Posted Apr 14th 2007 3:01AM by TMZ Staff
In a perfect Zone, the forthcoming sex tape from Season Two "American Idol" contestant Olivia Mojica would play out to the sounds of William Hung's "She Bangs," but for this sorry lot, a simple funeral march will suffice.
Don Imus: We had Don on last week's list, but since then, events have conspired to put him in the running for This Year's Biggest Loser. Stripped of his MSNBC simulcast and WFAN-AM syndicated morning radio show, he's now pushing the control buttons of "Imus in the Mourning." Would producer Bernie McGurk's ill-fated comments have sparked as big a furor had they been exchanged with a top-selling rap artist? You know, the kind that keeps radio parent company Viacom in the green via MTV and BET? Hard to say, but with the loss of Howard Stern and now the 66-year-old Imus, CBS Radio is suffering a serious case of jock shock.
Click here... it's not over yet
Filed under: The Z List
Tags: bernie mcgerk, bernie mcgurk, BernieMcgerk, BernieMcgurk, cbs, cbs radio, CbsRadio, david e. kelley, DavidE.Kelley, don imus, DonImus, girls gone wild, GirlsGoneWild, grindhouse, harvey weinstein, HarveyWeinstein, joe francis, JoeFrancis, Life on Mars, LifeOnMars, loser, losers, michelee pfeiffer, MicheleePfeiffer, miramax, olivia mojica, OliviaMojica, richard smoak, RichardSmoak, rosie o'donnell, RosieO'donnell, The Wedding Bells, TheWeddingBells, tom delay, TomDelay, townhall.com, TV, viacom, z-list
Posted Sep 20th 2006 12:57PM by TMZ Staff
The kinda-reality-but-mostly-staged MTV hit "Laguna Beach: The Real OC" has gotten even less real. MTV launched the "Virtual Laguna Beach" today so that we can all participate in the good life on the sun-baked beaches of Orange County.
It's Second Life meets Laguna Beach as MTV tries to expand its presence online. MTV is giving users the ability create their own personal hot-bodied, fashionable avatars. (Avatars are the virtual representation of a user, in this case the character created for use in a virtual world) The idea is to create a virtual online community akin to MySpace which allows users to interact at the hot spots made famous by the TV show.
If the idea of missing "Laguna Beach: The Real OC" because you're too busy mingling with your Virtual Laguna Beach avatar gives you cold sweats, never fear. You can watch video clips from the show in virtual theaters.
The only drawback is that the avatars only have the ability to kiss- nothing more. "The lips touch, but the bodies don't," according to MTV's Senior VP Matt Bostwick.
Unfortunately, you'll have to virtually keep it in your pants.
Filed under: Wacky & Weird, Celebritoyz
Tags: avatars, laguna beach the real oc, LagunaBeachTheRealOc, mtv, orange county, OrangeCounty, viacom, virtual laguna beach, VirtualLagunaBeach
Posted Sep 6th 2006 11:30AM by TMZ Staff
Christine Vachon, the inimitable indie film producer, has a rule about how to handle "Variety": 'Read the stories backwards to find out what's really going on.'
Her thinking? The real news is buried at the bottom, where it won't hurt the delicate sensibilities and out-sized egos of the executives it covers.
So, what's the second-to-last paragraph of "Daily Variety's" Viacom fallout story?
"Meanwhile, on the Par lot Monday, senior executives were busy working the phones, calling producers, filmmakers and other execs hoping to quash any speculation or uncertainty over implications Freston's departure has for future changes at the studio."
In Vachon's worldview, that ought to have been the lead, and she's probably right: Grey's days are probably numbered at Paramount.
A top New York-based talent agent put it to me this way: "Now is the time to say nice things about Brad Grey in the press, while continuing to do disgusting things behind closed doors. He's been the teflon executive so far, but there've been too many runs to the men's room: He's stalling."
Ironically, the very thing that saved his job thus far - the acquisition of DreamWorks - may be the one that catapults him out of a gig. By most talent agent's estimations, former Universal Pictures chairwoman and current DreamWorks president Stacey Snider is the Grey heir apparent at Paramount.
"You can quickly become fond of that job after being away from it," says one agent, "And she's been away from it long enough."
True, newly appointed CEO Phillipe Dauman tells Daily Variety, "I am very supportive of Brad Grey. I've spent a relatively large amount of time talking to him. We've had great conversations."
But that's in the fifth paragraph of the story - and using Vachon's formula, way too high up to possibly be true.
Filed under: City Of Industry
Tags: Brad Grey, BradGrey, Paramount, Sumner Redstone, SumnerRedstone, Viacom
Posted Sep 5th 2006 10:34AM by TMZ Staff
Since time immemorial, Hollywood has waited until just after Labor Day to uncork its nastiest surprises to the media.
