Movies

"The Business of Being Born" -- a documentary on which Lake served as executive producer -- explores birthing practices in this country. For her own personal enjoyment, Lake filmed the birth of her second child in 2001, and later decided to include the footage in the film. Now you can enjoy it too.

Dave pulled his coat up over his face while flashing a kooky neck billboard for his new horror film, which he co-wrote, directed and stars in, along with wife Courteney, who has not, to our knowledge, shaved her head.

The film is about a Reagan-obsessed serial killer who has it in for a bunch of hippies. Timing is everything.

In what is surely the understatement of the year, Variety reports that YouTube will soon be taking advertising, but that "[k]ey to the new venture will be making sure that those who upload video actually own the rights to it."

Um, ya think?

What's so astonishing about YouTube is what an overpriced sack of liability it really is: For starters, Wall Street types say it only makes $15 million a year in revenue - that's more than a teaspoon less than the $1.65 billion price Google paid for it.

But before we go thumbing our noses at Google CEO Eric Schmidt, we have to admire the sheer chutzpah of his venture's latest tactics. Schmidt, speaking at a conference of nerds and internet geeks, said that a new tool, dubbed "Claim Your Content," would soon be available to irritated content companies like Viacom, currently suing YouTube for a cool billion dollars. As if the 'content' on YouTube were simply lost children who'd gotten separated from their parents while shopping at Sears. Puh-lease.

So, why is Google willing to place such a hefty bet on a crack-fiend of a lawsuit magnet like YouTube? Because, while it seems like bad form to demand that companies 'claim their content' after it's been pirated, Schmidt thinks he can get away with it -- and make billions in the process.

He just might be right. Piracy is a losing battle online, no matter how many kiddie porn-sniffing Labradors the MPAA trains. Sure, Lucky and Flo -- the MPAA anti-piracy pooches -- have sniffed out 1.3 million pirated DVDs in Malaysia and the Philippines, but their noses don't work online. Schmidt knows this. Sumner Redstone knows this.

Google is basically saying, "Your stuff will go online - one way or the other. Why not split the profits with us?"

According to a special report from Glenn Bunting of the Los Angeles Times, the people behind the legally troubled 2005 movie, "Sahara," shelled out more than $350,000 to keep the actors fit, fed and and fabulous -- leaving the film's budget, well, in the dust.

In the report, set to be published tomorrow, Bunting claims he has obtained official documents verifying the outrageous expenditures, which include:

Penelope's hairstylist -- $135,550
Penelope's dialogue coach -- $125,804
Matt's Personal trainer -- $67,977
Matt's Personal Chef -- $48,893

Producer George Lucas dropped the casting nugget on 710 ESPN Radio's "The Big Show With Steve Mason & John Ireland" before signing off, telling the show, "My director [Steven Spielberg] gets very angry if I say anything at all about the movie ... I said we live in the age of the Internet, nothing's gonna be a secret, nothing is a secret, but he [LaBeouf] is in the movie."

Someone should have told Lucas what keeping a secret means!

BREAKING NEWS: Mum(my)'s no longer the word... TMZ has learned that Rachel Weisz is dropping out of the rapidly-rising three-quel of "The Mummy" franchise at Universal Pictures.

The actress won the 2006 Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her work in "The Constant Gardener," but more recently gave birth to another statuesque little guy: Henry Chance, who's now nine-months-old, and has apparently been living the sweet life -- vacationing last month with mom in Brazil.

Meanwhile, our spies tell us Weisz is up to her neck in other offers, with some four different projects coming together imminently, all of which will be juggled around newfound parenthood with "The Fountain" director (and baby-daddy) Darren Aronofsky.

Anna Nicole Smith's last film, "Illegal Aliens," will make its world premiere next month at the Cannes Film Festival -- after it's released on DVD in the U.S. on May 1. Doh!

Initially, the sci-fi "comedy" was scheduled to debut in April, but Anna's untimely death left the release date up in the air.

In the movie, Anna is one of three aliens who "morph into super-hot babes and arrive to protect the earth from the intergalactic forces of evil." The cinematic gem's stellar cast also includes Joanie "Chyna Doll" Laurer and "Dynasty" star John James. For your consideration.

Even though the film is screening "out of competition," it's sure to add to the freakish pandemonium associated with the French film fest. Book your flight now!

Ford has signed on to star in "Anna Nicole," and shooting begins next week. It's about Smith's rise from exotic dancer to reality-show-diet-spokesmodel stardom, from her late teens up until her death in February at age 39. Meanwhile, a thinly-veiled fictionalization of Smith on "Law & Order: Criminal Intent" will feature actress Kristy Swanson as an Anna-alike.

An extremely smooth-looking Nicolas Cage appeared at the Maryland University campus with estranged Angelina Jolie daddy Jon Voight, while filming the sequel to "National Treasure."

In the sequel, "Book of Secrets," Cage chases after 18 missing pages from the diary of John Wilkes Booth, in what promises to be a real *yawn* cliffhanger in the murder of Abraham Lincoln.

The Maryland location is doubling for Washington D.C. in this Christmas release. Yup, you'll have to wait all the way until December for this traction/adventure. Oh, the torment.

Keith Richards whipped up a whole mess o' publicity for Disney's "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End," but the House of Mouse is unamused with his antics.

In a recent and widely-reported story, Keith joked that he had snorted the ashes of his father, mixed with some drugs. He later said that he was kidding, but his jest was perhaps lost in translation. As you can see from this random clip, Keith is sometimes a little hard to understand.

