Rolling Stone magazine calls the AMC series Mad Men the best show on TV. While it may not live up to that platitude, there’s an argument that the show approaches (television standards of) literature.

Weiner Media’s Mad Men “is an elaborate pageant of American fantasies — guys and dolls who look like they have it all, even when their private worlds are complete frauds. The advertising wizards of Mad Men swagger through the office, knock back cocktails, knock back lovers. They live out JFK-era America’s tawdriest dreams, almost as if it’s a professional code — to sell these dreams to America, they have to experience them from the inside, with all their inherent betrayal and manipulation.”

It has been a long night and day, so this last paragraph has been shamelessly appropriated from the September 16th, issue of Rolling Stone, on newsstands tomorrow, excerpts on the web now.  With blessings from Weiner Media.

She's Got The Look

A new episode of She’s Got The Look will premier Wednesday, September 8, on TV Land. All the models left standing will replant across from the El Capitan on Hollywood Boulevard “where they must work their ‘ass-ets’” (directly from the press release, I swear) in front of thousands of whoever in the world goes to see these things.

The models will then participate in the first-ever flying fashion show.  Much thought was given to this production even if the publicity release wasn’t.

The teaser concludes with “One model collapses under the pressure while another model’s excuses could get her eliminated.”  Move over Jolson!

If you can last that long there’s the Behind the Scenes Special following with past models joining judge and celebrity (hair?) stylist Robert Verdi to solve the important questions of our time; Who was craziest?  Who really should have won?  Who ditched the cameras and went rogue?   Before drinking hemlock Socrates said that culture and morality were finished.  2,500 years ago.

Davis Letterman

Robert J. “Joe” Halderman, the man who blackmailed David Letterman, is out of the New York joint and ready again to serve his community (with a 1,000 hours of court-imposed community service).

All because Halderman wanted $2 million in hush money from the Tonight Show host.  Halderman was a CBS 48 Hours producer (true crime show of all things) and reportedly shared a mutual girlfriend with Letterman.  He allegedly found the girl’s (the lady in the case) diary and emails with salacious Letterman tidbits.

Being a typical resourceful (and bloodcurtling) producer, Halderman put together and sent an extortion package to Letterman with an ‘or-else’ threat.  Seems that Letterman was having sex with several of his female employees at the time, but immediately worked with the cops, set up a sting and showed what happens to producers who use their genius to do really stupid (and bad) things.

Letterman went on his October one show of 2009 to explain and apologize to all concerned.  Questions regarding  Letterman and sex relations between managers and employees or hostile/unfair work environments came and went.

In March of this year Halderman pleaded guilty to attempted grand larceny and got six months.  But he made news again today by getting out for good behavior.  As he labors at parole community service, Halderman will experience what it’s like to be a producer between jobs.

After years of landing A-list roles in such films as Leaving Las Vegas, The Saint, and Hollow Man, Elisabeth Shue spent most of the past decade acting in supporting roles for lower profile films.  She’s back in a big way with Piranha 3D, and now she has a film set to screen at the Toronto Film Festival.  Shue has come a long way from her Karate Kid days, and click on the media bar to her the actress talks about her acting life post-Piranha 3D. 

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PASTE print issue taking a rest

The music magazine Paste, Signs of Life in Music, Film and Culture, told its staff of nine that it could not meet its overhead, and that included the payroll.  Winner and near-winner of numerous excellence awards, Paste had to close its print newsstands after nine years.  The entertainment digest began with an experimental Radiohead model asking customers to pay whatever they wanted for an annual subscription.  The idea worked, but advertising wasn’t as robust.  Last year the company again asked its customers for help, but the donations only stalled the injuries.

The three Paste officers, co-founders editor-in-chief Josh Jackson, publisher Nick Purdy and vice president Tim Regan-Porter will keep their website running while continuing talks with potential investors with the dream of putting Paste back into print.

Among its many accolades, Paste was listed at 21 on the Chicago Tribune’s 2005 list of 50 best magazines.  And speaking of the Chicago Trib, a court-appointed mediator will assist in the 21-month long bankruptcy negotiations of  The Tribune Co. and it’s various creditors, reports said.

Sad.  The conversations in the print institutions sound similar to the lamentations of the carriage industry in 1900.

