Marlon Brando in “Flashdance”!

Whole lotta shakin' goin' on while His Greatness shoots new movie with De Niro; Yasmine Bleeth's new role: "I'm a bitch ..."; Mike Myers: "I'm as happy as a little girl." Plus: How George Clooney makes waves wherever he goes.

Topics: Celebrity, Marlon Brando, Spice Girls, George Clooney,

Put down your sandwich. Today’s column contains a truly hurl-worthy image. Lunches may be lost. Keyboards may be clogged. Your screen may wiggle and blur before you. Do not say you haven’t been warned.

Here goes …

Marlon Brando, naked from the waist down.

Liz Smith reports that His Corpulence has been waltzing bottomless around the set of his latest film, “The Score,” possibly in order to make absolutely sure that the camera captures him only from the shoulders up. His godfather of bellies, he apparently believes, might be just a tad too great for public consumption.

Not surprisingly, his exposed nether region has caused quite a stir on the Canadian set, particularly among his fellow stars, Angela Bassett, Ed Norton and Robert De Niro, according to Smith.

Imagine that!

Now try to stop …

- – - – - – - – - – - -

You know you wouldn’t want it any other way

“I’m a bitch, I’m a lover, I’m a child and I’m a mother.”

Yasmine Bleeth, describing her character on NBC’s upcoming Aaron Spelling series, “Titans.”

- – - – - – - – - – - -

Dieter digs dirt

Ooooh. Now I am as happy as a little girl.

Things are promising to get even nastier in Mike Myers’ battle with Universal Pictures and Imagine Entertainment over the aborted film “Dieter.”

According to Variety, Myers has hired professional dirt digger Anthony Pellicano to smear his adversaries but good. Pellicano’s the guy Michael Jackson brought in to muddy the waters in his 1993 sex abuse suit, among other dubious claims to fame.

So if anyone’s been doing any nefarious monkey-touching, Pellicano will make it his business to find out — and leak it to the press.

Just when you thought the story was growing tiresome …

- – - – - – - – - – - -

Klump change

“I can tell you that I’ve seen many films on video, played every video game, heard every album … I’ve seen it all in that chair.”

Eddie Murphy on spending five hours a day in the makeup chair to play six different characters in “Nutty Professor II: The Klumps.”

- – - – - – - – - – - -

Juicy bits

People who no longer need to perform for people are the luckiest people in the world. Or so contends Barbra Streisand, who, after years spent battling stage fright, is giving up live performances after she gives four final concerts in September. Buttah-voiced Babs will belt out her swan song in L.A. and New York, which her manager, Martin Erlichman, labels “the two cities most closely associated with her work.” I’m feeling verklempt …

The U.K. Sun reports that George Clooney travels with his own wave machine — a contraption that causes swells for him to swim against in whatever pool he happens to be near. Sounds like someone’s taking that “Perfect Storm” role a bit too seriously.

How’s this for a lineup: John Cleese, Kathy Najimy, Jason Alexander, Seth Green, Whoopi Goldberg — and that’s just a select few of the people tapped to appear in “Rat Race,” Jerry Zucker’s new take on “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.” If ever this mad, mad, mad, mad world needed a remake of “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World,” it’s now!

All is not nice in Spice world. A U.K. judge has ordered the Spice Girls to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to a motor-scooter company that sponsored them. The scooter maker lost buckets of dough after Ginger Spice, Geri Halliwell, left the group in the midst of its ad campaign. Add in the band’s own legal fees, and the Girls are facing a $600,000 bill. That’s a lot of Spice bread.

Continue Reading Close

Next Article

Featured Slide Shows

What To Read Awards: Top 10 Books of 2012 slide show

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 10
  • 10. "The Guardians" by Sarah Manguso: "Though Sarah Manguso’s 'The Guardians' is specifically about losing a dear friend to suicide, she pries open her intelligent heart to describe our strange, sad modern lives. I think about the small resonating moments of Manguso’s narrative every day." -- M. Rebekah Otto, The Rumpus

  • 9. "Beautiful Ruins" by Jess Walter: "'Beautiful Ruins' leads my list because it's set on the coast of Italy in 1962 and Richard Burton makes an entirely convincing cameo appearance. What more could you want?" -- Maureen Corrigan, NPR's "Fresh Air"

  • 8. "Arcadia" by Lauren Groff: "'Arcadia' captures our painful nostalgia for an idyllic past we never really had." -- Ron Charles, Washington Post

  • 7. "Gone Girl" by Gillian Flynn: "When a young wife disappears on the morning of her fifth wedding anniversary, her husband becomes the automatic suspect in this compulsively readable thriller, which is as rich with sardonic humor and social satire as it is unexpected plot twists." -- Marjorie Kehe, Christian Science Monitor

  • 6. "How Should a Person Be" by Sheila Heti: "There was a reason this book was so talked about, and it’s because Heti has tapped into something great." -- Jason Diamond, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

  • 4. TIE "NW" by Zadie Smith and "Far From the Tree" by Andrew Solomon: "Zadie Smith’s 'NW' is going to enter the canon for the sheer audacity of the book’s project." -- Roxane Gay, New York Times "'Far From the Tree' by Andrew Solomon is, to my mind, a life-changing book, one that's capable of overturning long-standing ideas of identity, family and love." -- Laura Miller, Salon

  • 3. "Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk" by Ben Fountain: "'Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk' says a lot about where we are today," says Marjorie Kehe of the Christian Science Monitor. "Pretty much the whole point of that novel," adds Time's Lev Grossman.

  • 2. "Bring Up the Bodies" by Hilary Mantel: "Even more accomplished than the preceding novel in this sequence, 'Wolf Hall,' Mantel's new installment in the fictionalized life of Thomas Cromwell -- master secretary and chief fixer to Henry VIII -- is a high-wire act, a feat of novelistic derring-do." -- Laura Miller, Salon

  • 1. "Behind the Beautiful Forevers" by Katherine Boo: "Like the most remarkable literary nonfiction, it reads with the bite of a novel and opens up a corner of the world that most of us know absolutely nothing about. It stuck with me all year." -- Eric Banks, president of the National Book Critics Circle

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 10

More Related Stories

Comments

0 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username ( profile | log out )

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>