Want a fascinating, up-to-the-minute update on Gail Berman's imminent move from Fox to Paramount? Of course you do! This is the e-mail that was circulated internally at Paramount, urging their employees not to break out in a spontaneous ticker-tape parade in front of the Sherry Lansing Theater in anticipation of Berman's elaborate coronation ceremony. Right. But we understand if they're not yet ready to announce the big move; it takes time to carve the plaque with her name on it out of an assistant's bones, and they want everything to be just right:

Wow, somebody at Craiglist is really moving at the speed of light, posting this listing for the job very recently vacated by Gail Berman. This is pretty great, so we're just going to get out of the way and let you enjoy:

THR and Variety are reporting that Fox entertainment head Gail Berman has dumped Rupert Murdoch's slice of television heaven for a movie job ("the top creative post") underneath Brad Grey at the New Paramount™.

· Spider-Man 3 director Sam Raimi announces that Sideways star Thomas Haden Church will play the Spidey's new archenemy, though he didn't disclose the villain's identity. We're going to play it safe and guess he'll be donning the spandex overalls of the wine-swilling Possibly Retarded Airplane Mechanic, a truly chilling foe. [THR]
· If he can't have his acting career back, what he really wants to do is direct: Ben Affleck will direct his own adaptation of the Dennis Lehane novel Gone, Baby, Gone for Touchstone. [Variety]
· Fox chooses mostly unknown British director (and Guy Ritchie disciple) Matthew Vaughn to direct X Men 3. Somewhere in Australia, Bryan Singer is laughing his ass off. [Variety]
· Not content to remake Curb Your Enthusiasm without the funny parts and with a fat, whiny stand-in for Larry David, Showtime poaches some HBO talent to keep the good times rolling. [THR]
· Paul W.S. Anderson, the auteur behind such masterpieces as Resident Evil and Alien Vs. Predator, brings his skillset to writing and directing a remake of Deathrace 3000 for Paramount. We thought that the New Paramount™ was going to lay off the remake crack-pipe, so we'll have to assume that this project is an artifact of the Sherry Lansing era. [Variety]

· Hugh Jackman signs on for the film adaptation of the C.P. Taylor play, Good, and will play a professor in 1930's Germany who gets "caught up in the fervor of nationalism." We're going to assume that's a euphemism for "getting all Nazi'd up." [Variety]
· DreamWorks and Imagine hire the writers of Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle for the Eddie Murphy vehicle Johnny Blaze. The writing duo will spend the next two months trying to rediscover the exact combination of psychotropic drugs and junk food that birthed their first hit. [Variety]
· FilmEngine purges the original cast of the Butterfly Effect and will go ahead with the development of a Kutcher-less sequel. Wilmer Valderrama, your moment has finally arrived. [Variety]
· And in other ridiculous sequel news, New Line has picked up a couple of disposable actors for Final Destination 3. Before you laugh, this one features an amusement park accident. Dude—killer Ferris wheels! [THR]
· Reason for rejoicing; Bravo orders a second season of Project Runway. [Variety]
· Everyone gets a poker project! Janeane Garafalo to star in the NBC poker comedy pilot All In. [THR]

· News to bore you to incontinence: Four longform and three music/comedy/variety categories are demoted to the fake, unbroadcasted Emmys. [Variety]
· NBC concedes the ratings ass-whupping that's been the current TV season, as freshly-beaten president Kevin Reilly confesses, "Trust me, I'm acutely aware we need the next generation of hits," before promising advertisers that September will be better. [THR]
· Kevin Reilly Day continues! The network may release its Poseiden Adventure TV movie before Warner Bros. can unleash Wolfgang Petersen's big-budget version in movie theaters next summer, hoping that their all-star lineup (we're not making this up) of Rutger Hauer, Peter Weller, and—get ready for it—Steve! Fucking! Guttenberg! will steal some of the "real" movie's thunder. [Variety]
· Assemble your own joke from these spare parts we found laying around in the trades: Tara Reid, Las Vegas, wedding chapel, Fox pilot. [THR]
· HBO picks up fourth season of The Wire, a show that everyone insists is brilliant but which we've never seen. Who has time to watch something that's actually good when gay-seeming singers are quitting America Idol every week? [Variety]

Hey, why aren't you all out getting drunk on green beer and car bombs? Oh, that's right, you're still at work, for Hollywood stops for no holiday without the threat of a Teamster riot. At least Fox lot is trying to keep thing festive on the studio lot:

