There are certain guests, like Vin Diesel, that Tonight Show host Jay Leno is utterly familiar and comfortable with. When these people drop by the soon-to-be-shuttered Burbank set, it generally results in very entertaining TV.

At one point during the Wednesday interview promoting Fast & Furious 6, Diesel decided to bring out his two young children. Watch below as the 45-year-old movie star throws to a clip, sitting one seat over from Jay and cradling his semi-shy offspring.

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During that recent sit-down for Rock Center with brothers Rahm and Zeke, Ari Emanuel insisted that lots of therapy had helped him move away from Entourage-worthy volcanic eruptions. But of course, for Fortune magazine senior editor-at-large Adam Lashinsky and most other journalists, it’s impossible to resist the lure of those tales, still, for the purposes of an article lede about the William Morris Endeavor deal maker:

Sean Parker, the billionaire technology investor and onetime president of Facebook, will never forget being on the receiving end of an Ari Emanuel onslaught. It was 2009. Emanuel, the famous Hollywood agent, had been e-mailing Parker because a friend had suggested they connect…

The article is behind the Fortune paywall. If this content doesn’t spark a few more subscribers, then there is no hope for the future of print media.

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Judge Apologizes for Lack of Transparency in James Rosen Leak Probe (The Washington Post)
The chief judge of the District’s federal court issued an unusual order Wednesday, apologizing to the public and the media for not making certain court documents widely available online. The gesture of transparency by U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth comes at a time when the Obama administration is under scrutiny for an unprecedented number of leak investigations, including one showing that the Justice Department had secretly probed the news-gathering activities of Fox News reporter James Rosen. Politico / Under The Radar The Justice Department is denying that it tracked the phone calls of Rosen’s parents as part of an investigation into how Rosen got classified information about North Korean nuclear test plans. “We did not wiretap the phones of any reporter or news organization. Nor did we monitor or track the phone calls of any reporter’s parents. No records were obtained from the computer servers of any news organization,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia said in a statement. TVNewser The news of the full extent of the investigation comes as editorials take aim squarely at the Obama administration for valuing secrecy over freedom of the press. The Washington Post / Dana Milbank There are various reasons you might not care about the Obama administration’s spying on Rosen and labeling him a “co-conspirator and/or aider and abettor” in an espionage case. Liberals may not be particularly bothered because the targeted journalist works for Fox News. Conservatives may not be concerned because of their antipathy toward the news media generally. And the general public certainly doesn’t have much patience for journalists’ whining.

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Had the earliest version of Nickelodeon’s green slime actually been dumped on a human being, the results would have probably been similar to what happened in the late 1990s to comic book artist and San Diego Reader contributor Jay Allen Sanford.

As Sanford recalls today, his unauthorized Contemporary Bio-Graphics treatment of Paul Reubens‘ alter ego Pee Wee Herman eventually led to a one-on-one interview at the actor’s LA home. In character, Reubens playfully at one point dumped on Sanford’s head some old and, it turns out, rancid green slime, resulting in a very strong reaction:

Reubens was still apologizing the next day when he phoned to make sure I’d lived to tell. He kindly picked up the tab for $975, which covered the cost of my hospital visit and of the hair stylist later called upon to “fix” those spots where slime-encrusted hair had been excised from my shaggy ‘do.

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In 2008, during the height of the economic downturn, the position of managing editor at LAT regional newspaper The Daily Pilot was eliminated. Today, in a very hopeful sign, that Times Community News (TCN) slot is being returned to the masthead.

Appointed to the position is 34-year-old Alisha Gomez (pictured). She started out with TCN in 2011 as a contract employee; moved to full-time in July 2012; and now occupies an impressive expanded perch. From this afternoon’s announcement:

Gomez will help oversee the staff of 24 that produces the Daily Pilot, Coastline Pilot and Huntington Beach Independent, which have a combined print circulation of 137,000. She previously served as managing editor of the Huntington Beach Independent and the Coastline Pilot and, on June 3, will add the Daily Pilot to her duties as part of a planned newsroom reorganization.

