The California Assembly today passed AB 2479 by a margin of 43-13 to impose penalties of up to $5,000, with the possibility of jail time, for paparazzi who drive recklessly and endanger celebrities and the general public. The legislation passed on the anniversary of the 1997 death of Princess Diana, who was killed in…

The impasse in the negotiations between AT&T U-Verse and Crown Media, the parent company of the Hallmark Channel and the Hallmark Movie Channel, over a new carriage agreement resulted in the two channels gong dark for 2.3 million subscribers at 12:01 AM EDT tonight when the two sides’ previous deal expired. Here are…

Robot Chicken creators Seth Green and Matthew Senreich have teamed with Ford Motor Co. and Sprint Nextel for ControlTV, an interactive reality show. The series, which will follow six weeks in the life of a guy in his twenties, enables the audience to vote, in real time, on every aspect of his life—from what he wears…

A nationwide billboard campaign asking "Still A Virgin? For Help, Call 888-742-4335" is creating controversy in a growing number of cities. TV news stations in Louisiana, Miami, San Diego, and Arizona have so far covered the brouhaha as local politicians demand the billboards’ removal. Turns out the whole thing is a…

Gavin Polone is smart and snarky and Hollywood’s erstwhile bad boy. He keeps earning his nickname as the Prince Of Darkness by today filing yet another lawsuit against an entertainment company. (His now infamous lawsuit against a former talent agency employer exposed oodles of bad behavior…) This time, it’s Summit…

A war of words broke out today between Avatar director James Cameron and producer Mark Canton over whether Weinstein Co/Dimension’s current version of Piranha 3D is a crapfest. (Cameron was hired and then fired as the director of the original 1981 Piranha Part 2). Here’s what they are saying: Cameron told…

Paramount Pictures has made a first-look producing deal with Stefan Sonnenfeld, the founder and president of visual effects company Company 3. Sonnenfeld has provided post production work on such Paramount films as the first two Transformers films, Star Trek and Cloverfield. Sonnenfeld’s company has also worked on…

Every Icahn move has deep reverberations inside the film/television studio whose management is increasingly paranoid about how their actions will be viewed by him. What a destabilizing situation. Now Carl Icahn’s hostile takeover attempt intensifies with his $7.50 a share unsolicited tender offer this morning. It…

Joan Cusack has joined the cast of Showtime's new drama series Shameless and appear in all 12 episodes of the new series. She’ll play the role of Sheila, an agoraphobic Chicago housewife with a sexually active teenage daughter who strikes up a special friendship with William H. Macy's character, Frank Gallagher. She…

It looks like the summer TV season will wrap the way it started, with CBS’s all-rerun Monday lineup easily topping the night. The network’s comedies The Big Bang Theory (2.8 rating/7 share among adults 18-49, 8.8 million viewers overall) and Two and a Half Men (2.6/7, 9.0 million) were the top programs of the night…

Newspaper critics are increasingly being put off by how expensive the Venice Film Festival, which begins tomorrow, has become. One critic from Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf says that he can spend two weeks covering Toronto for the same cost of one week in Venice. This at a time when newspapers are reducing staff and…

Amazing how a bedbug scare begins. One MSN reviewer’s tweet that a friend had been bitten by bedbugs while watching Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World at the Scotiabank Theatre in Toronto. That fueled a frenzy of reports that festival-goers might not be the only things swarming the movie theaters of Toronto next month…