Angelenos are certainly accustomed to seeing swirling vortexes of doom forming over some of our favorite local landmarks—everywhere from the CAA Death Star to the WeHo Pinkberry dispensary—but the towering pillar of smoke that formed over Universal Studios early Sunday morning proved especially ominous—particularly after reports circulated that it wasn't so much the result of God pointing a bony finger of disapproval towards the immoral business practices unfolding within, but rather a massive fire engulfing some of our most cherished childhood memories. (The Mice Age blog catalogs the casualties. R.I.P., special-needs King Kong! *Sniff*) One of the greatest challenges firefighters faced was a lack of adequate water pressure (it's not as if Jim Carrey hadn't warned them after each and every thoroughly unsatisfying shower in his double-wide), a logistical challenge that required some extremely creative problem solving. From the LAT:

Back in October 2004, Tatum O’Neal was a sobriety success story, having written a successful memoir after apparently conquering a drug addiction so intense that it made Stevie Nicks's habit look pithy. But as the NY Post reports, O’Neal was arrested by the NYPD last night while allegedly buying crack and cocaine just blocks away from her luxury apartment in Manhattan's Lower East Side. When she was busted, the actress supposedly claimed she was pulling a Mendes and researching a bit for an upcoming junkie role. Apparently, her research was tres Method — she was even carrying a crack pipe on her (but it was “clean!”, she said). Even more embarrassing? She reached for the age-old and very dusty “Don’t you know who I am?” in an attempt to get the cops to look the other way. But the cops didn’t bite, and O’Neal, along with her dealer, were taken to the clink. After the jump, we scoured her memoir of recovery to figure out why she may have gone back to the "glamorous" world of drugs.

Just in time to wring the last drop of anemic lifeblood from his wife's doomed presidential campaign, Bill Clinton's pervy, protective inner circle gets a close look from Todd Purdum in the new issue of Vanity Fair. And oh, the class: Model-schtupping moguls Steve Bing and Ron Burkle aside (the latter of whose private jet "Air Fuck One" has apparently acquired prime status among the ex-president's transportation modes), we're particularly intrigued to read about Clinton's more comely Hollywood company:

The Brazilian wax you scheduled to coincide with your Sex and the City opening night party may have now given way to the discomforting condition known as a Bolivian rash—but luckily for you there exists no better topical salve than the weekend's boffo numbers:

If you're famous, and you want to do cocaine (or smoke crack), our best advice is: don't do it, because you're a role model. Ha ha. But seriously, hopeless crackhead celebrities; if you're going to do it at least don't be an idiot. Coke is hardly even frowned upon in Hollywood, but getting busted while acting like a maniac can seriously impair your image and earning ability in middle America. So learn from your more unfortunate peers' mistakes; after the jump, five cases of cocaine-fuelled idiocy, and how not to reproduce them.

Antipathy toward Manoj Night Shyamalan was easy after Lady in the Water, but the slip-sliding trajectory of his upcoming eco-thriller The Happening has our hearts suddenly and surprisingly enlarged with pity. After a while, there's only so much you can hold against a guy whose actors' line readings are scarier than his plot, who unironically claims he's got something on The Exorcist and whose latest double-shot of bad buzz suggests Shyamalan's days as Genius Autocrat Brat are spiraling to a close. For starters, the flagging Manoj Mystique™ gets the point-counterpoint treatment in today's NY Times:

Well, we're here. We fought our way through hellacious traffic — 45 minutes on the off-ramp alone! — and we battled through the blazes that engulfed the famed clocktower from Back To The Future earlier today. Now Molly McAleer and myself are here are perched on the (surprisingly product placement free) yellow carpet, ready to take Hollywood down from the inside (again, we're still not sure how we managed to slip through the rigorous credentialing process). While we're still a little unsure of how all this will go down, one thing is assured — we'll be doing our best to wreak havoc. All of the action can be found after the jump!

It's not even 8am and today is already setting up to be a real doozy. Reports are just coming in that the Universal Studios backlot — possibly the Back To The Future set — is on fire right right now. A tipster sent in the above photo and wrote in that he "woke up to loud bangs - almost like tanks were exploding." While there are no reports suggesting that the blaze is anywhere near the Gibson Ampitheater, where the MTV Movie Awards are scheduled to be held later this afternoon, we will certainly keep you posted. Don't forget, so long as the red carpet isn't on fire, we're scheduled to be liveblogging the awards today beginning at 3pm PST. As they say in the business, developing...

