Jennifer Lawrence appeared on The Late Show with David Letterman last night and discussed a variety of topics, most notably a photo that’s been making the rounds. Is it her ass or someone else’s? The Hunger Games and Silver Linings Playbook beauty says she has no problem admitting she’s un-photogenic, but come ON. Watch the 22-year-old star hilariously discuss her love for celebrity gossip magazines and a very, very unflattering photo of her backside she found in one: Jennifer Lawrence on The Late Show – Not My Butt! Dave and Jen also discussed her “I Beat Meryl” Golden Globe speech , their mutual disdain for all things Twitter, and how she got so good at acting. Follow the link for three more classic clips: Jennifer Lawrence on The Late Show – LIES! Jennifer Lawrence on The Late Show – Twitter Bashing Jennifer Lawrence on The Late Show – Golden Globe Speech
Charlie Sheen made a startling announcement on The Late Show with David Letterman last night: He’s going to be a grandfather. YIKES! Charlie Sheen Talks Cocaine on The Late Show Sheen’s 28-year old daughter, Cassandra Jade Estevez, born to the actor’s high school girlfriend, is expecting – and guess what, Sheen told the host: “She’s, like, married. Me as a grandfather, it’s like the world’s gonna crack in half. This is not a title I’m ready to adopt.” Speaking of crack… you really must watch the exchange above between Sheen (who is dating Georgia Jones ) and Letterman. And speaking of being a grandparent, Sheen joked that it’s the best gig around “Cause you can leave the kid!”
David Letterman struck an uncharacteristically somber note Monday night, addressing the Newtown, Connecticut shooting for nearly seven minutes. Returning from commercial, the comedian, looking visibly saddened, noted the beauty of the Christmas decorations on CBS’ Late Show set. David Letterman Sandy Hook Statement He then touched upon the senseless massacre of 26 people – including 20 children – at Sandy Hook Elementary School, saying, “It makes me so sad.” “The lights … they’re really for kids. You think about this horrifying circumstance. What part of that do you think about that’s going to make any difference?” “Do you think about the kids in the class? That’s too awful to think about,” said Dave, himself the father of a little boy and a Connecticut resident for many years. “Do you think about the parents and their friends and getting that message from the school and finding out that their lives are irrevocably broken, ruined?” “You think about your own kid. I take him to school every now and then. Are we supposed to be worried about dropping our kids off at school now?” “I never worried about it before. I always thought, well here, school is a good place where my son will be free of the idiot decisions made by his father.” Letterman then addressed both gun control and mental health, areas that have become the focus of a fiery public debate over policy reform. “Believe me, I’m not dumb enough to think that this is a problem of guns,” Letterman said. “Before there were guns, people were killing one another.” “And you can’t just say that it’s mental health or emotional problems because people with all manner of problems don’t necessarily kill each other.” But citing a document prepared by the show’s researchers, Letterman did go on to acknowledge some frightening statistics about firearms. “Since 1994, there have been 70 episodes of school shootings, (all) after the Brady Bill had passed (in 1993). Good lord, does that surprise you?” he asked. Letterman acknowledged that listening to President Barack Obama’s Newtown speech at Sunday night’s memorial made him “feel a little bit better.” “He’s going on the record, (taking) some kind of action… In a small measure, I feel better that he’s looking out for us in that regard. It’s a sad, sad holiday season.” Indeed.
Ben Affleck ‘s political thriller passed the milestone box office mark over the weekend not counting overseas grosses. Rick McCallum will pursue smaller indies after leaving Lucasfilm post-Disney sale. The Kennedy Center Honors welcomes inductees; Silver Linings Playbook solid among Specialty Releases as newcomers fizzle. And at the European Film Awards , Helen Mirren expresses uncertainty over reprising Queen role. Ben Affleck’s Argo Crosses $100 Million Mark in N. America The Oscar hopeful directed and starring Ben Affleck crossed the $100 million mark, a notable feat for a historical drama. The title took in $2 million over the weekend. Internationally it has grossed $56 million, THR reports . Rick McCallum Bolts from Lucasfilm The Star Wars producer said Saturday via Lucasfilm’s StarWars.com that he is leaving the company to produce a slate of smaller independent films including a Russian pic about the Babi Yar Massacre that Sergei Loznitsa will direct; a film by Laurence Bowen about the boy soldiers of Sierra Leone; and an action drama with Tomas Masin about two brothers who escaped Czechoslovakia during the Cold War while being pursued by thousands of Soviet soldiers, Variety reports . Dustin Hoffman, David Letterman and Led Zeppelin Honored at Kennedy Center The John F. Kennedy Center welcomed eight performing artists to its wall of fame Sunday at a festival Kennedy Center Honors event. Actor Dustin Hoffman, TV host David Letterman, blues singer Buddy Guy, ballerina Natalia Makarova and the rock group Led Zeppelin (John Paul Jones, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant) were saluted during the affair’s 35th annual installment attended by the President and Mrs. Obama, Variety reports . Holdovers Solid As Newcomers Bow Tepid in Specialty Box Office Oscar contenders Silver Linings Playbook and Rust and Bone held solid in the specialty realm as they expanded. The overall box office had dreadful debuts from TWC’s Killing Me Softly and LD Entertainment’s The Collection . But Weinstein’s David O. Russell-directed Silver Linings held nicely with a per-theater average of just over $9K as the movie added four cinemas in its third weekend, Deadline reports . Helen Mirren ‘Unsure’ Over Reprising Queen Role Helen Mirren has admitted she felt “very unsure” about reprising her Oscar-winning role as The Queen in an upcoming London play. “I don’t like going back to things,” the 67-year-old said. “I like to go forward.” But she was won over, she went on, by the “extraordinary team of artists who are putting the play together”. The actress was speaking at the European Film Awards in Malta, where she received an honorary award, BBC reports .
Feeling that pre-Thanksgiving agita? I know, it’s not the food. It’s the thought of heaping helpings of stilted conversation about the presidential election and Wal-Mart’s Black Friday strike. Well, you can thank me now or later, but I’ve got you covered. Back for a return holiday engagement is Movieline’s gluten- and Trans fat-free turkey day conversation helper : 15 film-related topics that will insure that Grandpa never gets to his “Mitt Romney is the devil, but he’s my devil” monologue. 1. Will the Twilight Saga have the cultural longevity of Star Wars ? 2. If Adam Sandler’ s best performance since Funny People is Hotel Transylvania , should he just stick to cartoons? 3. Is Bill Murray’s FDR impression in Hyde Park on Hudson inspired in part by David Letterman ? 4. Is Lindsay Lohan ‘s acting career beyond saving ? 5. Does Snoop Lion really believe all this Rastafarian stuff ? 6. Where in the world is Warren Beatty ? 7. Whose acting career will matter longer: Kristen Stewart or Robert Pattinson ? 8. Which actor should portray Gen. David Petraeus in the inevitable Lifetime movie about his affair? 9. Is George Clooney the mayor of Hollywood even though he spends a lot of time in Lake Como? 10. Will the mixed reviews for Life of Pi hurt its Oscar chances? 11. What happened to Harvey Weinstein ‘s love affair with The Intouchables ? 12. Given the publicity that Brad Pitt ‘s Chanel No. 5 TV spot got, should he purposely look for ridiculous commercials? 13. Is there any actor sexier than Ryan Gosling ? 14. Good casting decision or bad: Russell Crowe singing Broadway show tunes in Les Misérables ? 15. Will Seth MacFarlane be a good Oscar host ? (And what does Grampa think of Ted ?) Happy Thanksgiving! Here’s hoping your holiday with the fam is a little less agonizing than this: Follow Frank DiGiacomo on Twitter. Follow Movieline on Twitter.
If you weren’t around for the premiere of Late Night with David Letterman in 1982, then chances are you’re not aware how much he — and the team of writers, producers and comic talent that put on the show five nights a week — changed the face of late-night TV. Dave challenged and, in some cases, blew up the conventions of the talk-show genre and rewrote the playbook that Conan O’Brien , Craig Ferguson and the Jimmys — Kimmel and Fallon — are using today. Now on CBS, Letterman is still going strong, and, in 1991, his success begat Worldwide Pants Inc, which has produced the television series Everybody Loves Raymond and Ed. The company’s CEO Rob Burnett began as an intern on Late Night in 1985 and rose to become executive producer of the current CBS incarnation of Letterman’s show as well as the co-creator, with Jon Beckerman, of Ed and Knights of Prosperity . Although Worldwide Pants made its first foray into film production with the 2005 indie feature Strangers with Candy , Burnett has expanded the company’s presence in the medium with two projects that also involve him personally. In September, he made his directorial debut with We Made This Movie , a funny, unsentimental coming-of-age comedy that he co-wrote with Beckerman. Worldwide Pants is a producer of that film as well as Burnett’s next picture, which was announced in mid-October: an adaptation of Jonathan Evison’s novel, The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving . Movieline spoke to Burnett about his move into film, which, as you might expect from someone who cut his show-business teeth on Dave’s groundbreaking NBC show, has been anything but conventional. Working with a miniscule budget and determined to remain true to the film’s do-it-yourself plot, Burnett and Beckerman worked with a cast of unknowns and crowd-sourced the music through Red Bull Soundstage. They also orchestrated an online premiere via an alliance with SnagFilms , which Burnett talks about in the interview. There’s also the plot of We Made This Movie. Available via iTunes and other digital formats, it is not your mother’s coming-of-age movie. The film follows the exploits of Eric “LeBron” James and his crew of high-school friends in fictional Buckstown, NY, who plan to escape the drudgery of working in their local chicken-processing plant by making a Jackass -meets- Sacha Baron Cohen -style movie that will make them famous. LeBron’s hare-brained plan involves getting the movie into the hands of hometown hero Bill Pullman , who makes a memorable cameo in the movie, but even before that happens, there’s a little catch. Like so many teens looking for fame in the age of YouTube, they have cameras but no talent, and their attempts to film comedy skits that, for instance, involve one character performing celebrity impressions while sitting on a toilet, and LeBron donning a chicken suit and walking through town with what looks like a massive erection end up being funny for all of the wrong reasons. But as you watch the teens’ screen dreams bite the dust, another accidental — and realistic — movie emerges about friendship and coming of age in a small town. Movieline: Tell me about your next project first. I read that you just bought the rights to an interesting book. Rob Burnett: It’s this lovely little book called The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving that I’m hoping to adapt into a film. It’s by Jonathan Evison, and I just fell in love with it. It’s a beautiful little story about this guy who has suffered a great tragedy in his life. He gets a job as a caregiver and starts taking care of this kid with Muscular Dystrophy. The guy is emotionally paralyzed, and the kid is actually paralyzed. It’s very touching, but what I responded to is it’s not maudlin at all. It’s a kind of a buddy movie where they go on the road to find this kid’s father. If I can find a way to do it justice in writing a good script, it could be a nice little movie. I’m really excited about it. That’s what I really like about We Made This Movie . In the way that good comedy tells the truth, this movie is unsentimental about dreams. It absolutely is about dreams. There’s this adolescent energy about LeBron. He doesn’t want to go work at that chicken plant. He’s got big dreams. We’re living in a world right now where, in terms of making a movie, anyone can do it. But just because you can doesn’t necessarily mean you can. [Laughs]. You know? LeBron and his friends are very naïve. Even their plan is naïve: they’re going to get their movie in the hands of Bill Pullman, who’s from their hometown. And that alone is going to make them famous. I’m not sure Bill Pullman himself can get a movie made. What we love about the movie is that they try and they persevere. Jon Beckerman and I wrote this together, and there’s a lot of similarity between this and Ed , the show we did on NBC for four years. There’s a real bittersweet quality to the movie. What these characters don’t realize is the thing they really have is each other. They have friendship. They have these high school bonds with each other. And in the end, that’s largely what their movie becomes about. They don’t realize that. They don’t set out to do that. Jon and I have always been very interested in doing a coming of age movie. I love that time of life. Those memories you have; the bonding that goes on there. Your life is still wet cement. But we never quite found an access point until we got the idea: what about a group of kids who are trying to make a comedy film but accidentally make a coming-of-age movie? Some of the early scenes of the movie, where, for instance, the kids film the ‘Chicken with a Boner’ man-on-the-street segment and put up all those index cards with dubious ideas on them, seem to be inspired by ‘Late Show’ segments. That could have been Chris Elliott in a chicken suit instead of LeBron. We actually shot some of the stuff Letterman remote style. We were out on the street shooting with real people. So, yeah, a lot of it was influenced structurally by the way we do Letterman. But what we thought was interesting was that, unlike Dave or Chris Elliott or Sacha Baron Cohen, our kids aren’t good at what they’re doing. If Chris Elliott were ever to do Chicken with a Boner, he would do it ironically because he’d be making fun of it. These guys are doing Chicken with a Boner as if it’s the funniest thing in the world. In that scene where LeBron is suggesting that they shit into a taco and eat it, it’s so misguided. The thing is, it’s not that far away from the guys at Jackass might do, but whatever you think of the guys at Jackass , they’re really, really good at doing Jackass. LeBron and his friends aren’t even good at that. They’re not fearless, and they’re really not funny. I really liked the scenes where LeBron and some of the other guys show up at their friend Smitty’s house and find him with his sick mother. To me, Smitty is the stand-up comic of the group and those scenes show that comedy often does not come from a pretty place. The interesting thing and the challenging thing about the movie is we’re telling an accidental story. The kids are making a movie that they don’t know they’re making. So, in a different movie, if you’re telling the story of a character who’s taking care of a sick mother, at some point, you just cut to him with his sick mother. We couldn’t do that in this movie. Smitty, in some ways, sums that up. He’s kind of a bastard. He’s screwing up the movie and not taking it seriously from the very first scene. But then we see that not only is this kid taking care of his sick mother, he’s taking care of his brothers, too. Clearly, the father is gone, and he’s holding this all together without a word. You start to see where all of this deep cynicism comes from. That’s kind of the trick of this whole movie. And I think to some extent Smitty’s character sums it up better than any of the other characters. Where did you find such a funny cast of unknowns? The cast is phenomenal. They’re all brand new, really. Arjay Smith, who played LeBron had done some television here and there. And Michael Charles Roman, who played Smitty, had done a lot of commercials as a kid. But the rest of them literally had to join SAG to be in the movie. We auditioned hundreds of kids for these roles. I had open casting calls at NYU. I auditioned 300 kids in one day. We did have casting directors in a traditional way. Barbara McNamara on the East coast, and Bonnie Zane , who cast Ed for us, found Arjay on the West coast. We wanted kids that were funny and could think on their feet, but who could also be a fresh brand that no one had seen before. Given the idea of the movie, we didn’t want to have famous people in the cast. And that was kind of a guiding thought for everything we did. If you look at the direction, I didn’t use any dollies or cranes. The camera is always justified by being held by one of the characters. The movie is intended to have the look and feel of something the kids in the cast would have done themselves. And I think by and large, this is what it would have looked like had they done it themselves. They’re convincing as friends. How did you get them to bond? We shot this movie in 21 days. Holy shit. Seriously? Yes, that’s the appropriate reaction. And when you’re going to shoot for 21 days, you don’t have the luxury of time. If it takes four days to bond on the set, that’s 25 percent of your movie. So, I literally took all of these kids, and I had them live at my house for a week before we shot the movie. Translation: My wife is a saint. They all came to my house in Connecticut, and we also spent some time out at the beach in Long Island. And these kids, as only kids in their early 20s can do, became the best of friends very quickly. In fact, I distinctly remember the first morning of the first day of shooting. We were living in a Holiday Inn Express in Shelton, Conn. God bless the people of Shelton. That’s all I’ll say. We had all moved to this Holiday Inn Express, and we were going to be there for 21 days. The first morning before we went to set, I looked over and I saw one of the kids fart in front of the other kids and not care. The other kids were cracking up about it, and I’m like, we’ve done our job. They’re bonded. Let’s go to work.
Creepa, aka Thaddeus Chaylon Martin, once won From G’s to Gents on MTV. Then he went on to run a counterfeit cash scheme in Florida. The irony! Creepa was arrested last week for allegedly giving counterfeit bills to a female associate and having her buy a $145 cell phone at a Super Walmart in Gainsville. Once the woman bought the phone, Creepa then took it to another Walmart and returned the phone for legitimate bills. Sounds absolutely foolproof, this plan. It’s unclear how authorities uncovered the alleged scheme , but when investigators spoke with the woman, she told cops she had no idea the money was bogus. Then, the woman “became extremely irate with [Creepa] to the point of having to be restrained by [police] to keep her from physically attacking [Creepa].” Creepa was charged with multiple counts of fraud and was hauled to Alachua County Jail, where he was booked and posed for an angry celebrity mug shot . Term “celebrity” used very loosely.
One would think after five episodes and three seasons in less than 18 months, The Voice ‘s blind auditions would start to fizzle a bit. Hasn’t been the case so far. The judges are on fire (namely Blake) and the talent keeps pouring in. Let’s break down the contestants who advanced last night, with video performances … Team Adam Levine Benji, a former race car driver, slayed with “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” Dude just commanded the stage and showed off some seriously impressive range:
The So You Think You Can Dance finale crowned TWO winners last night. Cyrus Spencer and Eliana Girard. Chehon Wespi-Tschopp and Tiffany Maher. Or Cyrus and Tiffany, or Eliana and Chehon … the possibilities were limitless! Okay, there were only a few combinations. Just the same, the final four were sweating this one down to the wire. So who came away with the top prize? Eliana Girard was named America’s favorite female dancer! Congrats!! “What just happened?!” she shrieked, barely audible over the applause. As she choked back tears, she was joined in the SYTYCD winner’s circle by … Chehon Wespi-Tschopp! Never before had any ballet dancer won So You Think You Can Dance. This year, in Season 9, both winners hail from that genre! Well done, Eliana and Chehon. What do you think of America’s voting? Did they make the right call with these two? Or should Cyrus and Tiff have won?
President Barack Obama stopped by the Late Show With David Letterman last night, and had barely sat down before being asked about the Mitt Romney video. The secretly-recorded-calling-Obama-backers-entitled-irresponsible-drains-on-society video, which Romney stands by , while acknowledging poor word choice. Letterman asked Obama for his take on Mitt describing ” 47 percent of Americans ” in this manner, to which he said, “One of the things I learned as president is you represent the entire country … if you want to be president, you have to work for everyone.”
