This is really intriguing. As part of its next “Hollywood Legends” event April 5-6, Julien’s Auctions in Beverly Hills will be for the first time selling some slices of videotaped Hollywood casting history. With all sorts of big names in the mix:

Tapes include Leonardo DiCaprio’s audition for the role of Ponyboy in The Outsiders; Brad Pitt, Robert Downey Jr., Keanu Reeves and Dermot Mulroney for Backdraft; Sandra Bullock, Gwyneth Paltrow, Julianne Moore, Helen Hunt and others for roles in Jurassic Park; David Arquette, Adrien Brody, Noah Wylie, Ben Affleck and Lisa Kudrow auditioning with Ellen DeGeneres for Mr. Wrong; Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly, Patrick Dempsey and others for A Beautiful Mind; and more.

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Listeners of the Petros & Money show on KLAC got to hear a different side of Los Angeles Times columnist Bill Plaschke on Thursday afternoon.

Yeah, yeah, Plaschke did eventually talk about sports, but he opened the show with Matt “Money” Smith discussing hotel porn and Helen Hunt‘s “lady garden.”

I don’t know what was more disturbing: Plaschke waxing poetic about Helen Hunt’s “lady garden” or him implying that he use to get off to the hotel porn previews while on the road.

Either way, I’m good on Plaschke ever having a radio show.

Yes, we know – the Top 10 Celebrity Nude Scenes of 2012 announced this week by the Chicago connoisseurs who run mrskin.com is not typically the kind of thing we cover at FishbowlLA. But #9 on this year’s list was too meta to pass up.

The scene in question, from Californication episode “At the Movies,” is all about an attractive Hollywood actress (Sarah Power) well aware that she has been hired because of her willingness to show her breasts in a movie. What makes the scene doubly meta is that when she nervously flashes her upper-body assets to screenwriter Hank (David Duchovny) in his trailer ahead of her nude scene, he ends his praise with: “… and nab yourself a Mr. Skin Award in the bargain.”

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In recent weeks, FishbowlLA has written about two separate Variety.com blog posts that alleged the time-stamps of Emma Stone and Sundance Film Festival news items on Deadline.com were false. In both cases, Variety‘s BlogDogger–based on some stated live Web monitoring–insinuated that Deadline.com must have jerry-rigged the date-time stamps of these particular articles, to make it appear that the items were posted earlier than when they actually were.

Baloney, counters the author of both Deadline.com items, Mike Fleming. Speaking to FishbowlLA today via telephone from New York, he explained that he has the ability to direct-post articles to Deadline.com and did so with the first article in question, about Stone’s project Little White Corvette.

“I had the story done the night before,” Fleming explains. “I wake up early every morning here in New York, before driving my daughter to school. My computer is always on, and even though I had been in touch with GK Films the previous day and was told I could post the item sooner, I figured I would just break it in the morning.” In other words, Fleming says the 6:00 am ET/3:00 am PT time-stamp on the Stone item reflects what he did at his computer the morning of Thursday, January 5.

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Today’s Studio City Patch article “A Little School in Crisis, Part 1” clocks in at an astonishing 2,289 words. That’s four times the normal Patch.com website item length.

The first of a four-part series by site editor Mike Szymanski, the article details the uncertain times faced by Valley View Elementary in light of county-wide LAUSD cuts. When word came down last June that 82-year-old principal Harold Klein (pictured) had been given his walking papers, student parents went into overdrive.

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The year’s barely begun and yet the ick is already flowing. In Robin Abcarian’s piece on Dirt in the LA Times, she confides that show creator Matthew Carnahan calls Helen Hunt his “baby mama”. Home delivery should come with barf bags.

Carnahan also gushed about the Sun’s Rebekah Wade, but claims to have never met Bonnie Fuller. He also said, in reference to the death of the Princess of Wales:

I thought, now we are going to shift into something more elegant, more distanced, more objective, more human, boy was I wrong.

Well yes, and he should be thrilled, as in a more elegant time, he’d be just another case of mistaken identity. In a wierd little twist, Ian Hart’s paparazzi character isn’t just a sleaze-bag with a telephoto lens, he’s also a schizophrenic, because what normal person could do that job? He’s called Don Konkey (Don Quixote, geddit?) so we’ll see his inner idealism (insert inevitable future reference to his failed career shooting war scenes and dead babies.)

Courteney Cox, to study up for the taxing role of tabloid editor Lucy Spiller, hung out with close pal Jane Pratt. Such a serious thespian–let us know when she decides to play Natasha Cornett. The NY Times says she’s “strangely wooden and bland”–is she ever not?

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