That "Up in Smoke" rap tour might have been just a hair too aptly named.
Proving that where there's smoke, there's fire, touring rapper Nate Dogg was arrested in Pomona, Calif., on Saturday for allegedly kidnapping and assaulting his girlfriend and setting her mother's car on fire. The girlfriend, who has been identified only as Rhoda, told KABC-TV that she'd broken up with the rapper (nee Nathaniel Dwayne Hale) just a few days earlier.
And proving that where there's smoke, there's, well, smoke, a man aboard fellow rapper Snoop Dogg's tour bus was cited in the wee hours of Friday morning for possessing more than half a pound of pot. The bus was stopped by authorities after a concert at a Border Patrol checkpoint near San Diego. It's not yet clear whether Snoop himself was aboard the bus at the time.
No "bum rap" jokes, please.
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Pee free
"I said he could do this one because no one's urinating on a public building."
-- Kathie Lee Gifford on why she's letting Cody make a play for a role in Adam Sandler's upcoming animated flick.
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No dancing
Forget touching the monkey. It's dead.
At this point, it looks like it's really all over for "Dieter," the movie. Variety reports that Universal Studios has laid off 25 crew members hired to work on the flick, killing all remaining hope that Mike Myers would return to the project amid dueling lawsuits.
Universal chairman Stacey Snider told the trade mag the studio was "extremely disappointed" that it wouldn't be making the film and was "particularly anguished" that it had to cut the assembled production team loose.
Now I am as unhappy as a little girl ...
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Drop it
"As I was telling the Queen, I can't stand name-droppers."
-- Veteran British roving TV reporter Alan Whicker, coining a classic quip.
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Angelina watch
If you think Billy Bob Thornton's the only one who can bring Angelina Jolie's sexual juices to a full boil, think again.
Elizabeth Mitchell, who shared a lesbian love scene with Billy Bob's blushing bride in the HBO film "Gia" a few years back, says she had a gay old time frolicking in the buff with Jolie.
"We did this one love scene on the bed where we were laughing so hard we were shaking. The whole bed was shaking," the actress recently told the Toronto Sun. "The director was yelling, 'Stop it, STOP it!' Angelina and I tried to think of sad things so we wouldn't laugh, but everything we thought of became absurd and funny, so it got worse and worse and worse."
But hey, that doesn't mean they didn't get into it, eventually -- particularly, you know, the kissing part. "She's got such beautiful lips," Mitchell recalls of her costar, "and they're all her own. She's all real. She's a work of nature. She hasn't put herself together at the plastic surgeon's office."
Sounds like someone's bucking to have her name immortalized on a tattoo.
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Toil and trouble
"It's not that [Kelsey Grammer] is crippled by his high Q rating. You don't think, 'Hey, look at old Frasier up there.' On the other hand, you never for a second think that a complicated, conflicted character named Macbeth is up on the stage either, just an actor speaking lines in a melodious bass voice."
-- New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley on Grammer's underwhelming Shakespearean turn on Broadway.
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Juicy bits
She's a little bit country. He's a little bit rock 'n' roll. And their show's a little bit canceled. Columbia TriStar Television has pulled the plugged on Donny and Marie Osmond's daytime talk show because it just wasn't performing as well as expected. "We have evaluated the May books ... unfortunately we are disappointed that while we did have increases in ratings this year, they did not come up sufficiently enough to make economic sense," Barry Thurston, Columbia TriStar's distribution president, told Variety. "This is not an inexpensive show." Hey, purple socks cost money, you know.
Who wants to be a famous actress on a successful TV show? Not Lara Flynn Boyle. Next time around, "The Practice" star wants to be reincarnated as a bikini waxer. She tells Glamour, "I just think you would meet a lot of interesting people that way." In interesting positions.
What is it with actors and errant airplanes, anyway? Over the weekend, Harrison Ford had to make an emergency landing in Nebraska, after the plane he was piloting hit a patch of foul weather. Turbulence: It's way scarier than snakes.
"Beverly Hills 90210" may be gone, but the money it made is apparently not forgotten. At least not by Robert Wagner. The veteran actor has filed a $20 million lawsuit against producer Aaron Spelling, claiming he was cheated out of profits from the Fox show. Wagner's claims relate to a deal he and his late wife, Natalie Wood, allegedly made with Spelling whereby they would submit ideas for television pilots and share the profit. I think those two fellas need to meet down at the Peach Pit for a little heart to heart ...
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