This year was no exception. Despite having the best hair in the business, MTV's longtime architect and current Viacom CEO Tom Freston has been canned.
Freston's departure from Viacom is such a bombshell, one hardly knows where to begin. On the one hand, it's fantastic theater, with classic - almost cliched - melodramatic trappings of business soap opera. (One imagines a scarlet-to-purple faced Redstone bellowing at his well-coiffed lieutenant, "I told you to make that deal, and you didn't! You're fired!")
On the other, it clearly shows where traditional media is headed: On-line, dummy.
As "The Wall Street Journal" remarked last week,
"MTV Overdrive, a free video Web site featuring music videos, news and MTV's hit programming, attracts fewer than four million unique visitors a month, a small fraction of MTV's 82 million monthly U.S. television viewers. More worrisome: MTV's Web sites are being whipped by rivals such as MySpace, the new home of the MTV generation. MySpace gets nearly 55 million unique visitors in the U.S. a month. YouTube, a fast-growing video Web site, draws 16 million."
In other words, in a world with a brand like MTV, why does MySpace even exist? Indeed, why wasn't social networking simply part of MTV.com?
But in examining the firing of Tom Freston, we should begin with what loaded the gun, and then move on to what pulled the trigger.
Two weeks ago, "Daily Variety" correspondent Jill Goldsmith filed a story that would have been the writing on the wall, were it not for the vigorous denials of an unnamed corporate flack.
Viz,
"...[recent] headlines over MySpace.com were the latest in a series of media stories touting its triumphs, including a lucrative pact with Google, a deal to download movies and the seven trillionth subscriber.
All this attention has made Viacom execs eager to explain why they didn't snap up MySpace. At media conferences, Viacom execs have said it's simple: The price was too high, and MySpace just didn't fit with Viacom's financial metrics. According to one company insider, however, Viacom CEO Tom Freston was asked by chairman Sumner Redstone to go to San Francisco to get the deal done but never went. [itals ours]
A company spokesman said, 'That's patently untrue.' "
Now, class, compare and contrast:
In Viacom's own
CBS MarketWatch coverage of Freston's firing, what does Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone say?
That Freston successor Phillipe Dauman would "never, ever, let another competitor beat us to the trophy."
(As
Bloomberg.com recognizes, "Dauman's background is in mergers and acquisitions, not in media programming.")
And so as of 2005, clearly, the bullet was in the chamber.
Now, some housekeeping and some other delicious behind the scenes details. As to housekeeping, the Wall Street Journal notes that "the 60-year-old Mr. Freston has been under pressure because of Viacom's sluggish price, down 7.6% since separating from CBS Corp. on Jan. 3."
But it also notes, as
yours truly did two weeks ago, that Freston's authority within Viacom appeared seriously undermined after Redstone shot Tom Cruise out of a cannon in August. in a recent City of Industry post entitled "Now Who's Running Amok?" we pointed out that the ancient Redstone had gone on the warpath against his CEOs many times before whenever he felt marginalized.
Viz,
"his castigation of Cruise is said by knowledgeable insiders to have taken both Viacom co-CEO Tom Freston and Paramount Pictures chairman Brad Grey by complete surprise...Some posit that the rationale for Redstone's indelicate (and apparently, unadvised) harangue was to take back the limelight he'd lost earlier this year. In essence, his Cruise missile was fired to reassert himself into the running of a company he'd split in two in January and divided between Tom Freston of MTV and Leslie Moonves at CBS. Based on Redstone's previous behavior, it's not such a wild theory: Redstone has gotten into fisticuffs with major Viacom execs before, including former Viacom CEO Frank Biondi, who Sumner fired because
he wanted to run the company, and with Mel Karmazin, who so tired of being co-opted that he decamped Viacom's CBS for Sirius Satellite Radio."
So, now what?
Well, if the future is any indication at all, Dauman would be wise to open his checkbook and just buy
YouTube.As a July think-piece in
Variety observed,
"it's new media that Viacom and particularly MTV really need to focus on. With a median age of 21, MTV's viewership is most likely to fall into the category that spends more time logged on than tuned in; a recent study noted people ages 13-24 now spend as much as 25% more time online than watching TV.
Oh. and, Phillipe: If Sumner even hints that "I might find it amusing if I had diet Coke," I'd suggest dropping everything and getting your one calorie ass in gear to get him that soothing beverage, pronto. Even at 83, Sumner Redstone has again proven that he's no one to be ignored.Filed under: The Biz, City Of Industry
Tags: MTV, Sumner Redstone, SumnerRedstone, Tom Freston, TomFreston, Viacom