Zsa Zsa Gabor long ago

Once described as the most beautiful woman in the world (that was sixty years ago), Zsa Zsa Gabor may actually turn back the clock to that perfect summer, along with goddess beautification (that is, immortality) if her husband has his way.  Frederic von Anhalt, the ninth and last husband (so far) of Gabor said that after his wife meets God, he wants her to be the next thing to alive for eternity (although not in those words).

Von Anhalt, according to the Bild newspaper, said that he wanted to preserve his ageless wife by plastination after she dies.  We hope so, since it’s horrific to undergo the procedure while still living.  “I would like to show the plastinated body of Zsa Zsa Gabor, in the context of a scene in one of her films,”  Von Anhalt said with a straight face. “My wife has always dreamt that her beauty would be immortal (goddess-like?).”  Not if her context-of-a-scene came from A Very Brady Sequel.

Gunther von Hagens would likely carry out the metamorphosis.  The good doctor gained notoriety by exhibiting his morgue of plastinated bodies with actual muscles and tendons attached.

Meanwhile, Gabor has remained in the news because of her near death experiences (literally), and now rests in an L.A. hospital awaiting her 94th birthday.  Obituary writers worldwide are sadly waiting for the gruesome news of Zsa Zsa’s final exit so that they can finally clear their desks.

Von Anhalt might better serve the memory of Gabor (she really was something in her day) by instead preserving her DNA for future cloning.  The first hundred years was fine, although another century of Zsa Zsa might be overkill.

Twenty-three-year-old Gossip Girl actor Penn Badgley plays a college student on the popular CW series, and in the new film Easy A he stars as a high school kid.  One wonders if the baby-faced Badgley can actually play youngsters up through his early thirties (like Selma Blair) or if he will successfully transition into playing real men.  Click on the media bar to hear Badgley give his thoughts on landing younger roles.

Ditty

Ditty, sometimes P. Ditty, formally Puff Daddy, originally Sean Combs, and currently the boss of Bad Boy Entertainment Worldwide, is still chewing over an interview with Martin Bashir on ABC Nightline from two months ago.  Ditty told Vibe magazine that “The whole thing about giving a ($400,000) Maybach to my son, that’s really like a racist question,” Diddy tells the magazine in the August/September issue. “You don’t ask white people what they buy their kids. And they buy ‘em Porsches and convertible Bentleys, and it ain’t no question.  It’s really a racist question and put things back in perspective with money and the way that people still look at you.  And I’m not saying that consciously he’s a racist.  But he probably don’t even realize that he would not ask Steve Jobs that.  He would be like Steve Jobs has that money and that’s the gift his kid is supposed to get.”

What does the spirit of Marin Luther King think about all this?  What do you think?

Drew Barrymore claims her latest film, the romantic comedy Going The Distance, speaks to her on a personal level.  The film, opening Friday, is about a new couple (Barrymore and real life boyfriend Justin Long) who try to manage a long distance relationship.  It’s great to know that Barrymore truly relates to her character in the film, but will that intimacy translate into a box-office hit.  Up against Machete and newcomers Takers and The Last Exorcism, Going the Distance will probably go the same distance as….The Switch.  We love our romantic comedies Drew, but going up against Sylvester Stallone (The Expendables), the guy crew from Takers, a girl undergoing an exorcism in the Big Easy, and a machete wielding Danny Trejo (plus an oh so hot Jessica Alba) really is not a good idea!! Plus, you have Apple dude Justin Long as your backup??  Good luck!!  Click on the media bar to hear Drew, who was wonderful in Grey Gardens, give her take on Going The Distance, aka the movie that should have been released later this year!!

Comic book writer Mark Millar gives Kick-Ass fans a preview of Kick-Ass 2 on his new monthly magazine which comes out this week, CLiNT.  In an interview with MTV, Millar says the comic will follow the further adventers of “Dave” and “Hit-Girl,” who has now been adopted by someone who wants her to stop her crimefighting ways.  Millar also broke the news that the sequel, Kick-Ass 2: Balls The Wall, is nine months away from starting, since Kick-Ass filmmaker Matthew Vaughn is currently working on X-Men: First Class. 

Kick-Ass 2, which also features original Kick-Ass artist John Romita Jr., should be finished by Easter, and the film version may be an improvement over the original flick. “It’s got everything from the first movie just getting bigger,” said Millar.  “The villains are out there doing horrible things and filming it all on their cell phones and putting it up on Twitter and on their Facebook pages.So we have a clash of superherous and supervillains of Kick-Ass with “Hit-Girl” in the middle of it.

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