's boyfriend also has some news of his own in the trades! [Variety]
· NUTS signs The Office's Jennifer Celotta to a two-year, seven-figure overall deal, which the writer candidly admits may help her avoid being hobbled by the bookie owed a massive gambling debt following a bad NCAA tourney pick. Here's hoping she gets out of that dilemma without lasting physical injury. [THR]
· 21.7 million viewers tune in to the fourth season of premiere of Dancing with the Stars, but are ultimately disappointed when no tango foxtrot-related mishap occurs involving Heather Mills' prosthetic leg. There's always next week, sickies. [THR]
· WGA President Patric Verrone taunts the studios by informing Guild members that there's no evidence their saber-rattling adversaries have been stockpiling scripts to prepare for a possible strike. [Variety]
There have been precious few developments in Angelina Jolie's ongoing attempts to smuggle newest acquisition Pax Thien out of Vietnam with a minimum of governmental meddling since Friday's installment of the AdoptionTracker, but today brings the happy news that her family's International Toy Shortage Relief Committee voted three-to-one to approve a resolution to leave behind their playthings for the unadopted children of Tam Binh orphanage , a decisive, pro-sharing victory that kept mother/chairman Jolie from having to cast an awkward tiebreaking vote that may have alienated the selfish faction who strenuously objected to giving up his favorite Tonka dumptruck. Reuters further reports that Jolie has arrived in Hanoi to obtain a visa for young Pax from the U.S. Embassy, but not before she fell victim to a devilish urchin at the Ho Chi Minh City airport who tricked her into overpaying for the "magic" umbrella pictured above, whose mystical, paparazzi-deflecting properties were vastly exaggerated by the greedy imp.
· Local Cleveland newsbimbo mauled by vicious housepet!
· Amazingly, TV networks aren't anxious to run this Casey Affleck PETA ad graphically showing the torture of the delicious animals served at the eating establishments of their other sponsors.
· Angelina Jolie AdoptionTracker: the thank-you note! (Which may or may not have been pinned to a bag containing a two million dollars "donation".)
· In the next Scriptland column: Frustrated screenwriters who turn to violence.
· John Travolta considers petitioning Scientology elders for permission to use the still-experimental baby-fabricating technology responsible for Suri Cruise to impregnate his 44-year-old wife.
Details about every virtually moment of press-shy orphan collector Angelina Jolie's ("Photographs and press coverage will make him upset. I'm very worried about that. I would like to say I'm sorry for bringing this into Pax's life," she recently wept into a tape recorder, lamenting that there was no television camera nearby to more fully document her visible distress) trip to Vietnam to pick up her latest toddler acquisition continue to flood the media, with orphanage officials willing to go on the record about the Orphan Formerly Known as Pham Quang Sang's earliest moments as an official member of the Jolie clan. Here, one describes how some harmless subterfuge was used to coax the child into a large burlap sack held by Pax Thien's new mom to complete the adoption process:
The first photograph of latest Angelina Jolie orphan acquisition Pax Thien (née Pham Quang Sang) comes not, as we might have expected, in an impeccably shot Annie Leibovitz Vanity Fair spread dramatically depicting the actress's multicultural brood as delegates within the world's most adorable United Nations assembly, but in this simple wire service image of all the children available at the now world-famous Tam Binh orphanage at the time of Jolie and Brad Pitt's Thanksgiving urchin-scouting trip.
Orphan successfully adopted! Us Weekly follows up on yesterday's reports that Angelina Jolie was on her way to the Tam Binh orphanage in Ho Chi Minh City to personally collect her latest child purchase and save on exorbitant international shipping charges, revealing that the newest member of the rapidly expanding Jolie-Pitt clan is now safely in her possession. With Maddox's new little brother officially her property, Jolie is wasting no time customizing the three-year-old boy to her liking:
According to Vietnamese adoption officials who wished to remain anonymous for fear their violation of the International Celebrity Baby-Brokering Association's code of silence would earn them a punitive transfer to a much less fashionable Eastern European outpost stocked entirely with unpopular Caucasian children, Angelina Jolie's latest family-building mission is nearly complete, with the orphan-hoarding actress set to participate in an adoption ceremony—which may or may not include the sacred, ritualistic handover of a briefcase containing two million dollars in unmarked American currency—on Thursday morning. As a busy Brad Pitt was unable to make the journey to pick up the child the couple scouted back on a Thanksgiving window-shopping trip to the Tam Binh orphanage, he's fully authorized son Maddox (pictured above) to choose a different new brother if the one they'd previously hand-selected "got all weird or ugly or whatever" since his late November examination.
· Var chief Peter Bart pens yet another memo to Tom Cruise, this time encouraging his successor at United Artists to ignore the skepticism of the press, take a big swig of some Oprah-endorsed positivity Kool-Aid, and realize that he's not the only one in this town trying to figure out how to run a studio. [Variety]
· Spunky test-pattern alternative MyNetworkTV will kick of a new schedule on Monday, shifting its focus from cheaply produced telenovelas that no one wants to watch to low-cost reality programming audiences will be eager to ignore. [THR]
· Clint Eastwood may direct and Angelina Jolie is in talks to star in The Changeling for Universal, the story of a woman who suspects that the abducted son that's eventually returned to her is not actually her child—material that the actress instantly connected with because of a paranoid fear she's been harboring that careless partner Brad Pitt lost Maddox at a Ralphs a year ago and has been trying to pass off another Cambodian orphan as their beloved tyke ever since. Imagine's Brian Grazer is also on board to superproduce the shit out of this one. [Variety]
· ABC elevates Ellen Pompeo to $200,000 per episode, while Grey's Anatomy co-stars James T. Pickens Jr, Chandra Wilson, Justin Chambers, and TR Knight are expected to get raises to $125k. No word on whether Isaiah Washington's successful completion of gayhab will earn him a similar reward, but should he be passed over on this round of renegotiations, he plans to recoup some of the withheld salary bump by stealing Knight's lunch money each day. [THR]
· USA pays $11 million for the rights to air Borat for five years starting in 2009, a relatively low sum due to the fact that the network will be forced to pixelate Ken Davitian's hairy, suffocating anus during the movie's iconic wrestling scene. [Variety]
The cover of the new Us Weekly might be a little misleading on the matter of the Vietnamese baby about to join the celebrated, racially and genetically balanced family of Hollywood orphan-hoarders Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie: the baby isn't yet en route to their New Orleans mansion in a satin-lined toddler-crate in the cargo hold of a Federal Express jet, as there's the small matter of the Vietnamese International Infant Export Agency adoption process to be dispensed with.
Possessing love reserves far too great to squander merely on her current family configuration of "2 miraculous, multicultural orphans/1 amorphous vanilla blob/1 eager-to-please, diaper-changing studmuffin," actress, humanitarian, and adoption addict Angelina Jolie has taken the necessary legal steps to finally fill the Vietnamese-baby-shaped hole in her heart:
How the heck can Eric—a good-hearted 30-year-old Columbia grad schooler and Peace Corps vet with an eerie resemblance to Will and Grace's Eric McCormack—find love in this frosty, lonely town?
Hoping to keep their conference from devolving into a starfucker-riddled orgy of swag suites attended by people who sneer,"What's the best Third World microlending panel I've seen this year? Are you fucking kidding? I'm just here for the parties," organizers of this year's World Economic Forum in Davos are eschewing the participation of the Hollywood do-gooders whose attendance often overshadowed the substance of the 2006 event:
