William “Willbilly” Hathaway, a cast member on the National Geographic Channel reality show Wicked Tuna, died on Saturday due to injuries he sustained in a car accident. He was 36 years old. According to local news outlets, Hathaway was involved in a crash in Salisbury, Maryland after he swerved off a remote countryside road into a ditch. WBOC16 says that Maryland State Police received a 911 call from a concerned citizen who drove past a Toyota truck on Old Ocean City Road; the station then received numerous similar calls shortly afterwards. The incident took place around 4 p.m. local time. Hathaway, meanwhile, supposedly called his wife after the accident occurred and said he was alright. However, paramedics quickly arrived at the scene and found the reality star “slumped over the center console,” not breathing. The aforementioned news outlet claims he was taken to Peninsula Regional Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead. Hathaway was allegedly forced off the road and into the ditch when another vehicle cut him off. His airbags reportedly never deployed. In response to this tragedy, friends and loved ones have started a Facebook fundraiser to raise money for Hathaway’s wife and their newborn daughter, Molly. A spokesperson for the Ocean CityFishing Community wrote on the page: “He was an exceptional human being whose passion was the sea. He always brightened the day of anyone he met. His wife and new born baby girl he was most proud of.” “Due to his untimely death we are asking for donations to help them stay on their feet while trying to survive this tragedy.” As of this writing, more than $56,500 of the $250,000 fundraising goal had been reached. Hathaway was part of the fishing crew on the Ocean City-based Foolish Pleasures vessel, which was featured on Wicked Tuna: Outer Banks. The series itself debuted in April of 2012. As detailed by Wikipedia, it “takes viewers into the unrelenting North Atlantic waters infamously spotlighted by the novel-turned-feature film The Perfect Storm.” View Slideshow: The Most Shocking Reality Star Deaths: Gone, But Not Forgotten There, the show “[follows] captains who are relied upon by their families, their shipmates, and by Gloucester itself, to haul in boatloads of the large but elusive bluefin.” Tragically, another Wicked Tuna star lost his life earlier this year. Nicholas Fudge died in July after a lengthy battle with substance abuse. He was only 28 years old. View Slideshow: Celebrities Who Died in 2018: In Memoriam We send our condolences to the friends, family members and loved ones of William “Willbilly” Hathaway. May he rest in peace.
NBC Announces Cast Of “The Wiz Live” NBC just released the first photos and revealed the cast of their upcoming live production of “The Wiz” on network television. Newcomer Shanice Williams will star as Dorothy, while industry vet David Alan Grier stars as the Cowardly Lion, and singer Ne-Yo appears as the Tin Man. Elijah Kelley, best known from his role in “Hairspray,” stars as the Scarecrow. Other big names are on the supporting cast, as Queen Latifah stars as The Wiz, Uzo Aduba plays Glinda the Good Witch, and Mary J. Blige portrays Evillene, the Wicked Witch of the West. Common, Amber Riley and Broadway’s original Dorothy Stephanie Mills are also set to star in the live production. The show will air live on Thursday, Dec. 3 on NBC, and is scheduled to move to Broadway after its network TV premiere. Will you be watching?? NBC
Last week, we reported that Kendall Jenner may be quitting Keeping Up With the Kardashians after she completes her current contract. Now it seems that her newly-grown-up sister may be taking advantage of her status as a legal adult to follow in Kendall’s footsteps. Yes, Radar Online is reporting that Kendall and Kylie both plan to quit KUWTK after their current filming schedule is finished. And what could possibility make the two in-demand teens want to part ways with the show that made them famous? Simple: they’ve realized that (with the exceptions of Kim and possibly Caitlyn) they’re more famous than the rest of their family. “Kendall and Kylie have both wanted out of KUWTK for quite some time now and they are starting to realize their power because people are focusing on the two of them more than ever before,” says one insider. “The know that they are hot right now and that is why they are constantly together…Kylie does not want to ever leave television, but she does want to separate herself from the current storyline of the show.” The source adds that part of the problem is KUWTK’s emphasis on Caitlyn Jenner’s transition . The girls feel that with a spinoff, they could focus on less heavy topics, and their adoring fans would still tune in: “Caitlyn’s transition has been really hard on her and neither her nor her sister like the fact that they have to talk about the hardest thing that they have ever had to go through on TV,” says the insider. If you hear a pained shriek that sounds a bit like the Wicked Witch of the West when she’s melting, that’s just Kris Jenner losing all her power.
At least it wasn’t Michelle… She might not have made it. Kelly Rowland survived a scary moment Friday when the boat she was whale watching from was nearly swept away in strong winds. Via US Weekly reports : The former Destiny’s Child member was rescued offshore of Provincetown, Mass., on Friday, July 19, when the private rented boat she and her friends were whale watching in got caught in gusty winds. According to the Wicked Local news site, five people, including the 32-year-old singer, were on a day trip whale watching when the boat reportedly became “disoriented in the gusty winds and high seas along with the haze which lowered visibility.” Per Wicked Local, the group were able to contact the Coast Guard at the Stellwagen National Marine Sanctuary, where TowBoat US escorted their boat back to Provincetown. All were unharmed and reportedly OK. Indeed, an eyewitness tells Us Weekly that the “Dirty Laundry” singer was shopping in Provincetown the following day on Saturday, July 20, browsing local furniture, art, and trying out some saltwater taffy. Rowland’s due to perform at her next concert on Aug. 17 in Waco, Tex. We’re glad Kelly’s okay! Be careful out there girl. Enjoy some beach photos of Kel below: WENN
When The Onion ‘s CEO Steve Hannah publicly apologized last week for the satirical newspaper’s controversial Oscar-night tweet about Quvenzhané Wallis , two thoughts crossed my mind: 1) It’s not a good day for comedy when a satirical publication says it’s sorry for a joke that was not actually about the Beasts of the Southern Wild actress. And 2) what would Paul Provenza make of this? In addition to being a veteran stand-up comic and actor, Provenza directed The Aristocrats , one of the finest dissections of comedy in any media (and not because I’m in it). The 2005 documentary deconstructs one of the oldest and dirtiest jokes in stand-up — the film’s title is its punchline — and when I shot my segment with Provenza, I quickly learned that, in addition to being a very funny guy, he’s a scholar of humor, who’s really good at explaining why something is funny — or not. ‘The Onion’: The Quvenzhané Wallis Controversy So, in the aftermath of the Wallis controversy, I emailed Provenza to get his analysis of the situation. Excerpts of his assessment appear below, but, first, an unexpurgated recap of what happened last week for anyone who was focusing on the sequestration crisis instead. If you’re offended by the word “cunt,” then stop reading now, because the term appears quite a bit in the following passages, and, in the context of this discussion, I think it’s justified. Also, as Provenza noted, censoring the word, “just adds to the irony” of the controversy. Here’s what The Onion initially tweeted during the Academy Awards on Feb. 24. After initially obscuring the offending word, the tweet was eventually disappeared as the backlash grew: “Everyone else seems afraid to say it, but that Quvenzhané Wallis is kind of a cunt, right?” The Onion’s Apology Here is the apology that Hannah posted on The Onion ‘s Facebook page on Monday, Feb. 25: Dear Readers, On behalf of The Onion, I offer my personal apology to Quvenzhané Wallis and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for the tweet that was circulated last night during the Oscars. It was crude and offensive—not to mention inconsistent with The Onion’s commitment to parody and satire, however biting. No person should be subjected to such a senseless, humorless comment masquerading as satire. The tweet was taken down within an hour of publication. We have instituted new and tighter Twitter procedures to ensure that this kind of mistake does not occur again. In addition, we are taking immediate steps to discipline those individuals responsible. Miss Wallis, you are young and talented and deserve better. All of us at The Onion are deeply sorry. Sincerely, Steve Hannah CEO The Onion Why The Onion’s Apology Is Problematic Take it away, Professor Provenza: I think the crux of it is that the whole issue has more to do with Twitter than it has to do with comedy. Not completely, but largely. Twitter is a big, broad audience, and it’s a tough room to ‘read’, particularly with a joke this harsh. But the joke is absolutely misunderstood in most of the chatter. It is NOT a joke calling that sweet little girl a cunt. It’s not maligning her in any way whatsoever — it is saying exactly the opposite. The joke rests squarely on the fact that Quvenzhané Wallis is the very last person