Show Business

To mark the recent Cinco de Mayo holiday, it would have made sense for this particular show business aspirant to drown their overworked and underpaid sorrows with straight rows of Tequila shots. Instead, they opted for the cheaper and longer-lasting buzz of Tumblr blog HollywoodAssistants.

What’s great about this excellent new diversion is that it does not swim with the snark. Rather, the author uses a drier, droll sense of humor to meme-capture the highs and lows of an overworked Hollywood assistant’s daily rote.

“I was formerly an agency assistant at one of the big four,” the operator of HollywoodAssistants tells FishbowlLA via email. “Now I am an assistant elsewhere in the industry, but I can’t reveal where in order to remain anonymous.” Although this person also refused to tell us if they are male, female or transgender, we’re guessing – based on this, and this – that HollywoodAssistants is a her.

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Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews.

Every once in a while, The Hollywood Reporter publishes an essay about a topical TV-film industry issue written by an anonymous show business insider. The latest such missive, appearing in the June 1 print issue and online today, is one of the best yet.

Right off the bat, the unnamed TV showrunner-author writes that although Community’s Dan Harmon (pictured) had a reputation for being “difficult,” they can neither personally confirm nor, for that matter, be surprised if the characterization is indeed accurate:

Because – and here’s the dirty secret of television – there are plenty of showrunners who are difficult. Some are even truly Machiavellian, hated and feared by all. But as long as their shows are hits, no one would ever think about replacing them.

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We told you last week that screenings of The Dictator featured a teaser trailer of Anchorman 2. Well, here you go — two different teasers!

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Former The X Factor host Steve Jones is reportedly replacing Mark Steines as the new co-host of Entertainment Tonight, according to the New York Post.

The 35-year-old has been filling in since March and Steines is leaving the nightly syndicated entertainment show after 17 years.

Simon Cowell gave Jones the boot from the music competition show in January along with judges Paula Abdul and Nicole Scherzinger.

Mention the words “The Laughing Cow” and most people think of a cartwheel of tasty, mid-priced soft cheese. But presently, at least through May 20, this is also the name of a play being performed at the Meta Theatre on Melrose.

Hollywood Patch guest editor James F. Mills caught up with the work’s author, Jessica Abrams. Formerly an assistant on the Disney lot, she sourced her experiences at the Mouse House for a comedy set at fictional Gurnsey Studios, where a gay attorney gets in trouble for writing a pamphlet:

“I first got the idea when working at Disney,” said Abrams, a New York City native who was raised in Chapel Hill, NC. “I was walking back to my car and this idea came to me. I felt like it was a way to express a lot of the frustration I had working there and the weirdness all around.”

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The last time Conan O’Brien dropped in on David Letterman, Y2K was topical monologue material. In the intervening years, the prize they both coveted also slipped right through O’Brien’s fingers.

The red-haired one did not sound entirely convincing when he insisted (at the top of the clip below) that he is 100% happy at his new TBS home. He then told a funny story about how, the Monday after the Friday of his last Tonight Show broadcast, he was forced to convene his staff at a Marie Callender’s. O’Brien located the restaurant in Burbank, but it’s actually Toluca Lake.

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When Kim Kardashian first started seeing wedding bells with Kris Humphries, producer Jonathan Murray didn’t bat an eyelash — because he knew it wouldn’t last.

“With Kim and her marriage, she showed up for Kourtney and Kim Take New York a week after the honeymoon, and we just documented what happened,” the executive producer of Keeping Up With the Kardashians said in mediabistro.com’s So What Do You Do? interview, “and it was pretty clear that these two people maybe weren’t exactly right for each other, that they didn’t have as much going for them as a couple as they thought they had when they entered the relationship.”

Murray, whose Bunim-Murray Productions also created The Real World, Road Rules and Bad Girls Club, also debunked rumors that his team encouraged the two to get hitched. “Kim did not seek us out as to who she should marry, nor should she. ”

Think you’ve got what it takes to be a reality TV producer, read the full interview for Murray’s tips on breaking in.

Paul Butler has been named the general manager of Aspire, Magic Johnson‘s new cable network, according to Jon Weisman of Variety.

Butler is a senior vice president and general counsel at the Gospel Music Channel in Atlanta —  a role he will continue during his transition to Aspire. The former Viacom executive has handled the day-to-day operations for Aspire since Johnson announced his plans to launch a network for African Americans in February.

“We conducted an extensive search for the right person to lead Aspire and found that he was right here all along, and already on the GMC team,” said Johnson. “Paul has a long track record of success with GMC with a wide range of responsibility and oversight.

It’s just one more stroke of genius for the empire that Steve Jobs built. Despite having more cash on hand than any of its competitors, Apple never has to pay for Hollywood to place its products in film and TV shows.

Per an article in Bloomberg Businessweek by San Francisco-based Peter Burroughs and LA-located Andy Fixmer, this no-cost sideline is booming:

The company’s gadgets were discussed or shown 891 times on TV in 2011, up from 613 in 2009, according to researcher Nielsen (NLSN). In the same year, iDevices appeared in more than 40 percent of the movies that topped the weekly box office, according to Brandchannel, which tracks product appearances. That’s nearly twice the penetration of the next most common brands in Hollywood—Dell (DELL), Chevy (GM), and Ford (F).

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Less than two months after Will Ferrell announced that Anchorman 2 was a go, a teaser trailer for the 2013 sequel is ready to go and airing in theaters before The Dictator.

Collider has the details from a source that saw an early screening of the new Sacha Baron Cohen comedy:

“Just got out of a screening of The Dictator. There is an Anchorman 2 teaser attached featuring the Channel 4 news team (minus Veronica) stating how excited they are to return… a concept that Brick seems to have a hard time with. Also, not sure if it was an official title or more of a slogan but the screen title read Anchorman: The Legend Continues followed by ’2013′”

Actress Christina Applegate is still on the bubble for the project. When the teaser eventually leaks, we will pass it along so you can save your $12 and not sit through 83 minutes of The Dictator.