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In
old Hollywood, by which we mean the Hollywood of the glorious studio
days, about the only violence that occurred on the
nightclub scene was between someone like Frank Sinatra taking
a swing at someone like gossip columnist Lee Mortimer at
Romanoff’s
over something he printed about Ava Gardner. Like
everything else, times have changed. Now we’re reading about
a patron getting mugged by thuggish gangsters as he left the trendy
Tropicana Bar
at the Roosevelt Hotel after attending Mike DeLuca’s
birthday party.
The victim was an assistant to Paramount Pictures’ production
president Allison Shearmur and the attack was
quite serious, leaving him bloody and unconscious on the sidewalk
with fractured cheekbones
and a smashed-in face.
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Jake
Gyllenhaal and Kirsten Dunst
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Has
this unfortunate incident impacted the business of the “in” spot?
Not a bit. Apparently, the town’s young trendsetters are
still flocking to Dodd Mitchell’s popular nightclub. We recently
ran into one of the town’s cutest couples there — Jake
Gyllenhaal and Kirsten Dunst — who told us they
are not getting married at Jake’s parents’ home in
Martha’s Vineyard
and, no, they are not trying to have a baby. The stories about
the couple’s wanting to conceive via homeopathic medicines,
naturally, originated in the tabloids, desperate to publish something,
anything, about the reclusive couple, truth not being one of the
criteria.
Jake says he long ago stopped reading the sleazy rag-mags, with
Kirsten adding that she’s sick and tired of being hounded
by the paparazzi. The Spider-Man star told us that one of the things
she was homesick for and missed most while she was in Paris filming
Sophia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette were In-N-Out Burgers.
“That, and L.A.’s great vintage boutiques,” she said. “I
although I did discover Free P Star, a vintage shop that I ransacked
on a weekly basis. I love buying clothes. It just changes your
whole mood.”
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Diane
Keaton
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She
said she has a few months to go before filming starts on the “threequel” of
the Spider-Man franchise and she is looking forward to
spending time with friends and with Jake. As for Jake, he’s
got a couple of high-profile films that are imminent – Proof with
Gwyneth Paltrow which has just opened and soon following, Annie
Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain in which he and Heath
Ledger costar as a couple of cowboys who have a long love affair during
and between their marriages.
Also at the Tropicana Bar that night we spoke briefly to Keanu
Reeves who denied categorically that he’s dating Diane
Keaton,
something that we never believed for a moment when we first heard
the report in one of the New York tabloids.
In what has to be the most blatant case of miscasting since Kate
Beckinsdale was chosen to play Ava Gardner in The
Aviator, we have
since heard that the zaftig 5’8” brunette Catherine
Zeta-Jones may be playing the petite blonde 5’3” Lana
Turner in a Warner Brothers film that purports to detail
the circumstances surrounding the stabbing death by Lana’s
daughter of her muscular mobster lover Johnny Stompanato.
And who are they considering to play the handsome Italian-American
hoodlum? Keanu Reeves, the
part-Hawaiian action-comedy star, that’s who.
If Lorenzo Lamas were 20 years younger, he’d be perfect as
Johnny “Stomp.” As for Lanita, as she liked Stompanato
to call her, we think the casting folks should take a look at Sienna
Miller. And Mark Ruffalo as Johnny.
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Eva
Langoria and Jesse
Metcalfe
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Meanwhile back at the Tropicana, outside the velvet ropes, Jesse
Metcalfe was pleading “Let me in! Don’t you know who
I am?” But the doorman showed no mercy, informing him that
the club was already “at capacity.”
We understand that this is the second time the hunky, one-time
soap star was refused admittance to the popular nitery. Perhaps
rumors that Jesse’s days are numbered on Wisteria Lane, and
that producers of Desperate Housewives are bringing his
story arc to an end has reached the venue’s gatekeepers.
If the doors are closed to Jesse at the Roosevelt, we hear they
have been left ajar at the hit Sunday night TV show, at least technically.
We suppose the powers that be at ABC are leaving their options
open in case a hue and cry arises from the show’s many fans
demanding that Jesse be kept on board. Frankly from a demographic
point of view, we think it would be a mistake to do away with Jesse’s
character, one of the main reasons being that teenage girls (and
gay men) tune in faithfully. Meanwhile, Jesse will soon be seen
in a feature film in release, John Tucker Must Die, starring Ashanti.
Fashion not-so-news: It is quite OK to voice an opinion
about people in the public eye, but for heaven’s sake, should
the opinion be based on the truth? One very nasty New York newspaper
columnist
recently wrote that Barbra Streisand is no longer
wearing Donna Karan. “She's wearing Omar the Tentmaker,” the
columnist wrote, reaching a new low in bitchiness. Believe us,
we have seen
Barbra out and about and she looks great, absolutely radiant! And
get this: Donna Karan will be visiting Barbra when she comes to
town to promote her new fragrances, Donna Karan Essences.
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Kyra
Sedgwick and Kevin Bacon
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At MR CHOW we ran into Mr. and Mrs. Kevin Bacon, Kyra Sedgwick,
start of TNT’s The Closer, dining with friends. Kyra is from
the same prominent East Coast family that produced the late Edie
Sedgwick, her cousin, whom she said she never met. She
said she’d
been hearing about Factory Girl and applauded the casting of Sienna
Miller as Edie, adding that she is sure that her cousin would approve.
With her series filmed here, Kyra said she is finally warming up
to L.A., but not enough to leave New York permanently.
Some readers will no doubt remember one of the darkest
periods in our country’s history – the Watergate break-in and
it’s aftermath which brought down the presidency of Richard
Nixon. One of the more colorful characters to emerge from that
human drama was Attorney General John Mitchell’s
wife Martha,
a loose cannon if there ever was one, but a welcome breath of fresh
air with her outrageous, off-the-cuff commentary on the Washington
goings-ons at the time.
During the height of the scandal, Martha disappeared and hid out
in Greenwood, Mississippi, at the home of her finishing school
best friend, petroleum heiress Aleta Billups Saunders. Local writer-photographer John
Ramsey Miller found her, got her to talk on camera and then
took the filmed interview to the Dick Cavett Show in New
York, a big deal at the time. Now there is going to be a movie
based on
the John Jeter play about Martha, Dirty Tricks, which played at
the Public Theatre. Ryan Murphy will direct from his own screenplay
with Meryl Streep starring.
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Martha
Mitchell on the cover of Time in 1970
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Murphy
put up his own money to option the play and will shoot the movie
midway through the third season of FX’s Nip/Tuck which
he executive produces. He’s put together an usually strong
cast, albeit with some rather unusual results — Annette
Bening as White House correspondent Helen Thomas,
Gwyneth Paltrow as Maureen
Dean and Jill Clayburgh as Pat
Nixon. Brad Pitt’s company,
Plan B Productions will co-produce the film with Ryan Murphy.
When Russell Crowe very grandly ordered the sommelier at
a popular night spot in London to “bring us a bottle of your
best wine,” the
wine steward took him at his word and brought to Crowe’s
table as bottle price at $7000. It was not until he had ordered
a second bottle and was presented with the bill showing $14,000
for wine that Crowe realized how fine his taste in wine really
was. He was not a happy diner. He paid the tab, but we hear he
really raised a stink about it. The irony of this is that Russell’s
next film is Ridley Scott’s A Good Year
for Fox 2000 by Mark
Klein adapted from Peter Mayle’s
novel about a London banker who moves to Provence after inheriting
a vineyard. The film begins
shooting in Paris in a few weeks. Meanwhile, Crowe is undergoing
a crash course in wine by visiting several French vineyards with
an oenologist. |
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