· The trades look at Viacom's potential bifurcation. Enthralling! [Variety, THR]
· The ankle bracelet's still warm, and already CBS is trying to throw together a Martha Stewart biopic. Naturally, they want Cybill Shepherd to reprise her role from Martha, Inc.; she's already doing research on how to sharpen spoons and shiv a hack. [Variety]
· Jennifer Aniston will star with Vince Vaughn in super-secret romantic comedy (you know, only like a thousand people in town know what it's about) The Break-Up. Let the Aniston-Vaughn porking rumors begin! [THR]
· We absolutely refuse to read an article with this headline: "Sprechen sie Soderbergh?" Knock yourself out, though. [Variety]
· Pilot casting is now making that sucking sound that you get when you get to the bottom of a Big Gulp, as we've never heard of anyone of these people with pilot jobs: AJ Calloway, Nicholas Brendon, Jodi Lyn O'Keefe, and Michael O'Neill. [THR]

Superannuated, skeletal Viacom executive presence Sumner Redstone is mulling dividing his corporate behemoth into two separate companies, to allow faster growing portions, like its cable TV holdings, to grow unencumbered by struggling businesses like radio. While Redstone does his public song-and-dance routine for the benefit of Wall Street, we know exactly what he's up to—he's finally trying to select a successor. He's grown weary of the once-amusing executive cockfight he incited by making CBS's Les Moonves and MTV's Tom Freston share power as co-presidents of the company. While his new plan ostensibly hands over a CEO title to both of them, Redstone's testing his Number Twos with a Solomon-like threat to cut his baby in half. Our prediction: The world domination-obsessed Moonves demands that he get the part with the cute, gassy smiles and giggles and Freston be left with the one with the stinky diaper; a tearful, nice-guy Freston then begs that Redstone not cleave his infant. Redstone will then hand over Viacom to Freston, and three days later, Moonves will kill him.

· News that ten people care about: The average cost of producing and marketing a movie fell 5% to $98 million in 2004. Yay, studios, pat yourselves on the back! Because when Vin Diesel finally gets that eleventy billion dollars approved to make Hannibal, that number's gonna soar. [Variety]
· Larry King will stay on at CNN until 2009, or until he collapses into a pile of dust in his desk chair, whichever comes first. [Variety]
· The FCC passes the swear jar from Michael Powell to commissioner Kevin Martin. We're thrilled that we work in the obscenity-laden Wild West that is the internet. Watch this: cocksucker! No fine! Yet... [THR]
· The principal from Boston Public and that teenage witch chick both get pilot jobs with Fox. We couldn't make this stuff up: the Fox projects are called Deviant Behavior and Dirtbags. [THR]
· Hoping to recapture the magic from the days when she wasn't so overexposed that the mere sight of her induced hate-seizures in a large part of the population, Jennifer Lopez reteams with Selena director Gregory Nava for her next movie, Bordertown. [Variety]

While it seemed like Disney CEO-in-waiting Bob Iger was sending a message to the world with this fortuitously placed ad on the NYT website, now it looks like someone's trying to slip him a warning in the same space.* And by "someone," we think it's pretty obvious we mean "Michael Ovitz." If Ovitz is trying to slip a note to Iger, he's being a little melodramatic; working underneath Michael Eisner didn't kill him, just his career.

· At the ShoWest conference in Vegas, MPAA head Dan Glickman thanks foreign film markets for making even the most egregious of Hollywood's bombs reach profitability. In an unrelated note, we really loved Glickman's work as the Tall Man in the Phantasm movies (pic at left). [THR]
· Kenneth Branagh decides to steer his career into startlingly uncharted waters by directing an adaptation of Shakespeare's As You Like It. [Variety]
· Whoops! Look like we were wrong about all of the actors in Hollywood being used up for pilots. Donald Sutherland, Gina Gershon, George Wendt, and Roger Daltrey fill in some of the casting cracks. [THR]
· New Line buys the rights to the upcoming Chuck Klosterman book Killing Yourself to Live: 85% a True Story, in which the writer visits the sites of infamous rock-star demises. Let's see if they can get Philip Seymour Hoffman to play Klosterman. [Variety]
· A quick reminder of a controversy that had the country's panties in a painful bunch, but which now we can barely remember: The FCC rules that Nicolette Sheridan's Monday Night Football skit was not indecent. Which, we suppose, makes it decent. [THR]

Now that Bob Iger is set to inherit the golden Mickey head that is the birthright of all Disney CEOs, he's been charged with a crucial task: begging Steve Jobs and his Pixar money-printing factory to continue their partnership with his company. Of course, Iger's going to play coy for a while:

