Even though the labor agreement between the Writers Guild and the Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Producers isn't set to expire until next October 31, the studios have already invited the WGA to join them in contract renewal talks, hoping to dispense with the formality of bending the union over the negotiating table, scattering a few pennies on top of a DVD, and buggering them until they accept the offering as their new home video residual rate. (This year, streaming and downloads will complicate matters, as the producers haven't figured out a way to scribble "Fuck you, you'll get nothing and like it" on an iPod without seeming crass and inflexible.) Thus far, the WGA has resisted their adversary's clumsy overtures, hoping to maintain some leverage by delaying their inevitable loin-plumbing until September, a posture which has the studios decrying the Guild as strike-happy maniacs bent on wiping out the entertainment industry once and for all. Colorful quotes from Variety follow:

The dissolution of Pamela Anderson's marriage to Bob "Kid Rock" Richie after just four months may have been the celebrity break-up that launched a million, "Go get her, Borat!" wisecracks, but the internationally renowned joke recycler may have had more of a direct hand in the snuffing of their white trash love than any of us could have guessed. From Page Six:

Say what you will about Britney Spears, but she's a pro. Upon inspecting the photos from her recent, impromptu upskirt shoot, in which her genitals were amateurishly obscured by a badly positioned thigh, she vowed that the next time she disembarked from Paris Hilton's luxury automobile while a dozen camera-wielding "fans" aimed their telephoto lenses at her ladyparts, she'd helpfully hike up her skirt and deliver the unobstructed view they so assiduously sought. She'll undoubtedly be more pleased with these results than she was with her previous effort, but as a perfectionist, she won't be able to easily quell the nagging feeling that the photographers didn't capture her labia's good side, and will insist on exiting through the driver's side door on her next trip to Hyde.

· "Were you planning to do a spoof or a parody of The Third Man?" Yeah, the Q&A portion of a NY DGA screening of The Good German probably could have gone a little more smoothly for Steven Soderbergh. Don't they know he's pals with that lovable Clooney character?
Two people you don't care about, even in an ironic fashion, are no longer dating!
Britney Spears Flashes Privates, Gets Press: Yup, that's pretty much the way the exchange works, isn't it?
TVLand has complied a list of the 100 TV catchphrases your most annoying co-worker long ago ruined for you.
Lindsay Lohan put on her underwear before heading out to the Vine Street Lounge, a sure sign she had no expectation of being photographed that night.

The tabloids are awash in stories celebrating Britney Spears and Paris Hilton's incipient, apocalypse-beckoning BFF-dom, an unholy marriage of convenience sure to draw the entire city of Los Angeles into a celebutard-generated black hole so powerful that not even Lindsay Lohan's pneumatic chest can escape its pull. An operative lucky enough to patronize the same drinking establishment as the temporarily inseparable duo files this report of their bathroom-hogging antics of last night:

Radar interviews a handful of the private coaches who tutor the spoiled children of Hollywood in demanding athletic activities like "catch" and "swimming," a subset of the babysitter caste whose efforts allow stay-at-home moms and busy, powerful dads to spend more quality time fucking the pool boy and their call-rollers, respectively. And how do these privileged kids act during their lessons? According to the pseudonymous coaches' anecdotes, they're pretty much the don't-you-know-who-my-daddy-is mini-tyrants you'd expect:

We're not entirely sure what to make of a pair of photos that popped up on D-Listed today, supposedly depicting this year's Thanksgiving festivities at Shar Jackson's house, where ex-husband and round one babydaddy Kevin Federline allegedly showed up with a buxom, root-challenged blonde on his arm. Leaving room for the possibility that these pictures were from some Turkey Day past, and the mystery woman merely an au pair with a history of chronic back problems, we must admit that whoever she is, she seems impressively well integrated into the happy, abandoned family (save for one pouty, disaffected Eminem fan), and K-Fed has rarely been photographed looking quite so genuinely content as he does balancing an unidentified child, quite possibly of his own loins, on his shoulders, in a seasonal portrait that seems to embody the very spirit of his "Ladies look out...Fuck a wife, give me my kids, Bitch!" shower door Declaration of Pimp Independence.

· Monday night music round-up: Great Northern at the Echo; Nightmare of You at the Troubadour; the post-Layne Staley Alice in Chains at the Wiltern.
Stephen Farber's Reel Talk screening series lands an advance showing of Dreamgirls, with writer-director Bill Condon to hang around to deflect questions about any catfights that may have occurred on his diva-rich set.
Is it that time already? Head over to Griffith Park for your annual opportunity to crawl along in your car at 4 mph while gaping at the twinkly, Christmassy tableaus of the DWP Light Festival, preferably while really, really baked. (Being high not required for those 14 and under.)

It's been less than a month since Universal laid out $42 million for the rights to Sacha Baron Cohen's next project, Bruno, but questions are already arising about whether Cohen's Borat-derived fame (and a wave of pesky lawsuits from the film's unwitting co-stars) will compromise the comedian's ability to once again expose America's not-so-latent intolerant attitudes, this time by adopting the disarming persona of a flaming Austrian TV host in a mesh shirt/bedazzled chaps ensemble who interviews monster truck fans outside the Birmingham Jefferson Convention Complex about whether they think Power Bottom will "win the game." The LAT discusses the aforementioned fame and legal problems, and also brings up perhaps the most substantial obstacle to Bruno's success:

The endless entertainment that comes out of humiliating lonely women who choose to take their search for love to national television is the basic working premise of GayDAR, a new dating show currently casting Gays able to resist their temptation to gush about Jennifer Hudson's performance in Dreamgirls long enough to convince their dates they actually have some legitimate interest in vagina:

Sure, you've snorted it off the cleavage of a new, busty friend delightfully incurious about why someone who's supposedly the "head producer" of Grey's Anatomy wants to party in the back seat of a 1994 Honda Civic, but have you ever really took the time to think about where your favorite recreational drug comes from? This instructive video passed along by our friends at LAist details the gasoline (both recycled and fresh varieties), coca, quicklime, and sulfuric acid cocktail used to produce your powdery friend in distant jungles, yet stops short of showing the step where the strawberry flavoring is added, allowing you to go right on blowing rails of the finest bathroom stall Quik your dealer has to offer without unpleasant thoughts about the artificial additives giving your high its delicious, fruity flavor.