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Robert Redford is 76; the Cannes Film Festival, 66. Over the course of these two cinematic lifetimes, the manner in which information flows out of a major film festival has dramatically changed. The once gentle print and TV ripple has been replaced by a social media and Web tidal wave.

Just hours after the debut on the French Riviera of Redford’s stranded-at-sea wordless drama All is Lost, Sundance hometown critic Sean P. Means is already suggesting that the film’s October 25 Roadside Attractions/Lionsgate release date is “one of the most anticipated moments of the Oscar season.” Echoing these sentiments are Roger Friedman and Sasha Stone. From Stone’s TheWrap review:

Redford is so good in this movie that if he didn’t already have such a long history of films behind him, this would launch his career late in life. Despite his 50-year history as an actor, he has been nominated for Best Actor just once, in 1974 for The Sting. Here’s hoping he sees a second, in 2014, at the age of 77.

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Tuesday night, Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy and their charmingly low-key Before Midnight director and co-writer Richard Linklater were back where it all began 18 years ago: the stage of the DGA Theatre on Sunset Blvd. The LA premiere of the third installment of the trio’s epic indie romance series was preceded by a crowded food-and-vodka reception in the lobby.

When Before Sunrise arrived in 1995, cell phones were just becoming affordable and popular. Today of course, the smart devices are ubiquitous; in the DGA lobby, where patrons snapped Delpy and Hawke on the indoor red carpet; and later on the DGA big screen. In Before Midnight, critical cell phone calls and text messages anchor each of the movie’s three conversational acts.

Because most of today’s film critics still (foolishly) believe that reviews must detail a movie’s plot points, it will be virtually impossible for any such critique to avoid spoilers. Our best advice to Before series fans is not to read any of the write-ups until after you’ve watched the latest chapter, which opens Friday in LA, New York and other select cities.

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The Gracie Awards were held last night in Los Angeles, celebrating “outstanding programming for, by and about women.”

We caught up with a few media personalities on the red carpet, getting some career advice from the pros. Shaun Robinson took the Outstanding Host award last night for her work on Access Hollywood, but she shared some general advice about breaking out in the business:

“Today there are so many different media outlets for people to get started. When I was coming up in the business, you had like four stations that you could send your resume tapes to. Now there’s so many outlets, you can start own show and then send those links out to different executive producers and let them see your work. It’s a new day today, it’s about creating your own show. You can have your own show, like that. It wasn’t like that when I was first coming up in the business.”

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One of the same fingers, no doubt, that anchor the crisp, concise lede of this week’s print edition story by Hollywood Reporter executive editor, features Stephen Galloway. Here is just a sampling of the things the Girls Gone Wild impresario insists are not his fault:

Francis has been jailed in Florida and Nevada; successfully sued for defamation by Las Vegas mogul Steve Wynn, whom he now owes $20 million; indicted for tax evasion and filming underage girls; blamed for the Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing of a company connected to Girls Gone Wild (which he says he no longer owns); and banned from entering GGW’s Santa Monica offices by bankruptcy trustee R. Todd Neilson, who filed suit to keep Francis off the premises.

Add to all this Los Angeles Times reporter Claire Hoffman‘s claim in a 2006 article that he pinned her to a car and twisted her arm so hard tears flooded her eyes – and that’s an awful lot of mischief. But none of it, says Francis, is his fault.

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Before Pretty Little Liars was an award-winning hit on ABC with its own spin-off,  it was the brainchild of YA writer Sara Shepard. The prolific scribe managed to publish over 20 books in eight years and get two of her series optioned as TV shows. In the latest installment of Mediabistro’s So What Do You Do?, Shepard tells how her series ended up on the screen and what she thinks of the TV incarnations of Pretty Little Liars and Lying Game. 

“Pretty Little Liars I’m really satisfied with. Pretty Little Liars more sticks to what the books are,” she said. “[The TV writers] take their own liberties, and sometimes their ideas are just great. Sometimes I’m like, “Oh, why didn’t I think of that?” So that’s always really fun. But, I mean, it’s just pretty amazing to see it on TV at all. Even if it wouldn’t have lasted a season, it still would have been this pretty incredible thing.”

For more, read So What Do You Do, Sara Shepard, Author of Pretty Little Liars?