After the severe bloodletting at Hachette's websites last month, one would expect remaining survivors at Elle.com, ElleGirl.com and Premiere.com might be grateful. Not so. In fact, there's been something of an uprising against digital vice president Todd Anderman (left), a clumsy transplant from Maxim Digital. As Women's Wear Daily is reporting, two of Anderman's top underlings have resigned: fashion director Joe Berean and Keith Pollock, executive editor of Elle.com and ElleGirl.com. Left unsaid? Pollock is the shopboy installed by Elle creative director Joe Zee, with whom he is said to be cozy, so his disgruntled exit from Anderman's employ will not soon be forgotten. Nor will the purported reason, a series of Anderman-instigated messes stretching back to an embarrassing incident involving the VP's laptop and a digital projector.

Although this press-junket interview between Justin Timberlake and "Chuck the Movie Guy" is less than three minutes long, one gets the sense at several distinct points that Timberlake is about to either storm out or punch "Chuck" in the throat. There's an uncomfortable confrontation about a prior interview, an uncomfortable retort from Timberlake involving his Speedo, uncomfortable sarcasm — notice a theme? Videogum wonders whether Timberlake or "Chuck" is the bigger jerk here, but that's kind of missing the point. You really need two people, each acting aggressively awful toward the other, to produce a moment so beautifully bitchy. After the jump, video of this excellent team effort in awkward hostility.

Do the refined, delicate blossoms from Bravo's Real Housewives of Orange County reality nightmare harbor any resentment toward their recent spin-off counterparts, the Real Housewives of New York City? Yes, definitely yes. While both sets of women — faces stretched into hideous death masks, busts slopping out of too-small tops, eyes sparkling with some misguided nouveau riche sense of victory — are essentially the same people, only separated by zip codes and some winsome trick of fate, the Orange County broads see themselves as distinctly better. Well, at least they told the Daily News that while on the red carpet for Bravo's Night of Not Enough Stars, the A-List Awards. Read a brief report on the ladies' sentiments after the jump.

What started out as a blaze that claimed a misshapen animatronic ape and a city pseudo-block on the Universal backlot is growing almost by the hour into something a lot costlier than the studio originally let on. First there were the Universal Music Group masters lost to fiery eternity (but they were already "transferred digitally," so, you know, whatever), and as alluded to by an astute Defamer commenter earlier today, a whole archive of film prints were rumored to be lost as well.

Universal is burning. Visit Universal! Though the fire was at the studio and the ad is probably for the amusement park, this mixed messaging is why computers will never beat humans when it comes to proven advertising placement that gets results. Monetary results. Results that don't involve any of your customers getting burned in fires. The so-called "geniuses" of the internet have yet to master that one, I guess! David Ogilvy, a human, would have caught this error using nothing more than a pencil, a pad of paper, and a big idea. Click to enlarge. [Gregg Scott via Mark Lisanti]

So it looks like we have a couple of "workers" to thank for the sooty, soaring plumes rising from last weekend's Universal Studios fire, which apparently began when said Universal employees got a little careless while "using a blowtorch to heat asphalt roofing shingles" in the wee hours of Sunday morning:

Honestly, I enjoyed the Legally Blonde musical. While it strays a bit from the popular Reese Witherspoon movie (which was based on a book) about a, um, blonde Californian sorority girl who ends up making it big at Harvard Law School, it's still fun and peppy (and Pepto-y! So pink!) and makes no major offenses. The show's star, Laura Bell Bundy, is appropriately brassy and shrill and belty. It's a fun, silly time at the theatre. That being said, the new MTV reality series Legally Blonde: The Search for Elle Woods (which premiered last night), in which a gaggle of dopes with limited talent compete to take over the lead role, is a dreadful pile of muck that takes the already-weak and defenseless Theatre and beats it senseless with a pink cellphone.

The once-in-a-generation inferno that conveniently cleared Universal's backlot on Sunday wasn't without its share of withering casualties; as noted here this morning, the New York street exterior, Back to the Future courthouse and the studio tour's King Kong exhibit were among the most lamentable (and well-insured) studio features to burn to the ground. Potentially worse yet was Universal's "video vault," which was responsible for no small part of the billowing black plumes welcoming movie-loving tourists to Hollywood, and which got us hoping — or praying, rather, on our knees, crying and everything — that maybe The Sting II or Ghost Dad might be lost to the happiest high flames of Hell we'd ever seen.

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:

Go figure: It turns out the jilted, crazy wife of Shubert Organization President Philip Smith, who aired their messy divorce battle on YouTube, has a long history of turbulent relationships and public flame-outs involving mostly men. Judging from the profile that just appeared in New York, the wife, Tricia Walsh-Smith, has done two sensible things in her life, starting with her lucrative appearance in close to 500 television commercials, including the Hellmann's mayonnaise ad pictured at left. She also wrote and starred in a popular play in Britain called Bonkers, about "a bulimic ex-model whose husband is always having affairs." Everything else has been kind of a disaster, particularly her many breakups:

As though awful reviews everywhere and horse jokes in the New Yorker were not enough, Sex And The City star Sarah Jessica Parker also has to contend with infidelity on the part of her dressmaker. Designer Olivier Theyskens of Nina Ricci assured Parker no one else had publicly worn the dress he provided her for the New York premier of the Sex movie. Whoops: Turns out socialite Lauren Santo Domingo had warn it to the Met ball less than a month earlier — and Theyskens had accompanied her and posed for pictures. Also, Linsday Lohan was photographed by "throngs of paparazzi" in the dress while wearing it for a Harper's Bazaar shoot. Cathy Horyn at the Times broke news of the Santo Domingo overlap — her commenters tracked down the Lohan shot — and Parker was not happy:

At least two people were killed when a construction crane collapsed on Manhattan's Upper East Side shortly after 8 a.m. this morning. In this clip—with breaking shots of what can only be described as carnage from the scene—a reporter explains the crane's unfortunate configuration: it was actually hanging all the way over the street below, like a "gondola." Its collapse damaged at least 18 floors of a nearby apartment building. This is the second major crane collapse in the city in as many months. Click to watch the clip.