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]

Chickens' rights activist Pamela Anderson announced on her website today, in a brief message amounting to a haiku of shattered love, "Divorce: Yes, it's true. Unfortunately impossible." This was the very same internet diary where the fake-bemeloned Canadian first announced her intentions to marry the latest butt-rocker of her dreams, Kid Rock, which she giddily announced with a flurry of ellipses and clichés in a stream of consciousness entry back in July. Reports People.com:

Newly untethered pop strumpet Britney Spears has been easing her way back into Hollywood's daunting singles scene with none other than its queen ant, Paris Hilton, as her personal guide and mentor. After securely duct taping both of her children to a nursery room wall, Spears and Hilton hit the clubs for a weekend of debauched, mutually beneficial publicity at local, ultraexclusive celebriwhore broom closet Hyde. It was there that paparazzi caught Spears demonstrating her aptitude for such high-difficulty skank maneuvers as the Range Rover cigarette toss, while wisely choosing to ditch her white pompommed golf cap look for a decidely sluttier ensemble that all but seemed to scream, "Look at me, everyone! I have no panties, no visible genitalia, and, most of all, no regrets!" It should come as no surprise that Spears is such a quick study, however, particularly to anyone who has seen her junior high book report on Antigone, currently on the Christie's auction block. It's a near letter-perfect (she has some minor trouble with a sentence that begins, "Their was a roomer...") retelling of the Greek tragedy, ironically the story of a misunderstood and tortured girl, leery of undergarments and slavishly devoted to her family, who meets an untimely death after falling off the table upon which she was dancing to "Stars Are Blind."

Today's NY Times reports that geriatric Viacom suzerain Sumner Redstone has finally resigned himself to the reality that his octogenarian body can no longer weather the stresses of his highly demanding job, ordering his beleaguered Midway Games division to devote all of its research and development resources towards the hasty completion of the long-planned robotic-ninja exoskeleton that will allow the cybernetics-enhanced executive to continue his day-to-day duties indefinitely. While the Times obtained this mock-up of the prototype, details of its capabilities are still a closely guarded secret, though it's widely rumored throughout the company that the new chassis will allow Redstone to effortlessly rip the spine from the profit-hogging action stars and corporate lieutenants who displease him, a grisly termination ritual that will ensure that their careers end in a lifeless, invertebrate heap on the floor of his office, not in the employ of a hated competitor.

On Sunday, the Michael Richards Apology Tour made a stop at Jesse Jackson's syndicated radio show, a venue where there was no live studio audience to undermine with nervous laughter the seriousness of his clumsy explanations that his remarks about African-American hecklers hanging upside down "with a fucking fork up [their] ass" came from a rage-place, not a hate-place. During his interview with Jackson, Richards upgraded his level of regret from "busted up" to "shattered," and claimed that the N-bombs he so liberally detonated throughout his onstage tirade are not a part of his vocabulary, even though "the show business" makes them too "accessible" to misguided "young whites" who might think racist meltdowns are "cool":

Don't worry, it's completely normal for the energy-sapping effects of tryptophan to linger all the way to Monday morning. Revive yourself with a hit of the weekend box office numbers:

The new Democratic dawn isn't just good news for gays and commies; it's also payback time for supermarket billionaire and would-be media mandarin Ron Burkle. A longtime patron of Clintons both Bill and Hillary as well as Nancy Pelosi among others, Burkle will enjoy considerable leverage and face time among the newly ascendant party. Forbes carries the water, asking why so many people make fun of Burkle, when all he wants to do is make money and help people (to make him money); the article has no particular answers, noting that Burkle even got mad at Gawker for our "53 citings since March." Make that 54, pal. Amusingly — and no doubt to ensure access to their subject — Forbes is forced to dance around Burkle's biggest publicity gripe. No, not this, which we don't pretend to understand or endorse. This is something or someone who Must Not Be Named.

· Michael Richards, upon discovering that the career he thought was dead was still gasping for breath in the trunk of his car, stabs it repeatedly with a fork.
· Fox and Judith Regan: If We Were To Turn A Book And TV Special About A Hypothetical Double Murder Confession Into An Utter Fiasco, Here's How We Would Have Done It
· Katie Holmes: The final moments of freedom give way to the first moments of bondage.
· Robert Altman, gone, but certainly not forgotten.
· Jerry Bruckheimer makes it all look so easy.

· While you were gorging on turkey and stuffing, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie cruised Ho Chi Minh City on a scooter, continuing their tireless search for another adoptee to add to their family. Sadly, they came up short, but drowned their disappointment in some delicious Vietnamese food.
Will Arnett seems to have really thought this last meal thing through, so we'll assume that his failure to specify that the in-mouth sundae would be prepared by hookers was just an oversight.
Even though Alec Baldwin is baffled about why "a substantial number of brave men and women have signed up, for whatever reasons, to defend us," he nonetheless thanks them for their service.
· Carson Daly is proud that ex-fianc e Tara Reid is talking about her poor choices in plastic surgeons, happy to be rid of her.