Archives: October 2009

The human body is a disgusting thing. If you live long enough, something truly horrifying will happen to yours. And when it does, well, you wanna talk about it.

Your friends may be sick of listening to your tales of shattered pelvises, festering boils and dislocated eyeballs, but that doesn’t mean you’re tired of telling them. Local performance troupe Art of Bleeding wants to hear all about it. The group is building a library of real-life medical horror stories and offer a toll-free hotline to anyone who wants to spill their guts. An audio archive of scary stories is available online.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom has withdrawn from the 2010 race for California Governor. Earlier this year Newsom formally announced his candidacy on Twitter. Today Facebook helps him end his campaign-

Newsom hasn’t updated his Twitter page yet.

Yesterday would have been Dominick Dunne‘s 84th birthday. Friends of the recently deceased journalist gathered last night at the at the Chateau Marmont to celebrate his remarkable life. Steven Mikulan was in attendance, and writes about the memorial on his blog L.A. Noir:

Thursday night’s toast to Dunne was attended by a mix of the people he knew from Hollywood and the courts, and also by the street reporters he met and befriended during the first Phil Spector trial – Ciaran McEvoy, Peter Hong, Harriet Ryan and the court blogger Betsy Ross, aka “Sprocket.”

Dunne’s actor son, Griffin, recalling that as a child his parents would visit friends in this very same suite, related how Dominick gave his kids firecrackers to toss at the police down on Sunset Boulevard during the curfew riots of 1966.

Author Lawrence Schiller praised Dunne for raising social issues usually kept out of polite conversation, while former Los Angeles D.A. Ira Reiner spoke of Dunne’s uncanny ability to attract sources of information during O.J. Simpson‘s first trial.

TMZ founder Harvey Levin recounted how Dunne’s righteous indignation over the judicial miscarriage following the murder of his daughter, Dominique, inspired Levin, then a KNBC reporter, to relentlessly delve into the trial, while keynote speaker Linda Deutsch of Associated Press described Dunne’s unshakable personal loyalty to colleagues.

Photo from William Morris Endeavor

Daniel Battsek is leaving his post as president of Miramax after 18 years of working for Disney. Details from The Wrap:

“With the change in direction at Miramax, we have reached a mutual agreement with Daniel that he will leave his post as president, effective January 2010,” Rich Ross, newly appointed chairman of the Walt Disney Studios, said in a release Friday.

The news comes less than a month after Disney significantly downsized the division’s release schedule and folded much of its operations into the studio’s larger film group.

Anyone keeping track of web traffic knows that celebrity news equals page hits, if not journalistic respectability. Maybe that’s why the LA Times is launching a new celebrity blog. Below is the LAT memo, found via LA Observed:

To: The Staff
From: Lisa Fung, Online Arts & Entertainment Editor

Christie D’Zurilla is joining the entertainment team as a blogger for a new celebrity blog on latimes.com. The move is a natural progression for Christie, a former stand-up comic and SAG card holder who has been a copy editor and backstop for the Dish Rag blog since it launched on the site in 2007. In addition to anchoring the blog, Christie will edit posts submitted by other contributors.

Read more

Delaware-based advertising agency Denizen scored a patent for product placement back in 2005. And now, The Hollywood Reporter explains, the delusional little company is suing a media agency called Mindshare for “stealing an idea to integrate a brand of Vaseline into a Lifetime miniseries called Maneater.”

Richard Rushfield of Gawker took the time to read the patent, and has posted it on the Gawker site. He declared:

This legalistic rabbit hole’s silliness is so profound that it makes us think that it might be time to throw the entire judicial system out the window and muddle by on mob rule for a few decades.

Scarier than zombies. Nadya Suleman and her demon brood celebrate Halloween.

Picture from the Daily Mail.