· From clingy dresses to canine masturbation, from mean-spirited reviews to disappointed Cosmo swillers doling out handjobs, we found ourselves oversexed in our city.
· The same cannot be said for Clay Aiken — he's pregnant!
· We were accused of being part of an "extraordinary smear campaign" after passing along a tip about Dan Aloni's alleged angry outburst on the Fox lot.
· Angelina Jolie gave birth to two lovely, genetically perfect children named Isla Marcheline and Amelie Jane. Wait, no she didn't. That left Entertainment Tonight paying the ultimate price.
· George Clooney bought Sarah Larson a one way ticket to Dumpsville.
· Lindsay Lohan's lesbian love was generously endorsed by Michael Lohan.
· Ben Silverman forgot to sync his Blackberry, enraging Ari Emmanuel [sic].
· We found out Kirsten Dunst wasn't drunk or drugged, just depressed. Then her pants caught fire.
· Sharon Stone got bit by the karma chameleon.
· The season finale of 'Lost' left us all wondering who's in the casket? Hint: he feels good!
· 50 Cent pulled a Left Eye (allegedly).
· We saved you $150K.
· Rachel [sic] Ray was in hot pursuit of extra virgins in the afterlife.
· We wept a little on the inside when Bill Murray's halo was tarnished.
· The End Of Ideas train kept plowing forward, picking up motormouth cops and ouija boards along the way.
· ScarJo CloneGate!
· We paid tribute to the dearly departed Sydney Pollack and Harley Korman (and angered a number of humor-challenged readers along the way).
· The next time we end up drunk in Tijuana, we are definitely getting that Patrick Swayze Centaur tattoo.

The totally accidental mystery of the angry critic who stormed out of a crowded Cannes screening of Two Lovers rather than "wait an hour for fucking [director] James Gray" was put to rest this afternoon at Entertainment Weekly, where critic Lisa Schwarzbaum copped to the outburst we once guessed came from Manohla Dargis. "And since I'm giving PopWatch readers a spectacular scoop, let me tell you what happened next," Schwarzbaum wrote. "I extricated myself from the angry mob at 9:30 p.m., took myself out to dinner, had a nice bowl of pasta and a glass of wine, and returned an hour later to a crowd, albeit smaller, still waiting for f——-g James Gray. ... As they say in beer ads, read blog items responsibly!" The catch? Schwarzbaum outed herself on a blog! We're not falling for that one; we'll believe it when it's in the magazine. [EW]

As Defamer's resident sous chef Molly McAleer will attest, the most difficult part of culling together each week's installment of Dirt Sandwich is not finding material worthy of inclusion, but rather trying to decide which parts to eliminate. This week's episode is no exception; even in a four day work week, this sammy is overflowing with juicy morsels of celebrity detritus. WATCH (!) as Billy Bush nearly drops an s-bomb when he learns about Clay Aiken's impending fatherhood. REVEL (!) in the sheer delight of knowing which celebrity in Hollywood Barack Obama looks up to. CELEBRATE (!) the wonder of TMZ's long-haired broseph when he describes Jodie Foster's erotic shopping trip as "Harsh, dude." Our thoughts exactly.

We'd spent no shortage of time around here in recent weeks lamenting John Cusack's one-two professional plunge of box-office allergic Grace is Gone and critic-allergic War, Inc. Then came last weekend, when War, Inc. nabbed the second-highest per-screen average in the country: $27,252, second only to Indiana Jones 4. Heady, eye-opening stuff, to be sure — but not quite as eye-opening as when Cusack actually phoned us an hour ago to talk about it.

While the summer time is traditionally even more barren for awards shows than Jennifer Aniston's lonely, lonely womb, we can always count on the MTV Movie Awards to satiate our seasonal cravings for celebrity carpet walking. What this award show lacks in prestige, it usually makes up for in star power. After all, what star with a summer movie to plug would turn down a virtually risk-free opportunity to accept an award for "Best Same-Sex Tongue Kiss" while reminding millions of viewers to remind them of their film's release date? This year's awards, hosted by Mike "The Love Guru Opens June 20th!" Myers, will feature appearances from Adam Sandler (who is receiving the coveted "Best Actor With A Movie Opening Next Week" award), Will Ferrell, Sarah Jessica Parker, Ed Norton, Liv Tyler, Robert Downey Jr., Mark Wahlberg and more. While the show will have a tough time eclipsing the bar that Sarah Silverman set last year (her teardown of famewhore Paris Hilton elicited universal acclaim from everyone but Paris herself), we here at Defamer will be doing our best to puncture the cloak of celebrity using the best tool we have available — a liveblog! Yes, that's right, we'll be coming to you live from the red carpet — we don't have any clue how we got on the list, either — of Universal Studios beginning at or around 3pm PST on Sunday afternoon and going straight on through until whenever the show ends. We hope you'll join us, it ought to be exciting. [MTV Movie Awards]