Air America Radio, the liberal talk radio network that has come to dominate the radio dial and our country's political media at large (you can't go anywhere these days without hearing about the latest Rachel Maddow show) is back in the news. This time, for fraud! The network's fugitive former director, Evan Montvel-Cohen, was arrested in Guam yesterday on money-laundering charges unrelated to Air America. But boy, they should really consider rehiring him for his fundraising skills alone:

At last, the buzz over the Sex And The City movie premiere is being deflated. It got so bad earlier this week that even the Times was reduced to hyping the official PR line about the opening in a cutesy video while failing to note the hundreds of unwitting publicity slaves turned away with tickets in their hands. But now the backlash stories are coming in waves, tearing down some small edifice of the celebrity-industrial complex before our very eyes. We've learned that many tourists in line paid "hundreds of dollars" for their worthless passes. It emerged that one of the stars made have shown up high on cocaine. The woman with the bum $19,000 ticket was lied to worse than anyone thought. Even the food sucked! There's talk of the show being way past its prime (you don't say!). And now movie producer New Line has been reduced to public bickering with Radio City Music Hall over who is at fault for the whole Tuesday night fiasco:

The Wall Street Journal is in the midst of a trillion-word ongoing series chronicling the downfall of Wall Street firm Bear Stearns earlier this year. Today's installment looks at the rapid compounding of the firm's financial problems, which builds inexorably into a crisis. That's nice and everything, but the really interesting part comes when the story reveals what threw a wrench into the multibillion-dollar firm's effort to save its public reputation: Eliot Spitzer and his stupid hooker! Not to mention their old card-playing stoner chairman of the board:

Yes Red China has wised up to the actress's ways after she blunderingly suggested on a red carpet that the massive earthquake in Szechuan was a bit of "karma" spurned on by the Chinese "not being very nice" to her "good friend" the Dalai Lama (who, as it turns out, has praised China's disaster relief efforts). The nation has now decided to issue a boycott of sorts, or at least its actors have. "This actress does not deserve our attention. The best way is to ignore her. I will never watch her films in future," said actor Liu Wei. Others Chinese performers have said she lacks "respect" and "humanity." Well, OK, we wouldn't go that far. She's just a little much sometimes. Oh, Sharon. [Variety]

The blow-dried, plastic smile-bearing Fox 5 reporter asks Jared Crystal what happened. Jared, the very cultural opposite of the reporter in his ponytail and "Republicans For Voldemort" T-shirt, explains that he was simply sitting in his car, reading 1984—an ordinary night—when a tree limb came crashing down! A scary situation! The reporter grimaces at the disheveled man with the disastrous car. "Reading 1984, and look what it got you!" the reporter says. "Next time read something more easy and calm!" Jared graciously blames Arbor Day, rather than punching the reporter in the face. Click to watch the underlying tension of the media's culture war in action.

Amid all the glamor and glitz and lady empowerment, an unsisterly tragedy struck at the Sex and the City movie premiere last night. Three friends, we'll call them Julia Allison, Meghan Asha, and Mary Rambin, got all gussied up and trotted off (with their upcoming reality show camera crew in tow) to enjoy a night of fabulousity and star gazing at the much buzzed about event. Julia the dating columnist (just like Carrie!) and Meghan (tech heiress and socialite) got in without a hitch, as they already had their tickets secure. But then, the clouds darkened and the low keening of travesties of old lilted across the red carpet, dancing grimly with the spring breeze. Mary, the handbag designer and big sister of actress Leven, was denied entrance and abandoned by her gal pals.

No question, the Sex And The City movie premiere at Radio City Music Hall is going swimmingly for some people. Fameball Julia Allison and her buddies Mary Rambin and Megan Asha, for example, got inside the hall and snapped photos like the one at left of cast member Sarah Jessica Parker (from Rambin) and now appear to be happily seated next to actress Ashley Olsen. Vogue editor Anna Wintour is present and accounted for. But a line of ticketholders stretching for an entire city block was turned away, according to a disgruntled email tipster, who wrote: "There was a near riot of Louboutin clicking girls to the security windows in the front... Some were in near tears waving their tickets and yelling into their cells." Hopefully the lady from Singapore who bought a fake ticket for $19,000, but then got a free authentic one, wasn't among the crowd, because this would push her over the edge. I told you this was going to get ugly. Full email report after the jump.

Meet Ella Sherman of Singapore. She paid $19,000 on eBay to be just like Carrie Bradshaw. She was going to get into the Sex And The City movie premier and after-party, stay for five nights in New York in a sexy hotel, shop at Jimmy Choo, hang in an exclusive club and carry on an emotionally unfulfilling affair with Mikhail Baryshnikov. Some money was going to go to charity in her name. But the travel company that sold her the package reneged (surprise!) on the premiere and after-party and wouldn't refund Sherman's money, claiming it had been defrauded by someone else. The Post took pity on this woman's pathetic situation and finagled her a ticket to the premier. But she's still upset!