· Hey, did you hear? Bob Iger's taking over Disney! Also, Eisner will step down in September, a year ahead of schedule, but his secret control will linger indefinitely. [Variety]
· Also: Bob Iger takes over Disney; Eisner will step down early. [THR]
· Hilary Swank celebrates her Oscar win by signing up to star in The Reaping for Dark Castle, Joel Silver and Robert Zemeckis' schlockhouse horror flick production company (Gothika, Ghost Ship, 13 Ghosts, The House on Haunted Hill and House of Wax). The whereabouts of Swank's agent and manager are unknown; presumably, her decision-making team has fallen down a well. [Variety]
· The networks have finally run out of actors for pilots, as Peter "Jennie Garth's husband" Facinelli has been cast in ABC's Westside. [THR]
· Universal gives Antoine Fuqua's American Gangster sloppy seconds to Hotel Rwanda's Terry George. [Variety]
· Desperate for some hint of what the fuck is going on in the show, superfans camp out in front of the DGA for Lost night at the Paley Television Festival. [THR]

Disney Chairman George Mitchell was quick to defend the company's board against accusations that the search for Michael Eisner's successor wasn't thorough enough, and merely a rubber stamp of the half-assed variety for president/Anointed One Bob Iger:

Please, Mr, Iger, you don't have to kill anyone else*, at least for a little while; the Disney board's finally chosen you to succeed Michael Eisner as Head Mouse in Charge at the Magic Kingdom/Media Concern. That's right, you'll be replacing the same Michael Eisner who was quoted in DisneyWar offering the following votes of confidence for your candidacy: "Bob can’t run this company,” "[he] lacks the stature" and could "never succeed me." Also, our personal favorite: "If I had to choose, it would not be Bob." We hope that Eisner made it up to you with a gift basket full of pricey cheeses and handcrafted vodkas. Or, you know, by handing you the job now so that you can continue his legacy.

· This counts as breaking news, if you care at all about the British film industry: Someone we've never heard of takes over the UK Film Council's Premiere Fund, taking on the responsibility for investing—now wait for it—the equivalent of Tom Cruise's annual motorcycle-and-matching-leather-jacket budget in British films. [Variety]
· Lasse Hallstrom will direct Hoax, the story of the man who perpetrated a media um, hoax, by selling a fake Howard Hughes biography. Richard Gere is in talks to play the huckster. That thing about Hughes urinating into milk bottles, that's still true, right? Right? [Variety]
· Yesterday was FCC Supernanny Michael Powell's last, tearful day. We're sure he'll rebound, but in the meantime, he plans on wandering the streets of DC and fining tourists for naughty language, collecting a nickel per infraction in his swear jar. [THR]
· Sally Field, Heather Graham, Robert Patrick, and Colm Meaney all obtain acting work in shows that will make one episode, then be reviewed by television network executives who will decide based on that single episode if the production of additional episodes is warranted. [THR]
· Variety maintains its dominance in alliterative trade paper headlines, demoralizing the THR with this gem: "Disney Dissidents Dis Disney." Fuck, they're good. [Variety]

Since our well of jokes involving a certain pop-star defendant and the inappropriate application of a name-brand cooking oil has momentarily run dry, we're happy to pass along yet another e-mail that's been circulating through the WGA's membership. This time, a jokester has assembled a top ten list of reasons that WGA West president Dan Petrie signed his colleague's signature on a letter to the judge...[snore] Oh, what were we saying? Right, the list follows. (And we hate to ruin a joke, but Petrie did not, in fact, author the list, but we suspect that many of you aren't going to read to the end.)

Yesterday, we briefly noted a report that Paradise Hotel, the beloved reality show in which "contestants" were locked away in a luxury resort with nothing to do but drown themselves in margaritas, screw, and tear out their hair at the capriciously-shifting rules concocted by sadistic producers, might be returning to Fox this summer with its original cast. Unfortunately, an operative has informed us that the show will not be back, a decision reached deep within Fox's evil reality TV incubator yesterday. We are profoundly sad that the television landscape will continue to languish in its postlapsarian state. Excuse us while we wander in the desert of reality programming, scurrying to find some berries with which to cover our genitals— we've just realized they're shamefully exposed.

· Even with their corporate masters cracking the whip and demanding more, more, more, the Sideways-boosted Fox Searchlight will make fewer movies this year. [Variety]
· MPAA Head Pirate Hunter in Charge Dan Glickman tours the "crime-ridden black market-areas" of Mexico City in an effort to crack down on piracy south of the border. Luckily, there have been no reports of Glickman firing pistols at poverty-stricken sidewalk vendors selling unauthorized DVD copies from dirty blankets. Yet. [THR]
· Fox Animation gets the rights to Dr. Seuss's Horton Hears a Who, which much to the chagrin of the Geisel estate, will promptly be retitled Rupert Hears a Who. Hey, that's what happens when you deal with Hollywood. [Variety]
· Hey, did you hear the one about pilot season? Ellen Burstyn, Alan Ruck, John Francis Daley join pilot casts. [THR]
· "Thanks to a vote Wednesday on Capitol Hill, Hollywood is one small step closer to seeing the camcording of a film declared a federal crime." Whether the crime should be punished by firing squad or by mere genital mutilation is yet to be determined, however. [Variety]