Steinberg is also in the process of soliciting financing for another Newport Beach sports agency. All in all, the man forever associated with Tom Cruise’s character in Jerry Maguire is authoring a gridiron-worthy comeback story:

On Saturday, friend and business partner Richard Gillam will throw a party to celebrate Steinberg’s three years of sobriety and his real birthday, which is next Wednesday.

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It matters very little that Brianna Baker bears no meaningful resemblance to either Oprah Winfrey or Cruise attorney Bert Fields; she inhabits both with real skill and technique. This might be the best Winfrey impression I’ve seen, one that doesn’t overplay its hand but perfectly embodies her vocal tics and regal self-regard.

The Brandon Ogborn script sources media coverage of Cruise and Holmes from 1998 through 2012 to skewer celebrity journalism as much as it does Scientology. Ortega’s tipster, Synthia Fagen, says that Ogborn has told her there may be some interest from Comedy Central. [Editor's note: Please see reader comments below.]

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Our good friend Tony Ortega sums it up this way:

For those of us who watch Scientology closely, and have for many years, most of the [Lawrence Wright book-related] articles that have popped up in recent days seem to be gasping over things that have been known or written about for many years…

We would argue that for much of the public, the word [about Scientology] was already out long before today’s publication of Wright’s book. (Look at the reaction, for example, when on Monday The Atlantic magazine ran a paid church advertorial at its website extolling the virtues of Scientology leader David Miscavige. Even though there was nothing really wrong with The Atlantic taking the church’s money for an ad, the public denunciation of the magazine was so swift and loud, The Atlantic caved and took it down.)

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The shorter excerpt is about John Travolta, told through his former [Church] personal assistant, Spanky Taylor. We guess it can be told now that Spanky has helped several of us reporters over the years — our relationship with her goes back over a decade — but Wright is the first to get her to speak on the record, ever. Maybe it was his Alabama charm.

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Patterned after OC Weekly editor Gustavo Arellano‘s “¡Ask a Mexican!,” Scott’s tongue-in-cheek responses to emailed questions from readers are a bold and brash attempt to connect with a major part of the WeHo constituency. Is it working? We’re not sure, but the format certainly has fun leapfrogging over usual letter-from-the-publisher boundaries. Here for example is how Scott began a recent response to a woman asking whether celebrities still need today to worry about staying in the closet:

So you’re asking me if Tom Cruise is gay? Don’t know. Haven’t slept with him. And seriously, he’s so not my type (I like ‘em edgy and have a thing for shaved heads)…

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The video itself is posted exclusively on Gawker together with a story by John Cook. It showcases a work-in-progress rap song recording laid down by a group of big-name former Church members. Led by Nazanin Boniadi (pictured), the British-Iranian actress at the center of a recent Vanity Fair cover story claiming she was hand-picked by the Church to be Tom Cruise’s girlfriend. One of Boniadi’s lyrics goes like this – ‘It’s a blind alley, like Kirstie Alley.’

In both the Gawker item and on Ortega’s blog, the critical role played by the tireless CoS watchdog reporter in helping flush out this material is explained:

In November, I was in Los Angeles and was hanging out with a British television crew that is making an hour-long documentary about Scientology for Channel 4 that will air in March. I told them about the song, and they were anxious to see if we could get [Tiziano] Lugli to play it for us. We met him at his Hollywood Hills home, and he took us into the studio.

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Jay Leno first quoted Polito’s 1998 synopsis on The Tonight Show a decade ago. When the talk show host revisited the same material for a “Headlines” segment in late October, a Reddit user launched the synopsis on its merry viral way. With Polito’s name as the source author cut out. (It was visible on Leno, although somewhat cryptically, the attribution reads: ‘Inquirer Television Writer Lee Winfrey and Rick Polito of Universal Press Syndicate contributed to this report.’)

“Part of what bothers me is that both times, Leno presented this as a mistake in the newspaper, when obviously it’s a joke that I wrote,” Polito tells FishbowlLA via telephone. “My Marin Independent Journal TV column was syndicated at the time to the Philadelphia Inquirer and other newspapers.”

Jim Romenesko was the first to point out the viral mistake. “Romenesko did his homework,” Polito explains. “He called me up on that Friday [October 26] and then FishbowlLA picked up on it, as did Gawker, BuzzFeed, Entertainment Weekly and some other places.”

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The headline is a reference to a quote from ex-Scientologist Marc Headley, who deems Tom Cruise’s relationship with embattled church leader David Miscagive to be “the most intense, expensive bromance in history.” Later on in the article, Headley’s wife Claire repeats some damaging claims that the “bromance” is built on a lie, and that behind Cruise’s back, Miscavige has repeatedly mocked the actor.

