Movies

The final product of Lindsay Lohan's movie-set meltdown is finally here ... well, at least the trailer is.

Today, the trailer for Lohan's new flick, "Georgia Rule," dropped over at Moviefone, but the real story is the string of mishaps that went down behind the scenes. While shooting the film, Linds was hospitalized for "dehydration," was verbally attacked by William H. Macy, and received a very public reprimand in a letter leaked from the CEO of Morgan Creek, who called the starlet "discourteous, irresponsible and unprofessional," adding that she "endangered the quality of this picture."

TMZ has obtained more clips from Anna Nicole Smith's final movie, "Illegal Aliens."

The movie, scheduled for a straight-to-DVD release in May, shows Anna Nicole (baby doll voice and all) as a space alien trying to stop an intergalactic terrorist -- played by the equally outrageous Chyna Doll. Smith gets to show off her acting chops by dropping TrimSpa references ("You like my body?") and feigning fear of Chyna's character giving her mind controlling suppositories.

BREAKING NEWS: In an exclusive interview with City of Industry, producer-directors Mike Tollin and Brian Robbins tell TMZ that after 15 years together, they are "reconfiguring" their production company "to more easily pursue invidual projects."

The love affair, they stress, is not up-ending their company, as the Hollywood rumor mill has been buzzing for weeks. That said, Robbins is setting up a new first-look production shingle at DreamWorks -- without Tollin.

If any producing partnership is akin to a marriage, it's fair to say even though they are sleeping in separate bedrooms, but they're staying together for the sake of the children: The "kids" they've produced include the CW hits "Smallville," and "One Tree Hill." Tollin Robbins are also producers of comedies like the Eddie Murphy fat-suiter "Norbit" and the ensemble comedy "Wild Hogs," the latter of which is spawning a sequel at Disney as it edges closer to $80 million in box office receipts.

Both have also directed films: Tollin's been at the helm of movies like "Radio" and "Summer Catch," Robbins, the aforementioned "Norbit," and a remake of "The Shaggy Dog."

Explains Tollin: "The worst part of being succesful is that you become more a manager and less a filmmaker," adding that his more indie sensibility has him getting behind the camera again as a director with "Counting Down," a comedic family drama that's being put together even as you read this post, at GreeneStreet Films. Simultaneously, Robbins is next directing "Starship Dave," an Eddie Murphy comedy about tiny aliens that are struggling to save their planet from destruction. That the duo would have been spending time apart anyway made Robbins decision to answer DreamWorks' flirtations all the more rational.

Says Robbins, "Different tastes have made the company successful." Joining Robbins at DreamWorks is Sharla Sumpter Bridgett, previously an exec at Tollin-Robbins.

So "300" director Zack Snyder told EW recently, and his ambivalence about the film's sexual ambiguity has served him well: An astonishing $70 million opening for Snyder's adaptation of Frank Miller's graphic novel means people ignored the negative reviews and showed up for those rippling, shaven, oiled chests -- and the spears that plunged into them.

With a headline that blared, "Rivers of Blood, Oceans of Nair," the Seattle alternative paper The Stranger put it best, "By the end, I didn't know which I wanted more: a cigarette, or, like, a whole bottle of aspirin."

Aesthetics aside, what's interesting about "300" isn't the prurience or the CG violence, (as the Chicago Tribune's John Kass wrote, "War-nography is hard to define, but you know it when you see it.") but the reason that the studio used CG in the first place.

Again, EW: "It would be shot almost entirely on bluescreen soundstages with computer-generated backgrounds added later. CG would also be used to create geysers of spurting blood worthy of Jackson Pollock, the better to control the precise level of the gore if the MPAA's ratings board found it all too much."

The muscled hunk enjoyed his last days of anonymity as he snuck into a 4:45 PM show at The Grove Theater in L.A. on Friday.

Unfortunately, unlike in the movie, Butler was wearing a shirt on this outing.

Reese Witherspoon has backed out of a big movie in which she was slated to star and produce. Now TMZ knows why Reese bailed.

