This video by Slate’s Jack Shafer is not only entertaining but also rather informative.

Lore has it that, if a sucker is born every minute, all eventually land in Hollywood. After exhausting the German dentist money, then the American tycoon scion money, then the Greenwich hedge fund money, now Tinseltown is exploiting the Abu Dhabi real estate money. Warner Bros announced today a “long-term…

Bob Iger can breathe a sigh of relief at today’s legal decision. Since the Disney Channel has My Friends Tigger & Pooh, a re-launch of the company’s very profitable Winnie The Pooh franchise. Tens of millions of dollars have been poured into the creation of this new CG TV series, all with the hope of making Pooh…

What the hell is going on at Saturday Night Live? First, NBC privately claimed it didn’t ask Maya Rudolph back to SNL for an eighth season “to freshen the cast.” Then NBC reversed itself and said it was her decision not to return. Now I receive this announcement via NBC from Maya: “It was an agonizing decision, but…

DreamWorks Animation SKG named Tom Freston to its board of directors today. The former Viacom Inc. president and CEO, who OK’ed the deal to bring DreamWorks into Paramount, was axed by old coot Sumner Redstone a year ago. Nothing like having a common enemy to bring Hollywood types closer together. I should also remind…

What a scumbag studio New Line Cinema is turning out to be. Because of this nugget buried in that legal victory which Lord Of The Rings director Peter Jackson just won during the discovery phase of his 2005 lawsuit to enforce the audit provision of his contract: Back in October 2006, New Line’s counsel produced only…

Instead of just two movies competing at the box office this Friday, there are two moguls slugging it out. Vying for No. 1 will be The Game Plan from Disney, and The Kingdom from Universal. But the behind the scenes catfight is what’s really interesting because both titles are the first films greenlit by…

… Ken Burns’ The War which began last night on PBS. Let’s not forget Tinseltown’s small role in this production. Narrated by actor Keith David, the 7-part series also features the first-person voices of Tom Hanks, Josh Lucas, Bobby Cannavale, Samuel L. Jackson, Eli Wallach, Robert Wahlberg, Carolyn McCormack, Adam…

Happened today. He plans to appeal. He had been trying to withdraw his guilty plea from before. (See my previous, Big-Time Movie Director Cops Guilty…

Disgusting filmmaker Eli Roth sounds increasingly desperate. (Recall when he reacted badly to the failure of his Hostel II)? Here’s the latest from his MySpace: “And did anyone read that absurd article by Lisa Schwartzbaum in Entertainment Weekly, about how she’d never watch a “Torture Porn” film? I think it’s time…

So now it’s official: the Friars Club of New York did score that legal victory over the Friars of Beverly Hills I reported way back on September 7th. (See my previous, Bicoastal Friars Club War Ends: NY Wins?) The court order was officially signed last week instructing the Friars of Beverly Hills to stop using the…

… When Brad Grey and Jeff Bewkes lunched together at Michael’s in NYC on Friday. Discussing David Chase and a Sopranos movie? Or The Departed sequel? Or the Viacom-DreamWorks debacle? Or just two “very old and close friends”? But if both moguls really had something secret going on, it would be at a dive in…