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Oyelowo is very good in The Paperboy, playing one half of a crack Miami newspaper reporting team (together with Matthew McConaughey) that comes to Lately, Florida in 1969 to investigate the possibly wrongful Death Row conviction of a local man (John Cusack) for the murder of a town sheriff. The actor has a big fan in Daniels, who planned earlier to make a civil rights era movie with Oyelowo as Martin Luther King Jr. and has the performer in his next film, The Butler. From The Paperboy press notes:

Daniels rewrote the character specifically for Oyelowo, transforming the part of Yardley Acheman from a white reporter into a cultured and sophisticated black man, whose English accent helps him navigate the still largely segregated American South of the 1960s. “As a black man himself, Lee was very interested in how a black reporter in Florida in 1969 would have been greeted and how he would react in that situation,” says Oyelowo.

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The first comes from attorney Bert Fields, who says that if someone were foolish enough to believe Maureen Orth’s article, “even she [the reporter] doesn’t claim that Tom knew what she claims the church was doing.” The other is delivered by Cruise’s 42West publicist Amanda Lundberg (pictured). She says the VF piece was nothing but “lies designed to sell magazines” and then adds this bucket of cold water:

Lundberg denies that Cruise ever forced his religion on Holmes. “He has a right to believe what he wants to believe,” says Lundberg. “Do I think fans care about it? No. Do I think he owes anybody an explanation? No. He has a job to do, and he does it better than anybody. He has nothing to apologize for.”

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Today, there is more of what will be much more as the Vanity Fair October issue begins to circulate. Over at Tony Ortega’s Village Voice CoS blog, Haggis has chimed in with a few more thoughts. He clarifies that although his emails to Showbiz 411 columnist Roger Friedman were taken as confirmation of the VF report, “Like everyone else, I have not even read their story.”

But Haggis stands firm on the central point of his reaching out. Vouching for Boniadi’s character:

“I am simply coming to the defense of a woman who has been publicly called a liar… Perhaps it’s just me, but I have never found Scientology’s blanket denials equally credible… It is my understanding that Naz is the subject of this article, not the source of it. Scientology has a long and well-documented history of attempting to bully its critics into silence. Here they are bullying a woman who has yet to even speak. I guess I just don’t like bullies.”

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First came the Saturday online tease for Vanity Fair’s Maureen Orth October issue cover story “What Katie Didn’t Know.” The article details how Iranian-born actress Nazanin Boniadi was unwittingly auditioned in late 2004 by the Church of Scientology to be Tom Cruise’s girlfriend and slotted into that role for what turned out to be a tumultuous few months. CoS watcher Tony Ortega commented Sunday that Orth deserves extra credit for figuring out a way to expose this latest bit of sordid CoS history (officially denied by the church):

Boniadi has wanted to tell her story for years, we’d heard, but she’s bound by multiple non-disclosure agreements from doing so. We hear that Orth managed to do a classic “write-around,” putting together Boniadi’s story without help from Boniadi herself.

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“It’s funny, the one place where we all end up is the Santa Barbara Film Festival,” Feinberg told FishbowlLA via telephone yesterday shortly after arriving in the rain. “It’s weird. Some of us can’t make it to Telluride, some of us can’t make it to Toronto. But the one that it just seems, year after year, all the usual LA Oscar beat writers end up at is Santa Barbara.”

Everything is walking distance in Telluride. It’s also a place where, with a very few exceptions, outlets pay the same hefty price for journalist passes as attendees. And because locals are used to living next to the likes of Ralph Lauren, Oprah Winfrey and Tom Cruise, the already secluded event has a welcome, casual feel for A-list attendees. Starting with today’s traditional kick-off picnic.

“At the end of last year’s awards season, George Clooney told me Telluride had been one of the highlights of the circuit, which he was on for a whole six months,” Feinberg recalled. “He felt that he could walk around here with no bodyguards, no entourage… Of course, one or two people might still ask him for photos. But it’s nothing like LA or Toronto.”

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Ortega remains the church’s number one journalistic foe, tirelessly publishing scoop after scoop. But FishbowlLA figured that this latest Saturday-Sunday opus must rank pretty high on his list of feature articles. Via email, Ortega concurred.

“I think this is definitely one of my favorite four or five Scientology pieces I’ve ever done,” Ortega says. “And people are telling me it fills in some interesting gaps in the historical record, so that’s nice to hear.”

“I was talking to JB for more than a year,” he adds. “In February 2011, Larry Wright’s New Yorker piece described some of the work Brousseau had done for Tom Cruise, and then I actually put his photos of that work up (Marty Rathbun had already done that too). Then, over the last year JB helped me here and there with stuff and questions about people like Ann Tidman [link] and Shelly Miscavige [link].”

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