you’d ever want to call a cunt. Not even the most steadfast cynic can find her anything but innocent, beautiful and adorable, and that’s the whole point of the joke: The Hollywood schadenfreude and the palpable desperation that runs through much of the movie biz inspires the idea that someone, somewhere in Oscartown is already spreading vicious rumors about her. The fact that it is so inappropriate to say anything like that about her is precisely the basis — and I believe the point — of the Tweet. It was meant as a satirical comment about Hollywood and the pretense that everybody at the Oscars loves each other so much. It’s all golden statues and lavish praise — and is, The Onion suggests, about as phony as it gets. SO The Onion ‘s apology is problematic. It suggests they did insult her, and they’re sorry about it. Which is not the case. They offended, yes — not by insulting Quvenzhané Wallis, but by using the word “cunt” in the first place. And what could they expect, putting a most innocent, beloved 9 year old in the same sentence with perhaps the second most reviled word in the English language? That’s not the norm for The Onion , which usually does a much more deft job of communicating harsh comic ideas, but, comedically speaking, the joke is meant to be a bludgeon. So, I really can’t fault it on that score. It’s not meant to be a cleverly disguised notion. It’s meant to be as harsh as the ugly truth of envy, back-biting and negativity that Hollywood embodies. No one is spared, no matter how sweet and pure and innocent. Provenza goes on to point out that launching the Wallis joke into the Twitterverse put The Onion in “a difficult place.” Their work rarely has reached the audience this has reached — it has gone beyond their normal audience of comedy fans, fans of biting satire, whatever — to the broadest based audience imaginable: Oscar viewers, news & opinion blog/TV watchers. That audience includes far more people who would be offended in great numbers. And that’s where it becomes about Twitter. It’s now a story debated by people who have never had, nor do they now have, any interest in The Onion or what they’re all about. And now we’re into the business of damage control. But man, it feels wrong to apologize for a joke you didn’t even make. When I asked Provenza if The Onion should have apologized at all, he replied: Not this apology. They could have apologized for upsetting people in their audience. That would have been honest — they didn’t want to offend anyone. But this apology is dishonest: They apologize for offending the little girl and saying she deserves better when they did NOT say anything offensive about her. Thus, the apology is obsequious, reeks of insincerity and is compromising of The Onion’s integrity and its actual point of view in the first place. The Onion’s Tweet & Seth MacFarlane’s Jokes Stir The Pretentious Pot Provenza also drew a provocative connection between The Onion ‘s tweet and Seth MacFarlane’s much-maligned emceeing of the Academy Awards that night: If you look at The Onion thing (the actual substance of the joke, not the misinterpretation of it) and Seth’s entire night of hosting, some very loud voices were digging into the whole pretension of the Oscars. And what’s really interesting to me is that Seth was essentially a fox in the Academy Awards henhouse. The producers of the telecast knew what he was going to do: Nothing was off the cuff, songs were rehearsed for weeks, scripts were signed off on by legal departments and Standards & Practices. In other words, the producers of the Oscars themselves chose to let Seth call bullshit on false propriety, to dredge up unsavory things about the celebs in attendance and onstage, to take very little of it as seriously as the Oscars seem to want to be taken. They essentially allowed him to repeatedly remind the audience what a load of crap it all is. We all know that Oscar itself is a massive industry. The politics behind the nominees and winners is predominated by studios/distributors’ financial interests and all kinds of deal-making and horse trading. The fact that awards shows and celebrities are being called out ever more loudly, even from within, seems to suggest something. It’s almost as if even the people involved in the enterprise can’t ignore how pretentious it all is and are really tired of the machine. I can’t wait to read the comments on this. Leave them below. Follow Frank DiGiacomo on Twitter . Follow Movieline on Twitter .
Consciously evoking the structure and iconography of MGM’s classic The Wizard of Oz without attempting to rival its impact, Disney’s Oz the Great and Powerful can be enjoyed, up to a point, on its own colorful, diverting but finally rather futile terms. Offering an eye-tickling but gaudily depersonalized Land of Oz populated by younger, sexier versions of well-known characters (most incongruously the Wicked Witch of the West), this elaborate exercise in visual Baum-bast nonetheless gets some mileage out of its game performances, luscious production design and the unfettered enthusiasm director Sam Raimi brings to a thin, simplistic origin story. The smash success of Wicked , the stage tuner adapted from Gregory Maguire’s much more intricate and morally complicated Oz prequel, showed that L. Frank Baum’s richly imagined universe still holds significant interest for audiences worldwide. With its culturally resonant imagery, state-of-the-art technology and strong family appeal, Disney’s first excursion into this realm since Walter Murch’s Return to Oz nearly 30 years ago should enjoy a hefty yellow-brick load in theatrical release that will only be amplified by 3D ticket premiums and bountiful ancillary opportunities. Abundant indicators of commercial success and faultless production values aside, there’s a persistent sense of artifice here, something admittedly not lost on a story that’s very much about the power of technology and the magic inherent in a skillfully executed illusion. Yet it still rings hollow in a way that prevents full surrender, leaving the viewer with an immediate desire to revisit the still-wondrous 1939 film and, to a lesser extent, the original Baum novels credited as the inspiration for Mitchell Kapner and David Lindsay-Abaire’s screenplay. (The filmmakers had to navigate a veritable poppy field of legal issues to steer clear of copyrighted and trademarked elements from the MGM film, now owned by Warner Bros.) Although Dorothy is nowhere in sight, attentive listeners will catch a fleeting reference to her origins in the film’s exquisite prologue, which, a la The Wizard of Oz , unfolds on a windy strip of Kansas prairie. Rendered in black-and-white and framed in Academy ratio, the sequence works as a luminous standalone tribute to the wonders of old-fashioned trickery and showmanship as practiced by traveling circus magician Oscar Diggs ( James Franco ), whose vaudeville-style act is a marvel of wires, trapdoors, faux hypnosis and do-it-yourself sound effects. Oscar is a handsome rogue, a sly con artist, and an expert levitator and seducer of women, qualities that will prove at once crucial and dangerous when a twister blows his hot-air balloon off course and deposits him in the vibrant-colored Land of Oz, where no fewer than three beautiful and powerful witches wind up vying for his attention. These include the naive, emotionally susceptible Theodora (Mila Kunis); her older, colder sister, Evanora (Rachel Weisz); and their sworn nemesis, Glinda (Michelle Williams), a beauteous blonde whose motives are initially shrouded in secrecy. Crucial to these women’s competing agendas is the question of whether Oscar is the all-powerful wizard who, as prophesied, will ascend to the throne of the Emerald City and deliver Oz from evil. Disney’s marketing campaign has worked to generate some suspense over the question of who will eventually become the Wicked Witch of the West, although even modestly Oz-savvy viewers will have no trouble guessing which witch is which before the truth is revealed halfway through. Suffice it to say that the transformation is poorly motivated at best, and the unlucky girl in question, sporting not only the requisite green skin but also an eyeful of cleavage, seems a better candidate for top honors at a West Hollywood Halloween bash than for the mantle of Margaret Hamilton. Such comparisons to The Wizard of Oz are not only unavoidable but actively invited by Raimi’s film, which, within its legal restrictions, carefully mimics its 1939 forebear — from the early monochrome-to-color shift signaling that we’re not in Kansas anymore to the device of having key supporting characters pop up on both sides of the proverbial rainbow. To their credit, scribes Kapner and Lindsay-Abaire have taken pains to incorporate previously unfilmed elements from Baum’s original work. Pointedly in this version, Glinda hails from the South, not the North; the (racially diversified) Munchkins are joined by the similarly friendly but lesser-known Quadlings; and a key role is played by the fragile, all-porcelain China Girl (Joey King), who joins Oscar and his benign winged-monkey companion, Finley (voiced by Zach Braff), on their journey. Quite apart from the question of whether the picture lives up to its various inspirations, however, Oz the Great and Powerful finally falls short by dint of a too-timid imagination. In straining for an all-ages simplicity, the script comes off as merely banal, full of flat, repetitive dialogue about who’s good, who’s wicked and, most incessantly, whether Oscar is a real wizard, an opportunistic scoundrel or perhaps both. Not until the third act does the film start to jell, with a couple of arresting setpieces that neatly demonstrate how pluck, resourcefulness and an endless supply of tricks can equal, and even overcome, real magic. Raimi’s genre credentials made him as ideal a match for this production as any, and he attacks the material with palpable vigor, countering the thinness of the story with visuals that can feel by turns excessive and transporting. Gary Jones and Michael Kutsche’s lovingly detailed costumes and Robert Stromberg’s multihued sets take on an almost radioactive glow in Peter Deming’s widescreen cinematography, and the use of tracking and crane shots is inspired, the camera pulling back on occasion to observe the action at a painterly remove. This marks the first time Raimi has worked with the stereoscopic format, and he’s applied it with abundant care and precision. Bob Murawski’s editing meshes seamlessly with the 3D-lensed imagery to produce a fluid, genuinely multidimensional experience whose eye-popping effects — a swirl of fog rolling out of the frame; blossoms that turn out to be butterflies — are executed with an enchanting dexterity and playfulness. In a real sense, Oz the Great and Powerful has a certain kinship with George Lucas’ Star Wars prequels, in the way it presents a beautiful but borderline-sterile digital update of a world that was richer, purer and a lot more fun in lower-tech form. Here, too, the actors often look artificially superimposed against their CG backdrops, though the intensity of the fakery generates its own visual fascination. The indie experiments with which Franco has been recently preoccupied lend an interesting subtext to his casting as a genial humbug, and the actor fills the Wizard’s shoes, vest and top hat with slippery, ingratiating charm. Among the three witches, Kunis’ Theodora is a bit lacking in dramatic stature; Weisz’s Evanora strikes the right notes of icy ambition; and Williams, who has rarely looked more radiant onscreen, is a bewitching presence indeed, making Glinda more than just another bubblehead.
In a new preview for the James Franco adventure, we learn a bit more about the Wicked Witch and catch a glimpse of Zach Braff as a flying monkey. By Kevin P. Sullivan James Franco in “Oz: The Great And Powerful” Photo: Disney
Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest Evil Queen of them all? Is it Julia Roberts, who will star opposite Lily Collins’s Snow White in Tarsem Singh’s untitled fairy tale adaptation? Or is it Charlize Theron, who will play the wicked queen opposite Kristen Stewart’s armored Disney princess in Snow White and the Huntsman ? Take a look at the side-by-side comparison below before deciding for yourself.
Everyone’s favorite Oscar-snubbee Mila Kunis is reportedly set to join Sam Raimi’s Oz, the Great and Powerful , the lonnnnng-gestating Wizard of Oz prequel with James Franco attached as the title character. Kunis would play Evanorah, the young witch-in-training who develops into the Wicked Witch of the East. Of course. Shooting is rumored to begin in July, but I think we all know Raimi’s protracted dawdling really portends an awesome Oz / Sex and the City 3 Memorial Day showdown in 2016. Or something. [ Vulture ]
Shelley Malil, 45, was convicted of attempted murder in September for stabbing his girlfriend more than 20 times. “I stand before the defendant alive,” Beebe testified. “Despite plunging a knife in me 23 times and trying to kill me, I am alive. Despite the wicked scars he left on my body, I am alive.” Shelley Malil – who appeared alongside Steve Carell in The 40-Year-Old Virgin – will finally begin to pay for the scars ex-girlfriend Kendra Beebe lives with each day: On Thursday he was sentenc
