After a few years of letting us have some semblance of tween-free happiness, MTV's president Christina Norman announced today that the 2006 Video Music Awards would return to Manhattan. The shitstorm goes down August 31 at Radio City, a safe distance from the tragic and ill-timed hurricanes of last year's debacle in Miami. Norman praised this year's potential for "insanity," to which Mayor Bloomberg responded:
· Michael Eisner finally finds some meaning for his post-Disney existence, signing up to host a bi-monthly CNBC talk show, the aptly named Conversations with Michael Eisner. The network says the show "will focus on the importance of creativity and innovation in all pursuits, from business to politics to entertainment," but with an eye toward "wistfully reminiscing about Eisner's days as the most powerful man in Hollywood, which I—excuse us—he totally was." [Variety]
· Rosie O'Donnell is producing a sketch comedy show for MTV network Logo. Think Saturday Night Live, but you know, gay. And probably funnier. OK, maybe not. [THR]
· Relieved to have big bully Monday Night Football out of the way, Two and a Half Men beats up on the premiere of Emily's Reasons Why Not, which we predict (as we must) will be gone by early February. [Variety]
· EuroSlump '05: European movie ticket sales were down in 2005, though revenue still increased a bit. Who can we invade to halt the slide? [THR]
· The TV Academy may change its rules to define its comedy category to include only traditional sitcoms, leaving "dramedies" (and please, for the love of God, don't use the term "comerama") like Boston Legal and Desperate Housewives to get hammered in the drama contest by Lost at the Emmys. [Variety]
In the post-Giuliani era, it's tough for a gay man in Times Square and seeking a little lovin' to know what to do with himself. The Gaiety closed last year, the buddy booths are fewer and further between, and, hell, there isn't even a good diva on Broadway at the moment. (Patti LuPone as Mrs. Lovett just doesn't seem to count.) So it's a good thing that Viacom, your friendly neighborhood media conglomerate, is stepping in to fill the void. Reports a tipster (who curiously submitted this via Armani-clad brother Defamer):
· Because we know that your weekend wouldn't be complete if you didn't kick it off by contemplating K-Fed handling some poopy Pampers: Britney's Mom: Kevin Changes Diapers.
· Walmart is "heartsick" that its website software seems to be a big, fat racist.
· Quentin Tarantino explains Icelandic women: "I'm in a room full of supermodels who were drunk out of their mind standing on a table, (going) 'Let's get the party started.' I'm like, 'Where have I been all my life.' "In America, the idea is to get the girls drunk enough to go home with you, in Iceland it's to get the girls home with you before they get so drunk that they're passing out in your bathroom or vomiting all over you." Also, they have lovely feet.
· We are shocked—shocked!—and possibly even scandalized—scandalized!—by the possibility that underage MTV stars might be getting shitfaced at respectable, starfucking drinking establishments.
· Not everything Giada makes on the Food Network can be a winner.
Great news for those of you who can actually participate in NYC real estate: the Hudson street triplex used for MTV's Real World: Back to New York is now available, fully furnished, for your rental enjoyment at a nice $35,000 per month. The brokers at Stribling are calling it a "Tuscany penthouse," but it just strikes us as an oversized, over-decorated footnote to the pop-culture history book. But that doesn't mean there isn't some loaded, D-list starfucking douche out there who's going to snap it up ASAP just so he can pretend he's the Miz.
Say what you will about Viacom president and CEO Tom Freston, the guy can knock out a year-end company-wide e-mail like nobody's business. In this memo currently making the rounds, Freston effortlessly glides from cheerfully suggesting employees raise a New Year's Eve "glass for the birth of your new company, too," to putting a human face on their conveniently disposed of "corporate overhead," while all the while using his trademark laid back style to cut any of the self-congratulatory bitter aftertaste often associated with some of his colleagues' gushy outbursts:
As reported last week, obsessive-compulsive Wenner Media honcho and Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner has signed a deal with MTV to film a new reality show. (Why should Atoosa Rubenstein have all the fun?) The series will follow a group of journalism students as they move to New York for internships with Rolling Stone (it's still a relevant publication, you know), where they will then compete to become a contract writer with the magazine. Think as if Miss Seventeen banged Almost Famous and gave birth to Gideon Yago.
