Hollywood: August 2006 Archives

It's one thing for TMZ.com to send videographers into the world to pester celebrities outside of nightclubs in hopes that they'll be drunk enough to issue forth some kind of tirade against, oh, say, Lindsay Lohan and her naturally red hair. It's quite another for an ostensibly reputable TV newscast -- oh, who am I kidding, putting "reputable" and "TV newscast" together in the same sentence -- to dump sad news on celebrities busy preening merrily on the red carpet of a premiere.

And yet, that's precisely what KCAL's Dave Clark did last night at the Pantages: Button-hole celebrities for their reactions to the death of Bruno Kirby. It's a fairly amusing and eminently lazy piece, incongruously combining Kirby's death -- which, let's face it, probably in the scheme of things doesn't deserve this much air time -- with a puff piece about the premiere of a musical, juxtaposing big red-carpet smiles with expressions of sorrow.

It excels as an exercise in measuring spontaneous emoting from people who didn't really know the guy (why bother hunting down his onscreen co-stars when there's a random pile of celebrities amassing in one place?), however, with Jennifer Tilly's gape-mouthed response (they worked together, sort of, as voices of CGI mice) -- "Omigod, are you kidding?" -- the most dramatic. Robert Davi (ID'd in the piece as "Robert Dabi" -- fading fame's a bitch, innit?) ruefully shakes his head for the cameras more than he ever would have in real life because he understands that's what's expected of him. Lorenzo Lamas is a veritable fount of information: "I had no idea he was ill," Lamas says, confessing that he never worked with Kirby but "I liked his work." You can almost see the gears whirring in Lamas's brain trying to place the name, the face -- and he succeeds, noting accurately that Kirby did both comedic and dramatic roles.

Clark's next assignment: Asking red-carpet trollers what they thought about the capture of JonBenet Ramsey's killer, or just offering them current-events quizes in general.

TMZ.com reports that the Burning Shore resort in Namibia, world-renowned as the prenatal hangout of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie and brood, is to be auctioned on Aug. 30. The couple was reported to have paid $2 million just to clear the place out for themselves for 80 days, so the auction price is likely to lock out your average Namibian investor.
But with African desert on one side and ocean on the other, it's secluded enough for even the most camera-shy of Hollywood notables. Some possible future uses:
-- Suri Cruise's summer camp ("Kumbaya, L. Ron, kumbaya...")
-- bar mitzvahs generously hosted by Mel Gibson
-- Lohan family reunions
-- retreat for publicists who work with clients like these.

Greg Hernandez of the Daily News examines the cost of public celebrity stupidity in today’s paper, niftily finding a way to sweep Suri-ously nutty Tom Cruise under the umbrella currently shadowing Mea-Culpa Mel and Looped Lindsay, but politely ignoring Britney Spears’ ongoing travails. (But she’s not a movie star, you argue? Have you seen “Crossroads?�? Oh, you have? Well, OK.)

Not to diminish or trivialize the rancid vitriol spewed by Mad Mel early the other morning, but does it strike anyone as odd that when someone whose career consists a lot of shooting guns filled with blanks at other actors vomits forth a fusillade of hateful, alcohol-drenched invective, there are cries that he is no longer morally capable of shooting guns filled with blanks at other actors, yet when a presumably stone-cold sober political pundit slags the widows of men killed on Sept. 11 and cavalierly announces without providing any proof that a former U.S. President is gay, TV news divisions seem to have no problem with continuing to encourage her bile?