There exists perhaps no more potent symbol of 1980s ratings powerhouse The Cosby Show than its star Bill Cosby's signature sweaters. Like the enchanted product of some magical mystery loom, no two inches of any garment was alike. If a plot involving Theo Huxtable's underachieving academics failed to capture your imagination, you could easily have gotten lost instead inside their woven psychedelia: One moment, you were picturing the vomited-up remains of an Uno deck; the next, you imagined an aerial tributary map as interpreted by a colorblind kindergartener. Now, thanks to a charitable eBay auction, some of these surrealist fashion masterworks are being made available for purchase. We guide you to the website now for a hypnotic slideshow of some of the greatest Cosby Sweater hits.

We know we threw your worlds for a loop this morning when we relayed ET's joyous news that noted orphan-collecting pregnancy-dabbler Angelina Jolie had delivered healthy twin girls, then cruelly swiped back the statement like a rattle from an abandoned French toddler. We've been patiently awaiting ET Online's retraction, but instead have gotten nothing but the above meltdown message for the past couple hours. Could their faulty reporting have caused a massive, Paramount Tabloid Syndicate grid failure? Or are they just closing shop until the intern instructed to, "Get me a fucking picture of those twins, I don't care if you have to set up a step-ladder and climb into Angelina's birthing canal!" returns with the smoking goods in hand? Developing. [ET Online]

Even Roger Ebert, that paragon of fair-minded, populist film criticism, admitted from the outset of his recent Sex and the City review that he is "not the person to review this movie" — that his knowledge of the television show lent a certain preexisting distaste for the characters and "their bubble-brained conversations." But! Being the professional that he is, Ebert found intellectual redemption where he could:

In honor of today's opening of Sex and the Movie—yet another beloved franchise sure to be ruined by the unseen hand of ghostproducer George Lucas, who'll insist the fabulous four be beamed into the heavens to spread their shoe-shopping, man-bagging secrets among higher life-forms—we thought we'd round-up all the mean Sex stuff we could find floating around the web:
· A Defamer reader hoping to secure tickets online was taken aback by the mean Fandango rollover-bot, who took it upon itself to warn audiences that seeing the familiar quartet four years later and on a giant movie screen might prove to be a traumatic experience. [Fandango]
· Yes, we're pretty sure Rex Reed's review is the meanest thing we've ever read, particularly the part where he expresses a hope that the "moths in [Sarah Jessica] Parker's stupid hat get butterfly AIDS and die." (Note: He didn't actually say that, but it's still unbelievably mean.) [NY Observer]

[Photo Credit: INF Daily]

· Variety reports: "DreamWorks has fashioned a first-look deal for 'Sex and the City' writer-director-producer Michael Patrick King. The deal gives the studio first-look at King's next film project." Is that how those work? We always thought it just meant he gets to keep whichever outfit he wears out of the Barneys dressing room first. [Variety]
· Jon Cryer, William H. Macy, Leslie Mann and James Spader will star in Robert Rodriguez's family comedy Shorts, about a suburb thrown into chaos when an 11-year-old boy is "hit in the head with a rainbow-colored rock that grants wishes to anyone who holds it." [Variety]
· How I Met Your Mother showrunner Greg Malins signed a two-year, mid-sevens deal with Fox, the direct result of Malins having been hit in the head with a rainbow-colored rock that grants wishes to anyone who holds it. [Variety]
· British TV buyers left L.A. without committing to anything, noting, "Blimey! They've repackaged all the programmes we already got on the telly! Life On Mars? Bollocks." [Variety]
· Donnie Darko SequelWatch: Shut The Fuck Up and Dance host Elizabeth Berkley has signed on to play a "speed freak-turned-Jesus freak" in the blaspheming second chapter of the beloved cult classic, sure to bring down a rain of passenger jet engines upon the homes of all involved. [THR]

Either Jon Voight dined alone before attending this week's Dirty Harry DVD re-release event, or his date hates him. We can think of no other explanation for the unfortunate tooth-bound leftovers caught by paparazzi outside the theater, whose reckless pursuit of tabloid infamy has nothing on the ever-elusive "Incisor Salad" shot — a celebrity catch ranking somewhere between "drunken mug shot" and "B-list baby" (e.g. spawn of Alba, Richards, Richie, etc.). We salute the classy shutterbug who nabbed the close-up you'll find after the jump; moreover, besides the live plant jutting from his grill, we have got admit Voight is looking terrific these days.