Disney's publicity veep, Dennis Rice, told AHN, "When (a senior Disney publicist) forwarded the ashes story to me, I thought, 'How are we going to spin this?'" and "Keith won't be doing a lot of publicity for this movie." No surprise there, eh, matey?

Keith plays Teague Sparrow, father of Captain Jack, Johnny Depp's character in the May 25 release.

After "Kill Bill" and "Sin City" re-injected high kitsch into the American cinema, we here at City of Industry were particularly interested in what the critics would say about Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodgriguez's newest, critic-proof films: Rodriguez's "Planet Terror" and Tarantino's "Death Proof," which are being released as a double feature entitled "Grindhouse" -- this weekend on 2,624 screens.

By far, my favorite review of the directors' combined 3-hour slasher & zombie hodgepodge comes from the Christian Science Monitor's Peter Rainer, who writes of Tarantino's newest:

"Tarantino devotes a great deal of time to scenes of the women just sassing each other – at times it's like a grindhouse version of 'The View.' [but]...Tarantino may have moved beyond the grindhouse conventions he has routinely championed. The extended sequences with the women in 'Death Proof,' before the blood and the vroom-vroom set in, could be his newfound attempt to humanize his people instead of treating them as car-crash mannequins. He has such a good, loosey-goosey feeling for the back-and-forth jabber of girlfriends that you almost wish he had jettisoned the skidding U-Turns and just made a film about women hanging out."

That's an intriguing idea, and one that's especially timely given the untimely death of Bob Clark. Tthe director got his start with horror schlock like "Black Christmas" and raunchy comedies like "Porky's," but the media -- and the world -- remembers him far more fondly for directing that near-perfect holiday film, "A Christmas Story."

Bob Clark, director of "A Christmas Story" and a producer of the "Porky's" films, was killed today on California's famed Pacific Coast Highway when his car was hit head-on by an SUV driven by a man who was later arrested for being under the influence of alcohol.

Clark's son, 22-year-old Ariel Hanrath-Clark, was riding with his father and was also killed in the crash.

TMZ has learned that police arrested 24-year-old Hector Velazquez-Nava, the driver of the SUV, on suspicion of gross vehicular manslaughter, and that Velazquez-Nava will be booked once he is released from the hospital. We're told that Velazques-Nava had a female passenger whose status is unknown at this time.

Sporting the latest in receding hairline chic, the Oscar-winner (really?) was snapped with script and Starbucks coffee in hand on the D.C. set of "National Treasure: Book of Secrets," the sequel to his 2004 Da Vinci Code-esque knockoff.

The former hunk is an inspiration to struggling actors everywhere, proving you don't need Brad Pitt's looks to open a movie.

I'm talking about this sort of smarmy attack on John Travolta and his five private planes, out of London today.

What's the man suppossed to do?

Fly coach?

Urge people NOT to do their bit to stop global warming?

Sources tell TMZ that Pitt's Plan B production company is interested in turning James Scurlock's critically acclaimed documentary expose of America's obsession with credit card debt, "Maxed Out," into a feature film with a big Hollywood cast, in the vein of "Fast Food Nation." A well-placed TMZ source says that a Plan B rep contacted Scurlock's agent expressing how Pitt really enjoyed the docu's companion book, 'Maxed Out: Hard Times, Easy Credit and the Era of Predatory Lenders.'

TMZ has learned that shortly after Plan B's call, Scurlock's reps were contacted by DiCaprio's production shingle, Appian Way Productions, who revealed the same interest in the documentary. Hunky see, hunky do!

We're told neither production company has finalized any deals for the film's rights, but it could turn into Pitt's biggest brawl since "Troy."

"Maxed Out" is playing in select cities now.

A rep for DiCaprio told TMZ, "This story is bull. It sounds like someone is creating a bidding war to try and make a buck."

A rep for Plan B could not be reached.

In Hollywood, unprecedented chutzpah is usually met with approbation, not probation.

But not today.

The Motion Picture Association today took the unusual step of issuing a month-long suspension of the ratings process for Roland Joffe's upcoming horror film, "Captivity." The film was planned for a May 18 release, but will not have to wait a full month before it can go before the MPAA ratings board, meaning that it will likely miss its planned release date if it wants to get a rating.

This all started a week ago, when "Captivity" billboards starting putting people off their lunch in L.A. and New York: Four graphic panels showed a young woman going through "abduction," "confinement," "torture" and "termination." As the Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez aptly put it, "I thought about ordering up a photo of the billboard for this column, but trust me, you don't want to see it. I felt like I needed to take a shower just from having been within a hundred feet of it."

Jill Soloway, who knows a thing or two about the portrayal of death from her stint as the executive producer of HBO's "Six Feet Under," blogged on the Huffington Post, that "it somehow managed to recall Abu Ghraib, the Holocaust, porn and snuff films all at once."

The MPAA says the 'art' work was "summarily rejected" but went up on billboards anyway. After Dark insisted it was a "communications error" with their printer, and said they'd be taken down. Six days later, they were still up. Finally, they came down, but were replaced with a defiant "'Captivity' was here." Hardly contrition, though Courtney Soloman, the film's producer, said "nothing like this can ever happen again."

Now, per the MPAA, "the production company and its distributors will also be required to clear not only all promotional materials but also the locations and venues of all advertising buys relating to the film" -- the first time such a demand has ever been issued by the MPAA.

Clearly, we're in for some interesting times ahead: In a recent interview with MTV.com, 'splat pack' director Eli Roth ("Hostel") had this to say: "Hopefully, we'll get to a point where there are absolutely no restrictions on any kind of violence in movies."