Brittany Murphy's last known interview—on December 1 in Los Angeles at the premiere of her flim, Across The Hall—is simultaneously sad and sweet. Sad, because she appears out of it. Sweet, because she was still such a doll.
• News of Walter Cronkite's death on Friday evening didn't generate a Michael Jackson-like reaction, but the hour-long CBS News special honoring him on Sunday proved a ratings winner. In related news, the network will continue airing Cronkite's voice-over introducing the CBS Evening News. [NYT, NYT]
• Is Janice Min leaving Us Weekly? That's the rumor, at least. [P6]
• Fashion magazines are looking a little thin this fall, not surprisingly. [MW]
• Padma Lakshmi is in talks with NBC to star in a sitcom. [Variety]
• More changes are afoot at Interview: Evan Schindler is the troubled mag's new president. And Stephen Mooallem has been named editor-in-chief. [NYT]
• As expected, the new Harry Potter movie mopped up at the box office this weekend with $79.5 million in ticket sales. The big loser? Brüno, which fell to fourth place as sales plummeted 73 percent. [EW, Variety]
It's been a very rough month for Glenn O'Brien, the former editorial director of Interview who was ousted from the mag in early June and slapped with a lawsuit shortly thereafter. He is, however, still alive. You're excused, though, if you may have thought otherwise given it's O'Brien's photo that accompanies an obituary of former Beatles manager Allen Klein on the Hollywood news site, The Wrap. (It looks like a Google image search led the site to this story, although neither of the two men in the photo happens to be the deceased.) Oh, new media! [The Wrap]
• Both NBC and ABC plan to pre-empt regular programming this evening to air specials devoted to coverage of the Jackson story. E!, MTV, and CNN (among others) have specials airing over the next few days, too. [NYT, THR]
• Time is publishing a special Jackson "commemorative edition" on Monday. For its part, Rolling Stone has a "bookazine" in the works. [NYT, NYT]
• How newspapers around the world covered the Jackson news. [Guardian]
• And how the Jackson story kind of broke the Internet. [ABC News]
• It's an ugly day at MySpace. The News Corp.-owned social network is slashing nearly 30 percent of its staff, or 400 people, due to a decline in sales. [BN, PC]
• Protesters in Iran have been using Twitter to keep up with developments on the ground. Now the State Department is stepping in and asking the company to put off a planned upgrade so service isn't disrupted. [Reuters]
• MTV entertainment president Brian Graden is departing the network. [NYP]
• It's official: NBC is dumping Live at Five and replacing it with an hour-long "daily information, lifestyle and entertainment show." [NYO]
• Interview dropped editorial director Glenn O'Brien last week. Now the magazine's parent company, Brant Publications, is suing him for allegedly breaking the terms of his confidentiality agreement. [WWD]
• Courtney Love may be incapable of paying her AmEx bill, but that isn't stopping her from launching her own clothing line. Coming soon: "cotton ribbed body suits" and "cashmere harem pants." [Grazia, SW]
• Emma Watson is the new face of Burberry. [Vogue]
• Bee Shaffer may be attending posh parties at the Venice Biennale right now, but she's also job hunting at the moment, in case you weren't aware. Then again, she's also interested in studying acting, so she may just do that instead. [FWD]
• Five months after he was kicked to the curb, Fabien Baron is returning to Interview as the mag's editorial director. [WWD, FWD]
• Now's the time to hit up Save Fashion; the festivities end on Friday. [Pipeline]
• Union members at the Boston Globe will vote on the controversial concession package proposed by the New York Times Co. on June 8. [E&P]
• Last week's broadcast of Meet the Press earned the NBC chatfest its lowest ratings since David Gregory took over as moderator. [HuffPo]
• Supermarket tabloid smackdown: Us Weekly is standing up for integrity in journalism (and Brangelina) by waging war against In Touch. [TMZ, Gawker]
• Who says magazines are dead? The publisher of Interview is in the process of launching a quarterly design magazine called Modern. [Folio]
• Neil Patrick Harris will host the 2009 Tony Awards on June 7. [AP]
• The two American journalists who were first detained in North Korea two months will go on trial for "hostile acts" on June 4. [NYT]
• NBC chief Jeff Zucker says that despite the fact Jim Cramer got his ass handed to him last week by Jon Stewart, it's had absolutely no impact on CNBC. Believe that and you may also be willing to buy that everything's perfect at MSNBC and NBC, and Zucker has a perfect head of hair, too. [Portfolio, B&C]
• Crain Communications has cut 150 staffers and sliced salaries by 10%. [PC]
• Don Hewitt, the creator of 60 Minutes, is in the hospital with cancer. [Wow]
• Media advertising fell 2.6% in 2008, according to Nielsen. [B&C]
• Interview seems to be having financial difficulties. [Gawker]
• Discovery has filed a patent suit against Amazon over the Kindle. [WSJ]
• The Hills's Audrina Patridge has a reality show of her own in the works. [THR]
• CNN's Lou Dobbs is a racist. But you probably knew that already. [Gawker]
• Jon Stewart's showdown with Jim Cramer is getting mixed reviews, mainly because both deviated from their typical personas: the normally brash Cramer was a wimp and Stewart wasn't funny. It "felt like a Senate subcommittee hearing," writes Alessandra Stanley. [NYT, Salon, Atlantic, ABC]
• TMZ and Extra have extended their coverage to the financial services industry! Isn't it ironic that TMZ has exposed more corporate misbehavior over the past few months than CNBC has? Because it sort of has. [NYT]
• Google sales chief Tim Armstrong is the new chairman and CEO of AOL. [WSJ]
• Jim Kelly is stepping down as managing editor of Time Inc. [NYP]
• Fox has dumped Peter Liguori in favor of Fox Searchlight's Peter Rice. [THR]
• More changes are ahead at the Peter Brant-owned Interview. [WWD]
• Mel Karmazin says Sirius's poor performance last quarter was due to "doom and gloom" rumors suggesting the company would go bankrupt. [WSJ]
• Jimmy Fallon finished his first week with solid ratings, beating out the numbers that Conan O'Brien typically generated. Depressing, huh? [Variety]
• The Max Azria dress that Angelina Jolie wore to the SAG Awards? She wore it backwards. [NYM]
• Marc Jacobs is slashing the guest list for his Feb. 16th show. [WWD]
• Target has a temporary McQueen shop planned for next month. [Racked]
• The backstory on why Fabien Baron was pushed out at Interview. [WWD]
• Jane Mayle's store isn't closing; it will be around through April. [Pipeline]
• Two brands doing well despite the recession: H&M and Mango. [WWD]
• Aretha Franklin's inauguration hat is Smithsonian-bound. [SW]
• The star at Jean Paul Gaultier's couture show in Paris this week? Inès de la Fressange, a 51-year-old model and mother of two. [WSJ, SF]
• After six seasons away from Bryant Park, Narciso Rodriguez is returning to the tents this season. [WWD]
• Betsey Johnson says she plans to revive some of her old designs as part of a new line. [Pipeline]
• Sales of luxury goods are expected to fall 3% and 7% this year. [WSJ]
• Five trends from couture week in Paris to keep an eye on. [Pipeline]
• LVMH has confirmed it's helping out Gareth Pugh. [Vogue UK]
• The lookbook for Isaac Mizrahi's Liz Claiborne collection is online. [Racked]
• Fabien Baron is leaving Interview. [WWD]
• A pair of Sarah Palin's shoes sold on Ebay for $2,025. No joke. [NYM]
Bernie Madoff is facing a long stretch in prison for bilking investors out of $50 billion, and plenty of theories have been batted around as to what might have motivated Madoff to carry out his devious scheme. Was it just about the money? Did he feel any sense of shame as he ripped off hundreds of investors and non-profits? And will there be any sort of redemption for Madoff at the end of the day? To get a little perspective on what it's like to carry out a massive financial fraud, keep the scam going undetected for years, eventually get caught, and then account for the wrongdoing, we turned to someone who's been through all that (and more): Sam Antar, who, along with his cousin Eddie Antar, built Crazy Eddie into a electronics powerhouse in the '70s and '80s until the company came crashing down and the Antars were indicted on a variety of charges.
Transplanted UK songstress M.I.A. interviews visual artist Kehinde Wiley in this month's Interview, but as usual she ends up with the more interesting quotes. Despite the fact she lives in Bed-Stuy with her fiancé Ben Brewer, she calls New York a wasteland for young artists, and looks back nostalgically on her time in her native war torn Sri Lanka. Is she about to piss off her considerable fanbase again?The visual artist and musician tells her friend Wiley that, "Manhattan seems pretty developed, you know what I mean? Like it has peaked in culture. The Village Voice called it McHattan. It's just become impossible for young, creative artists to live in New York." Should she finish that sentence with "and afford to buy my concert tickets?" Considering the rising hype from this cultural wasteland is what brought the multi-talented musician and artist to prominence in the first place, her subsequent crack that she detects an overwhelming "feeling of entitlement" from the city's denizens is bound to turn off some of her unemployed, struggling supporters. She recalls attending a recent event at the MoMA:
Opus, Berkeley Breathed's troubled, herring-loving penguin, has managed to eek out an existence since he first hit the strip "Bloom County" in 1980. But now he's gonna die, because Breathed is gonna kill him, and it's all your fault, snarky snarking internet users! Asked why Breathed is ending Opus's self-named strip next week after a five year run, Breathed tells Salon, "We're not a movie. In most aspects, there's no arc to the human story. Only a line heading upward. For nearly everything. In this case, the coarsening of the National Discourse. We aren't returning someday to any sort of golden era of political civility. The line heads heavenward and has been since the Republic started. And with the intersection of two rather dramatic dynamics — the cable and Web technology allowing All Snark All the Time ... and the political realities of No More Free Lunch in America, it will spike in the coming years like Don Draper's sex life, and I hereby pledge that that's the last pop reference I use." But isn't it during dark times that we most need funny satire? Screw you, noob!
Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, the most trusted names in journalism, sat down for a Q&A with Entertainment Weekly—and kicked everyone's asses all the time! For example: STEPHEN COLBERT: One of the things I love about my character is I can make vast declarations and it doesn't matter if I'm wrong. I love being wrong. So my character can tell you exactly what's going to happen: The Democrats are going to change everything. We're going to have gay parents marrying their own gay babies. Obama's gonna be sworn in on a gay baby. The oath is gonna end ''So help me, gay baby.'' More selections after the jump. So what do you think is the issue that people will end up voting on? STEWART: Whatever happens that week. It all depends on when that Michelle Obama ''I hate whitey'' tape comes out. If it comes out now, it could dissipate by the election. But if it comes out a couple days before, that could be dangerous. COLBERT: Jon? I have it. There are a lot of issues in this election. The biggest one right now is the economy. STEWART: We were in this huge credit crisis, out of money. Then the Fed goes, We'll give you a trillion dollars, and all of a sudden Wall Street is like, ''I can't believe we got away with it!'' Can you imagine if someone said, ''I shouldn't have bought that sports car because it means I can't have my house,'' and the bank just said, ''All right, you can have your house. And you know what? Keep the car.'' [He throws up his arms joyfully and shouts] ''Yeaaaaah, I get to keep the car! Wait, do I have to give the money back?'' ''No, it doesn't matter.'' ''Yeah, I'm gonna get another car! I'm gonna do the same thing the same way, except twice as fucked up!'' COLBERT: The idea that Lehman Brothers doesn't get any money and AIG does reminds me very much of ''Iran is a mortal enemy because they have not achieved a nuclear weapon. But North Korea is a country we can work with, because they have a nuclear weapon.'' The idea is, Get big or go home. How big can you fuck up? Can you fuck up so bad that you would ruin the world economy? If it's just 15,000 who are out of jobs, no. You have to actually be a global fuck up to get any help. Can any [politician] break through this mess? STEWART: I worry that those people are there, but we won't recognize them — or we'll destroy them so thoroughly that their voice won't be heard. I just imagine Lincoln out there, and people throwing the gay stuff at him. ''And what about depression running in his family?'' ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: You guys regularly make a mockery of the 24-hour news networks. Do you see anything good about the format? JON STEWART: It's Muzak now. You ever walk into a clothing store in New York City and they're not playing music? And you go, ''What's going on here? Did a virus hit? This doesn't seem right.'' Twenty-four-hour news now is this weird companion to my life. STEPHEN COLBERT: There's not more news now than there was when we were kids. There's the same amount from when it was just Cronkite. And the easiest way to fill it is to have someone's opinion on it. Then you have an opposite opinion, and then you have a mishmash of fact and opinion, and you leave it the least informed you can possibly be. STEWART: We've got three financial networks on all day. The bottom falls out of the credit market, and they were all running around. On CNBC I saw a guy talking to eight people in [eight different onscreen] boxes, and they were all like, ''I don't know!'' It'd be like if Hurricane Ike hit, and you put on the Weather Channel, and they were yelling, ''I don't know what the fuck is going on! I'm getting wet and it's windy and I don't know why and it's making me sad! Maybe the president could come down and put up some sort of windscreen?'' By being on 24 hours a day, you begin to not be able to tell what's salient anymore. Read the whole interview here.
Well, the press can stop wondering when and where Sarah Palin's first post-nomination television interview will take place. A campaign adviser says they offered ABC nightly news anchor Charles Gibson the job days ago. That's the same Charles Gibson who was last seen being "greasily avuncular and patronizing" when he and his ABC cohort George Stephanopoulos were ruining the Democratic primary debate back in April. You know, the ABC-sponsored event about which a New Yorker scribe wrote, "Seldom has a large corporation so heedlessly inflicted so much civic damage in such a short space of time... If Gibson and his partner, George Stephanopoulos, had halted their descent at the level of the fatuous, that would have been bad enough. But there was worse to come."