The movie, "Bunny Lake Is Missing," was to be a remake of Otto Preminger's 1965 film about a woman whose daughter disappears from a nursery school. Cops then try to convince the woman that her daughter was a figment of her imagination.

Reports are circulating that Witherspoon did not feel emotionally invested in the film, and that her psyche was fragile in the wake of her divorce from Ryan Phillippe.

But a well-placed, high-powered Hollywood source tells TMZ the problem had nothing to do with emotions. We're told Reese signed onto the project after being presented with the idea and a draft script. Last week, Reese was presented with what she thought would be a completed script, but turned out to be 80 pages that had major sections of the movie outlined but not written.

Clad in Borat's trademark green "swimsuit," the mustachioed doubles all read copies of London's Sun newspaper ... and then tried to have sex with each other's sisters. Wawaweewa!

News broke today that Premiere magazine will cease to exist -- tomorrow.

Advertising Age carries the story that Hachette Filipacchi has yanked the plug, citing declining subscriptions of the venerable monthly on the eve of its 21st birthday.

Viz, "Premiere's paid circulation has declined slowly over the years, from an average of 616,089 in 1995 to 492,498 in the second half of last year, according to Harrington Associates and the Audit Bureau of Circulations. Even more ominous, Premiere sold 24.7% fewer ad pages in 2006 than it did the year before, according to the Publishers Information Bureau."

In keeping with the rich Hollywood tradition of giving former employees the bum's rush, folks were given 24 hours notice to clean out their desks.

TMZ has obtained video of one of the wackiest marketing stunts in recent memory. To celebrate the launch of Disney's "Peter Pan" Platinum Edition, a team of skydivers in green leotards jumped from 14,000 feet!

Thirty daredevils from Neverland sang a horrifying rendition of "We Can Fly, We Can Fly" as they ascended. When they reached maximum altitude, they leapt from the plane and formed two giant letter Ps in the sky. Look, Wendy!

Rats.

As the Wall Street Journal will report in tomorrow's paper, DreamWorks Animation's fourth quarter was plagued by the underperformance of the rodential adventure "Flushed Away" -- the film is a $109 million write-off that drowned the studio's last quarter, in a net loss of over $21 million.

It's a shame DreamWorks in stuck in the middle of a two-year deal with McDonald's; the rat-themed "Flushed" would have clearly been a better fit for Taco Bell.

The Los Angeles Times' Claudia Eller reports that Team Cruise is closing in on some $500 million in financing that would be spread over several years at United Artists.

Now, we hate to admit this, but Cruise's career almost appears to be stabilizing.

After the "creative suicide" of last summer, Cruise's team has gone into overdrive: First the smart, classy deal that put Cruise into Robert Redford's next movie, "Lions for Lambs," in which in which Cruise plays a congressman.

(Even better, we hear that the congressman's name is not Mark Foley; Capitol Hill Blue, a non-partisan blog, wins our award for best recent Foley headline with "Mark Foley blows town," which in Foley's case could really mean anything. But we digress.)

More encouragingly, the LAT points out that Lambs had everyone, including Cruise, deferring their upfront fees so as to get the movie made for $35 million. Imagine: A Tom Cruise / Robert Redford / Meryl Streep movie for less than the price of a nuclear submarine?

But don't worry: Cruise still has a chance at blowing up this deal: Viz, "People close to the talks cautioned that the deal with expected lead investment bank Merrill Lynch wasn't final, and that terms were still being negotiated. They said an agreement could take an additional 10 days to two weeks to complete."

Well, so much for the theory that there'd be no clear Oscar favorite: "Departed" has taken best picture, director, editor and screenplay.

We also imagine that this is a bad time to be Brad Grey's shrink. I mean, talk about mixed feelings: The good news? You just produced the best picture of the year. The bad news? You produced it for your bloodthirsty competitor, Warner Bros.

"Visual effects: They enable us to see aliens, experience other universes, move in slow-motion, or watch spiders climbing high above the city landscape." (a beat) "For me, just a typical weeknight in the mid-Nineties."

God, I love this guy: Abusive childhood. Seen more snow than the Swiss alps. Regular jail. Movie jail.