Nightmare online dater John Fitzgerald Page will appear on an upcoming episode of nightmare tv therapist Dr. Phil's show, in a segment dedicated to "men with out-of-control egos." Yeesh. Click to enlarge the woefully misaddressed email.
Are we going soft if we're starting to feel a little badly for Mr. Phil? The guy answers one frantic phone call from a family in need, then instantly jumps to action, gathering a handful of tongue depressors, a non-functioning stethoscope, and a camera crew before rushing bedside to treat their daughter's Fake British Accent Disorder. He then innocently offers his frank assessment of her condition to Paramount TV syndie-cousin ET.
Tough love guru in the media crosshairs Mr. Phil has broken his silence™ about the Britney Spears incident, speaking with Matt Lauer on The Today Show this morning. Since exploding onto the national stage as Oprah's motivational-speaking protégé, no other case has managed to so rattle the foundations of his "Talk Loudly At People Until They Do What You Tell Them To Do"-based therapy practice.
To watch an actual doctor actually do something towards curing non-actual celebrities with actual drug problems, we refer you to the goings on over at VH1's Celebrity Rehab, with board-accredited, medical-degree-holding Dr. Drew and his ragtag gang of Z-list addicts. (And a constantly-moaning-in- withdrawal-symptom-agony Jeff Conaway. Seriously—shit's fucked up. We don't think the I Love New York 2 people really realized what they were getting into.) For all your other TV quack needs, we refer you instead to Mr. Phil, who apparently now regrets breaching Fake-Doctor/Someone-Else's-Patient confidentiality laws by blabbing all about Britney Spears to those guys over at Entertainment Tonight:
· Actually, it kinda looks like a dude to us.
· Spoiler alert! The Cloverfield Monster ... revealed! Click only if you must.
· "Did I, at any point, say to you, 'Flip the genre'? No. All I said was to put in a few more song and dance numbers."
· If the advance quotes are any indication, the new Pixar tell-all is going to read like a Dreamworks animation picture.
· We agree with The Fiddler, Ledger's Joker looks for the world like Beetlejuice.
· We loves us some Tina Fey, but the trailer for Baby Mama looks stillborn.
Is she in New York City? Is she in Mexico? Is she at a Shell station in Hermosa Beach buying cigs? These are the kinds of riveting questions that had a nation (and the Defamer staff) glued to the AM radio yesterday, furiously dialing between stations in search of an update on The Animal's whereabouts. While we eventually found out the answers (no, yes and yes), we thought about a few places that the paparazzi would never even THINK to look for Brit Brit.
While our proprietary, patent-pending VirtuaPhil™ technology allowed you to experience what a showdown between the KingWorld tough-love swami and a Britney Spears well-past the verge of a nervous breakdown might have looked like, the actual footage from their historic meeting will never air. (Save, perhaps, for repeated 4 a.m. screenings on a rickety Super-8 projector in the doctor's home library, popping cashews into his mouth as he obsessively relives every moment of the intervention that got away.) Now the Spears family, whose only means of dealing with a situation involves relaying their problems to the nearest national media outlet, is on the attack, with frayed matriarch Lynne Spears and fecund tween daughter Jamie Lynn having dispatched a representative to The Today Show to insist they had never authorized a Britney-themed Dr. Phil episode.
If the Spears Meltdown was looking to be missing any one thing, it was probably crossover appeal, an oversight quickly remedied when Dr. Phil's Tough Love Intervention Tour '08 made a surprise stop at her Cedars-Sinai hospital room. Little could he have known the outrage that such a selfless endeavor would elicit from the press (and admiration from Dr. Joyce Brothers), and after two straight days of pummeling, it turns out the Very Special Episode to Save Britney is being scrapped. Sadly, we'll never know for sure what transpired during that 15 minute conversation, but thanks to Defamer videographer Molly McAleer now you can watch how the butting of the famously bald heads might have gone down after the jump.
As it turns out, the 72-Hour Strapped To A Gurney While Being Monitored By Five Burly Orderlies Super Mental Breakdown Watch under which Britney Spears was being detained at Cedars Sinai's vaunted Celebrity Meltdown Ward is not quite as restrictive in its patient-retention policies as we'd assumed, as Spears has already left the hospital following just a little over a day of crazy-containment.
In what could have easily become the greatest talk-show studio-audience transportation disaster since a van of Hour Magazine fans accidentally careened into the Pacific Ocean in the mid-1980s, never to be heard from again, a busload of audience members headed to a Dr. Phil taping crashed through a fence and into the lawn of a Hollywood church just moments ago:
On last night's Late Show, David Letterman invited shouty self-help personality Dr. Phil to speak truth to celebutard power in the wake of the latest Britney Spears meltdown, hoping that the unvarnished words of Oprah's Favorite Tough-Love-Providing Thing might help Spears and her panty-eschewing peers get their collective acts together. Unsurprisingly, Dr. Phil will countenance no talk about alcohol or drugs' role as the moral lubricant in desperate starlets' decisions to share their virtue with the public; these coddled fame-whores, argues the good fake-doctor, know exactly how much vagina they're going to flash before a single cocktail is poured or rail is blown.
Star magazine and its ilk are always asking "experts" like "New York-based psychologist Dr. Cooper Lawrence" to weigh in on the pressing tabloid issues of the day. With Britney Spears just now apparently checking herself out of rehab, AGAIN, WTF, we wanted in on the action! So we called up Robert Wolski, MD, an honest-to-goodness Manhattan-based board-certified psychiatrist, and asked him to explain the people who explain Britney. Our conversation with Dr. Robert actually ended up helping us work through a few of our issues; we hope you'll find reading it equally therapeutic.
Just days after his big, stage-managed break-up with Jennifer Aniston, Vince Vaughn's publicist is already hard at work coordinating new canoodling opportunities with chicks he may later pretend to date.
· If you'd like to actually view a clip of Mel Gibson talking about his struggle against his inner, drunken monster, ABCNews.com has finally posted one, as well as some other quotable bits from his Diane Sawyer interrogation.
And in the interest of piling on, it turns out that one of Gibson's drinking buddies might be L.A.'s favorite local cruise ship child molestor.
Possibly nuclear-powered North Korea strongman Kim Jong-Il might be a huge Friday the 13th fan. Comforting.
We don't know how Dr. Phil or his producers possibly could've foreseen how much filling up a mid-Wilshire house with noisy addicts and misfits desperate to be on TV might piss off some neighbors. Maybe they should've put the house in Hollywood, where it would've gone completely unnoticed.
Looking for a way to let off a little steam after a tough day's work, maybe even meet someone while you're at it? Care to have the entire thing captured by Dr. Phil's cameras so that the Bald Drawling One can then pour over the footage in front of a national audience, analyzing your every tequila-fueled, regretful come-on? Then our pals at LA.comfidential have pointed us to the answers to your prayers:
Like a teacher taking his students outside for a special treat (but instead of delighted schoolkids, picture a bunch of people who have nothing better to do in the middle of the day but trade their dignity for gifts), Dr. Phil's taping his freakshow al fresco today at the Paramount lot. Says a spy:
