After some snippy little incidents (bad profiles and oh, say, refusing to let a reporter stay in his presence) with the New York Times, it seems that I [Heart] Huckabees director David O. Russell has finally come around to the Gray Lady by embracing it's uber-expensive Ad-Mail service. We hear that buying advertising through the Times' email service runs as pricey as $5k per Ad-Mail; but once you digest Russell's tome about his dreams and Franny and Zooey, you'll realize it's money well spent. Read on for some self-indulgent spittle.

Celebrity Friendster profiles are so 1987, but when a helpful person helped us stumble upon Brandon Routh's entry (a.k.a. the new, "unknown" Superman), we couldn't resist sharing it with the world. His "About Me" section gives some insight into his humble, Midwestern beginnings:

From Variety's VPage coverage of Thursday night's Surviving Christmas premiere at the Chinese Theater: Ben Affleck, always a man of the people, demonstrates that even stars making millions of dollars per picture sometimes have to surrender their dignity for their jobs.
[Photo: Kevin Winter/Getty Images]

Blogging.la's Sean Bonner catches a movie at the ArcLight and discovers that either Variety or the anti-piracy-powers-that-be are now paranoid that camera phones are going to steal their souls and/or copyrights:

The catfight between I Heart Huckabees director David O. Russell and NYT writer Sharon Waxman (some background here) might yet develop into the bloodletting cockfight that we'd secretly hoped for. Russell informed Waxman that he won't allow the use of photos of him and George Clooney in her upcoming book, Rebels on the Backlot, and when she ignored him, Russell had his lawyer reinforce the message. Waxman wasn't pleased:

Remember when the Motion Picture Academy started sending its members magical DVD players that would play enchanted, copy-protected screener copies of movies for Oscar consideration? It seems that the studios have balked at producing the DVDs because they haven't seen the machines or observed how they will work in Academy members' homes, so there might not be actual "movies" to "watch" for this upcoming awards season. The Academy maintains the players will eventually be adopted, as no one expects Academy members to accept the new technology right away. It's only a matter of time before word of mouth helps everyone realize that the players' installation process, in which an AMPAS-approved voodoo priestess activates the encryption magic by liberally splashing home theaters with freshly-sacrificed goat's blood, is not nearly as messy at is sounds.

The Movie Marketing Blog alerts us to a novel publicity ploy that grossed out NY Daily News gossip by sending him a fake severed hand in a bloody Ziploc bag to promote the movie Saw. Grove then contacted Lions Gate president Tom Ortenberg to let him know how effective the tactic was, and Ortenberg responded:

A spy files this report from last night's premiere of Eulogy at the Mann Festival in Westwood, and, more importantly, from the after party at Palomino. It's always so touching to know that bloated, fading stars like John Travolta will turn out to chew on some cake and give the scenery a much-needed respite from his teeth-marks.

The just-launched, anonymous blog (apparently, it's only a few hours old) Query Letters I Love has already posted some choice movie pitches from aspiring writers who, from the looks of their letters, are going to stay "aspiring" for the forseeable future. For example:

Breaking: This year's Oscars might not bore the world into incontinence: The Academy has signed up Chris Rock to host. [Note to Emmy organizers: Shandling's looking like an even bigger joke right now.] The trades are so excited about the press release from AMPAS that Variety even somehow approved this unfortunate lede, "The Oscars are about to get, in Chris Rock's own words, 'bigger and black.'" Firstly, we believe it's "Bigger and Blacker." Secondly, the audience at the Kodak Theatre still will be the whitest place on earth, narrowly beating out a conference of albinos in an Alaskan snowdrift scheduled for the same night.

Yesterday, some scrappy filmmakers blew up this enormous penis outside of the Sundance Film Festival's offices in Beverly Hills to promote their porn-industry documentary Missionary Positions. Unfortunately, we hear that the pneumatic dong only reached fully-engorged majesty for a couple of minutes before villagers arrived with pitchforks and demanded its immediate softening. Prudes! (Click the picture to see a larger version.)

A Defamer operative forwards this choice quote from former MPAA head Jack Valenti's speech last night at the Museum of Television and Radio, where he discussed his career in politics before becoming the movie industry's 400-lb lobbying, pirate-hunting gorilla.

If you asked us which celebrity we most fervently wish kept an online diary, we would quickly reply, "Melanie Griffith." Oh, wait a minute. We're changing our answer! We are proud to (belatedly, we know) present the free-associational prose stylings of Oscar-nominated legend Nick Nolte. Here, Nolte recounts the type of madcap "only in Hollywood incident" that happens to us at least three times a week:

Today's Page Six speculates that Tom Cruise and producing partner Paula Wagner are splitting up Cruise/Wagner Productions. Naturally, the rumor was met with the obligatory, reflexive denial by Cruise's publicist/sister/fellow Scientologist, LeAnn Devett: "Now why would they [split] when they are producing War of the Worlds and Mission: Impossible 3 together? Everything is fine." Of course it is! The Celebrity Centre must have instituted a new public relations curriculum, because her denial has sent us spinning into a series of self-doubting questions. If Cruise's own sister says that everything is hunky-dory in Tomtown, then how could it not be? How could they possibly part ways with two blockbusters still waiting to be shot? Do we think that when Cruise and Nicole Kidman divorced, they sold the kids to an organ farm in the Sudan? Isn't it obvious that Tom and Paula will be together forever, without even the limits of mortality dissolving their partnership, and there will never be room for another woman in his life?

In the new Playboy, director/tinfoil-hatted conspiracy theorist Oliver Stone reveals the screamingly Freudian drama of losing his virginity, as Daddy Stone generously took him to a hooker:

I just learned to read, like, yesterday, so maybe I'm missing something in Herbert Muschamp's review of Team America. Hopefully someone can decipher this clichéd fifth-grade gibberish for me:

It's actually hard for us to be insensitive about the death of Christopher Reeve, 52, the actor best known for his role as Superman. Reeve passed away after going into cardiac arrest at his New York home on Saturday. We instantly recalled, however, that during Friday night's debate, presidential candidate John Kerry name-dropped the quadriplegic Reeve as a major supporter of stem cell research. Politics aside, we're inappropriately left wondering if the Kerry campaign is indeed cursed with Kryptonite.
Christopher Reeve, 'Superman' Star, Dies At 52 [AP]
Breaking: Christopher Reeve Dies [Defamer]

Superman is dead. The L.A. Weekly's Nikki Finke reports that Christopher Reeve died suddenly on Sunday, and that his family may make the announcement on Monday. More details as they become available. There's a totally inappropriate Kryptonite joke to be made here, but we're way too involved in Desperate Housewives to bother.

From Variety's VPage coverage of Tuesday night's Groundlings 30th Anniversary Gala at the Henry Fonda Theater: Groundlings/SNL alum Jon Lovitz improvises no fewer than three chins for an obviously impressed Mindy "Frau Farbissina" Sterling and Krista "Had Sex With Clooney" Allen.
[Photo: Variety VPage, WireImage.com]

It's a brave, new world at the leaner-and-meaner Miramax. After Harvey Weinstein tossed scads of nonessential employees (you know, like the film acquisitions people) out of empty windows over the past handful of months, the Miramax Left Behind have had the last shreds of their morale sapped by a barrage of memoranda detailing the company's cost-cutting policies. After suffering memos about Miramax's revised vacation directives (different for NY and LA offices, natch), an LA staffer finally snapped. The following "memo" on snack policies is now happily circulating through the Max's tumbleweed-strewn offices. Apparently, even Disney's decimated subsidiary can lay a claim to the title of "the happiest place on earth."