The director of the Warhol movie Factory Girl wants the world to know that the attention that Jude Law's nanny-drilling antics gained for finacé Sienna Miller didn't help her (re)land the role of Edie Sedgwick:

Our agony is over. We finally have an answer to the question of whether Must Love Dogs star John Cusack is a dog lover or a dog haver. The AP comes to our rescue:

How much work goes into the crafting of a believable blond bimbo character with six lines? The NY Times, doggedly determined to find out the answer, sat down with Must Love Dogs [Ed.note—Kudos to the movie's publicist for carpet-bombing the media with stories this weekend.] actress Jordana Spiro (twelfth-listed on the IMDb page) and dissected the steps of the process that follow the initial purchase of a good bottle of peroxide:

An obligatory wire service "I'm exactly like my character/nothing like my character in my just-released movie" story goes horribly awry when a crucial mistake bumps us right out of an in-depth examination of John Cusack's similarity/dissimilarity to his on-screen persona in the romantic comedy Must Love Dogs [bold ours]:

• Al Gore's cable network, which launches today, is apparently a tapas bar, says a San Francisco Chronicle writer. This is, we think, a good thing, mostly because we had some excellent tapas last time we were in the City. [SFC]
• Katie Couric is a diva, but not one who throws lamps, says Ken Auletta. Not that we can actually get to his article online. [NYer]
• While her husband is on vacation, Judy Miller gets jail visits from journos. [E&P]
• TV on the web is perhaps finally here. Which comes as great news for your friends who worked at Pseudo five years ago. [NYT]
• GQ really, really likes The Dukes of Hazzard. [NYT]
• As if things were looking so rosy for media companies in the first place, now a global ad slowdown is expected. [NYP]
• Ten bought-out employees had their last days at the Times on Friday. [Romenesko]
• Apparently there's a clever guy in Los Feliz running a smart and funny blog about Hollywood. Who knew? [LAT]

Look, when you've got $600 million of Passion of the Christ fuck-you money, you can make a black-and-white documentary about nymphomaniac donkeys overdubbed in Klingon if you feel like it. If anything, Mel Gibson's choice to go Mayan feels a little bit safe.

Did Owen "The Butterscotch Stallion" Wilson provide the secret sauce that helped Wes Anderson's movies slide down the hipster moviegoer's throat a little more easily? Slate posits that Wilson's writing contributions to Anderson's films, which ended with The Royal Tenenbaums because The Stallion is now a huge star with little time left for screenwriting, might have tempered the director's more pointy-headed cinematic tendencies with a healthy dose of the "middlebrow":

So we're going to assume the fine folks at The Aristocrats did this on purpose:

Dear Differently Shaped/Abled/Pigmented/Limbed People of Los Angeles: New and exciting opportunities in the pirate-extra field await you at an open casting call next weekend for the sequels to Pirates of the Caribbean. Dear Asian People of Los Angeles: Yeah, you can come too, but be ready to play a hooker.

• How to ride the subway. If you want to be hated. [This Is What We Do Now]
• All the President's Men was screened in Tribeca last night, with Woodward, Bernstein, and Bradlee in attendance. Also Woodward's young daughter, who was overheard having the crushing realization that, no, her father does not look like Robert Redford. [MyJewishBooks/JewishFilm]
• It's so cute when Germans try to act ghetto. [Verbose Coma]
• With today's New York mag web headlines, Tristam Shandy officially turns on Adam Moss. [Tristam Shandy]

Even with The Wedding Crashers opening tomorrow, Thursday has been somewhat lighter on Owen "The Butterscotch Stallion" Wilson news than the promotional orgy of yesterday's wall-to-wall Stallion gangbang. Luckily, a reader with basic cable and the constitutional fortitude to withstand MTV's TRL teeny-bopper onslaught is able to momentarily patch the gap in our coverage, recounting Crashers co-star Vince Vaughn's (perhaps unwitting) nod to Wilson's equestrian legacy:

Diora Baird, "busty Guess model," upcoming Playboy cover girl, and Wedding Crashers cast member (we're not going to stretch it to "star" until we actually see the movie), is a fast learner. At an "intimate lunch" at Koi, Baird demonstrates her knowledge of Hollywood's time-honored casting system to NY Daily News JV gossip column The Lowdown:

If you're bored, you can head on over to Cooter's Place, where the avuncular former TV mechanic accuses the movie of rampant Blue Stateism: "Frankly, I think the whole project shows an arrogant disrespect for our show, for our cast, for America's families, and for the sensibilities of the heartland of our country." Cooter then took a big bite of apple pie, saluted the flag, and then rolled himself back underneath a replica of the General Lee.

The LAT got an early look at the script that will spawn Oliver Stone's sure-to-be-controversial 9/11 movie (starring, quite logically, Nicholas Cage, fresh off a movie in which he rides a motorcycle while his head is engulfed by demonic flame). The good news: The screenplay "might be the most coherent, moving piece of material to fall into Stone's hands in over a decade." We think we all know what the bad news is:

ThinkFilm, distributor of the documentary The Aristocrats, featuring a litany of comedians telling "the dirtiest joke in the world," is up in arms over theater chain AMC's refusal to show the movie. Let the he-said/she-said accusations begin!

Only if crows the size of a Lear jet descended from the sky, plucked out Johnny Depp's eyes, and spirited away a child-actor brunch could there be a darker harbinger of doom hanging over Sunday's Hollywood premiere of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory than Britney Spears' appearance in a themed t-shirt. Box office prognosticators should immediately adjust their opening weekend estimates downwards by $8-10 million.

"Excitable" Marvel CEO Avi Arad is apoplectic over the beating his new X3 director, celebrated fauxteur and bon vivant Brett Ratner, is taking on the internets before a single frame of the latest installment of his certain-to-be-ruined franchise (There we go again! Bad internets!) has been viewed. Like a big brother enlisted to stop the unchecked flow of milk money into a bully's pockets, Arad defends the director on Zap2it.com:

Despite new leader Brad Grey's executive restructuring of The New Paramount™, the studio still can't seem to stop taking hits from the remake crack-pipe. Is there some holdover from the old regime feverishly making deals out of a well-hidden janitorial closet, waiting to be discovered? Today's Variety reports that Paramount plans to remake Summer School, the Mark Harmon comedy vehicle* from 1987:

No superhero movie campaign would be complete without a full line of toys to help maximize the thorough Hoovering of parents' wallets. But what happens when those toys totally suck? This is what happens:

Is there something unsettlingly familiar about Johnny Depp's portrayal of Willy Wonka in the upcoming Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? The E! Online wonders aloud: