Risky Business

Did Tom Cruise really get kicked out of his studio for bad behaviour?

When Cruise dropped his long time publicist and discovered he loved the media and really, really, loved Katie Holmes, I hopped right on his crazy train. Here was an actor that had assiduously created the persona of an old-style A-lister. People called him the hardest-working man in showbiz and his image remained squeaky clean, even during his divorce to Nicole Kidman. Anyone who dared speculate about his sexuality in print found a hail of lawyers raining down upon them.

Once Tom found Katie, all of that changed. Soon there wasn’t a camera he didn’t love and the formerly reserved actor’s appearance on Oprah spawned the phrase "Jumped the couch." He publicly feuded with Brooke Shields about post-partum depression and the use of drugs and called psychiatry a Nazi science. Scientology, which he’d long been an adherent, began to play a more open role in his life. People called him crazy and the label started to stick as rumours swirled around Holmes’ pregnancy, the birth of Suri and TomKat's subsequent media aversion.

It all came to a head this week when Sumner Redstone, the chairman of Viacom (Paramount Picture's parent company) publicly kicked the superstar to curb. "As much as we like him personally, we thought it was wrong to renew his deal. His recent conduct has not been acceptable to Paramount," Redstone said. "It's nothing to do with his acting abilities. He's a terrific actor. But we don't think that someone who effectuates career suicide and costs the company revenue should be on the lot."

Career suicide? While Redstone claims Cruise's antics may have hurt the box office take of Mission: Impossible III by as much as $150 million, the film is still expected to bring in $400-million worldwide. Cruise has been working with Paramount for 14 years and his most recent films have averaged around $100 million each.

I’ll admit that Cruise has been off the rails, but has it really been that detrimental? It’s been fun blogging material and he is incredibly off base about psychiatry, but who was going to take his opinions seriously in the first place? Was being hummingbird excited on Oprah so terrible? Maybe M:I3 sales were down because nobody was really looking for a sequel and John Woo’s M:I2 sucked (there, I said it).

Clearly this was about money and the obscene amount of it that Cruise was getting before the studio got its taste. Which is fine – it’s called show business and cold, hard cash talks. I don’t see why the studio need to hide its reasoning behind such a flimsy excuse as Cruise’s antics. Mel Gibson’s recent drunken racist rant didn’t get him cut off by the studio putting out Apocalypto, and it is Disney no less. They obviously believe he’s still an earner so they are turning a blind eye. If Cruise could still make studios billions, he could jump on as many couches as he liked.

Hide-and-Suri

Tom Cruise just can’t win. I find it odd to be feeling sympathetic towards world famous bazillionaire, but circus surrounding the whereabouts (or indeed, even existence) of little Suri Cruise has become absurd.

It has been over three months Suri was born (bought/came out of the test tube/ fell to earth) and still the clamouring public has yet to see Katie Holmes and Tom’s spawn. Does she exist? Was Katie just wearing an ever-expanding pillow around? Is it because Suri looks as much like Tom as Blanket does to Michael Jackson? These are some of the increasingly outlandish claims surrounding Scientology’s chosen couple.

Now I enjoy conspiracy theories and making fun of celebs as much as the next person, but I think the circus surrounding the non-existent pics is a little much. When Tom turned into a couch-jumping, propose-at-the-Eiffel-Tower lunatic, everyone wondered why the previously press savvy star all of a sudden couldn’t find a camera he didn’t love. His public respect began dipping in direct relation to how much face time he received.

Cut to a year later and the couple is now being camera shy with their baby and everyone wants to know why. Jolie and Pitt trot out their little one for $4.1 million and everyone swans over Baby’s First Invasion of privacy. Meanwhile when Tom and Katie’s kid doesn’t grace the tabloids, people speculate their price wasn’t met. Maybe, just maybe, they’ve decided their baby doesn’t need to be exposed to the public curiosity fuelled paparazzi cameras. Nah, that can’t be it. Kid must look like an alien.

(Wonderful X-Files mashup poster from The Art Pitt.)

Hollywood Economics

Skin commands a lot of money, more so if you are famous. I know, I’m hardly breaking news here, but there have been a couple of stories recently that shows what a pound of flesh is worth.

A few weeks ago, People magazine shelled out $4.1 million for pictures of the chosen one, Shiloh Nouvel Pitt-Jolie, setting the bar for Baby’s First Invasion of Privacy.

It appears $4 million is the going rate to see Ashlee Simpson as naked as the day she was born. In Touch Weekly says Playboy has offered the lip-syncher seven figures, under the assumption more people would prefer to look at her breasts than hear her sing.

"Ashlee figures she's never looked better, so this may be the perfect time to do it,” an insider told the magazine. "She feels confident and sexy and thinks this is one way for her to separate her image from (sister) Jessica's."

Yeah, getting everyone to stare at her body would really help define her differently than Jessica. Sadly, Ashlee has decided her body is not for sale, at least at that price anyway.

Which is, essentially, why we haven’t seen any pictures of Suri Cruise gracing the newsstand. The gossip magazine were only willing to pony up a measly $3 mill for Scientology’s latest poster child, and Tom and Katie (ok, Tom and his handlers) balked, refusing to sell out their kid for less than Brad and Angie got.

Which means Britney should expect a month’s supply of Cheeetos when she pops out her second born.

For the Love of Money

Remember Tom Cruise and Kate Holmes? They were the Hollywood couple that had a baby before Shiloh Jolie-Pitt became the next stage in human evolution.

Anyway, it turns out that they are still around and spreading the love cash around. Anyone who somehow still believes that they have been pin cushioned by Cupid’s arrows need only look at the mega-buck prenuptial agreement they have signed.

Cruise is reportedly offering Holmes $3 million for each year she maintains the façade of marriage, for up to $33 million. If she makes it through eleven years of Scientology brainwashing she will be eligible to take Maverick for half his fortune, estimated to be around more money than you’ll ever see in your lifetime.

Now isn’t that what love is all about, getting everything that you can and than hitting the road? She might as well, her film career wasn’t going anywhere. I can’t see what Cruise is getting out of it though, everybody already thinks he’s crazy.

May their love last until death, or $33 million, do they part.

(TomRat Family Portrait from Gallery of the Absurd. Seriously, she's really that good.)

Just the Facts?

Celebrity culture is driving me crazy -- more specifically, the media’s treatment of celebs. Bear with me here as I appear to bite the blog that feeds me.

What is driving me crazy is how “facts” are repeated down the chain, with very little or no verification. I’ll give you an example. I read a copy of Metro today (a daily Toronto commuter paper) and came across a story about Lindsay Lohan dating Leonardo DiCaprio, according to Ananova.com, which was reporting a story in New! Magazine.

I also found out that a pregnant Gwyneth Paltrow may have eaten raw fish, reported by imdb.com, again picked up by Metro. Now I can admit to reading celeb gossip, but I hate seeing it passed along second and third hand in newspapers and magazines. I’m not picking on Metro, everyone does it.

Before I continue on my rant, I have to come clean. I have written pieces like the ones that I am complaining about, I’ve been paid for them and will likely do it again. I’m a hypocrite, but it doesn’t mean I like it.

So what’s my point? People want to read about the stars and they are going to be written about, but I’m tired of seeing the same things being repeated ad nauseum, especially all over the web. I saw today that Tom Cruise is putting off his wedding to Katie Holmes until the summer. I saw it over 200 times on Google News and I’m fairly certain there wasn’t a press conference.

Maybe if we stuck with original source reporting/gossiping it would help keep celebrity obsession in check, or at least improve the discourse a little. Mind you, I don't mind it when bloggers pass along this info

Which brings me to Gawker Stalker. The media/celebrity/gossip site has begun mapping readers celebrity sightings on a Google map of New York in real time. So there we have it, celebrity reporting straight from the mouths and eyes of fans. Of course it’s also more than a little bit obsessive.

George Clooney agrees and is trying to foil the site by flooding it with fake sightings.

"There is a simple way to render these guys useless. Flood their Web site with bogus sightings. Get your clients to get 10 friends to text in fake sightings of any number of stars. A couple hundred conflicting sightings and this Web site is worthless. No need to try to create new laws to restrict free speech. Just make them useless. That's the fun of it. And then sit back and enjoy the ride."

Oddly enough, Clooney is the most reasonable sounding one – and he is the one subjected to all the coverage. Bizarre. I suppose I just don’t understand the interest in celebrities, but I’ll keep trying.

Where Does the Truth Lie?

Now I don’t know if two films a trend makes, but I’ve got a question: Does Hollywood have it out for the media or just women?

Female journalists don’t come off all that well in Atom Egoyan’s Where The Truth Lies. Karen O’Conner (played by Alison Lohman) is writing a book about Vince Collins (Colin Firth) and she not only messes around with her subject but sleeps with his music and comedy partner Lanny Morris (Kevin Bacon) as well.

So fine, there is one working woman who goes a little too far for the story. But then there is another woman, an editor of a college paper who sleeps with them both while interviewing them, and then attempts to blackmail them over a story.

We just saw Where The Truth Lies, but it came out around the just before the Toronto Film Festival, where Thank You For Smoking premiered. In it Katie Holmes' journalist character sleeps with a tobacco lobbyist played by Aaron Eckhart to get information that she uses in a scathing profile that ruins his career.

You may have heard about that scene – it’s the one that wasn’t in the Sundance version of the screening and has created much speculation that Tom Cruise used his star power to have the scene of his fiancé in the flesh expunged from the flick. The director says it was an editing mistake and will be back in the film when it debuts in March. I’ve seen it and it’s no big deal.

But I digress. Is this an attack against the media? Certainly Hollywood has no love lost for reporters. While they are necessary for them to sell their product I’m sure many see them as parasites. So is it women they are after, criticizing as social climbers who will do anything to get ahead?

Don't get me wrong, I actually really enjoyed the film and think it got hurt by a pointless NC-17 rating. I just wish I had asked Egoyan this question when we saw him at the screening. Ooops.