· More perfectly timed holiday layoff fun: MTV Networks let go close to 100 employees, a move the suddenly scary-looking Tom Freston might have been hinting at when he told THR yesterday, "We're looking very closely at a much leaner corporate overhead." Merry Christmas, pinkslipped "overhead"! [THR]
· Paramount signs a term sheet to sell the DreamWorks library to a number of private equity firms for somewhere between $900 and $950 million. We will not even attempt to sex up this move. [Variety]
· Time Warner cable will roll out "Family Choice Tier" cable package of "smut-free" programming. You know, the kind of smut that you find on Nickelodeon or the Cartoon Network, which are not a part of the package. [THR]
· After the disappointing Wednesday numbers for King Kong, execs are clinging to the hope that word of mouth, school vacations, and the South thawing will lure fans of the little monkey out of hiding. [Variety]
· Sometime actor Bruce Willis will take some time off from his promising vigilante-financier career to star in Morgan's Summit, playing a professionally nice guy who goes crazy for vengeance once a brutal crime changes his life. [Variety]
Oh, those media companies are really full of the Christmas spirit.
TV networks are quickly realizing the necessity of aligning themselves with a major online content store. ABC and NBC made the obvious choice of an Apple/iTunes marriage, but MTV has decided to forego the shiny, white, easily-scratchable party, pairing its soon to launch URGE network with woefully unhip big meanie, Microsoft:
We've received a few Media Christmas reports over the past few days, but nothing even comes close to this tale, from last night at Hiro:
We'd never expect an event for Jackass to attract anyone in the alphabetical neighborhood of the A-list, members of which generally don't have a very high tolerance for the stapling of genitalia to stationary objects or the show-offy chewing of broken glass. But when nearly all of the wire photos of the night include pornstar/recall gubernatorial hopeful Mary Carey, things are not good. According to this report from an operative unlucky enough to have turned up to the party, the planners had a problem luring warm bodies of any kind to fill the venue, even with the promise of booze and food:
Last night's season finale of MTV's pseudo-reality drama Laguna Beach featured one of show's main cast members, Lauren (or, like, LC, as everyone calls her), skipping north towards Los Angeles and a totes awesome internship at Teen Vogue. In the preview scene, our young LC is even introduced to whip-brandishing Vogue EIC Anna Wintour. We can only imagine how Anna reacted to LC's permatan and eyeliner enthusiasm.
You have to love that the Drudge Report, that bellwether of breaking, right-leaning news and weather phenomena, has an exclusive report about last night's MTV Europe Music Awards. How, you might ask, does a report on a ho-hum Madonna performance for her masters at MTV fit into Matt Drudge's beat? Very easily:
A media commentator who's much cleverer and better-known than we are confessed by email earlier today his fondness for Miss Seventeen. He knows it's wrong, he says, but he's just too caught up in one contestant's story:
Last night marked the premiere of MTV's latest reality abortion, Miss Seventeen, in which a gaggle of teenaged girltards compete for the approval of Seventeen EIC Atoosa Rubenstein in weekly competitions of character; the winner snags a coveted internship at the legendary girl mag. In short, the summer job you worked your ass off for in college has been reduced to a reality competition for the tween network.
• More on the Boy George cocaine bust: He apparently called the cops after a male prostitute tried to rob him, at which point the cops found the coke. Because where there's a hooker, there's blow of one sort of another. [Page Six]
• Angelina Jolie stops humping Brad Pitt just long enough to speak out against mining the Iraq border, then threatened to adopt all Iraqi orphans if her requests were not met. [R&M]
• While Kate Moss twiddles her thumbs in rehab, the father of her child, Jefferson Hack, has possession of the little girl and a brand new modeling contract on Savile Row. [Page Six]
• Why we'll always love MTV: In an episode of Date My Mom, a mother told a contestant, in Russian, that her daughter had a very big heart. The MTV subtitles, however, read, "There is no better piece of a- than my princess Anastasia." Six in one hand, half-dozen in the other. [Lowdown]
Having seen one too many $2000 My Super Sweet Sixteen party dress and Laguna Beach butt-floss bikini, The LA Weekly's Nikki Finke is finally ready to tune her television to MTV and chainsaw the fucker in half (kids, ask your parents!). In this week's column, Finke laments the network's—which, we hear, used to primarily present delightful mini-movies set to the most popular songs of the day—loss of semi-innocence; after all, what kind of basic cable channel can claim a rock-and-roll soul when it cynically underwrites some Hollywood do-gooding just because the host is a movie star who boffs Justin Timberlake?
