Friday, June 13, 2008

Variety.com

U.K. shuts out product placement

Minister says it 'contaminates programs'

Gatorade product placement
Gatorade product placement in 'Friday Night Lights.'

By STEVE CLARKE

The U.K. media minister has attacked product placement in TV shows and said he will not allow the practice on British broadcasters even though it has been approved by the European Union.

The news is likely to infuriate TV companies, including beleaguered terrestrial giant ITV, which are all trying to find additional revenue streams as new media continues to make inroads into traditional advertising.

Andy Burnham, secretary of state at the Dept. of Culture, Media and Sport since January, dropped his bombshell Wednesday in his first big policy speech on broadcasting.

He said product placement would undermine the status that British TV enjoys internationally and “contaminate” programs.

He added, “There is a risk that, at the very moment when television needs to do all it can to show it can be trusted, that we elide the distinction between programs and adverts,” referring to the phone-in quiz scandals that rocked all British terrestrial webs last year.

“As a viewer, I don’t want to feel the script has been written by the commercial marketing director,” he added. “British programming has an integrity that is revered around the world, and I don’t think we should put that hard-won reputation up for sale.”

Last week, ITV topper Rupert Howell, in a speech about the new economics of TV, eagerly anticipated a time when U.K. television would be allowed to follow the U.S. example and use product placement.

Howell said it was vital to find new revenue streams soon and that product placement would be an important source of coin.

He said: “If we do it badly, people will switch off or switch over. We have to do it well. It will not be big, but it will be valuable.”


Facebook No Longer The Second Largest Social Network

It was sort of inevitable given Facebook’s monster growth over the last few years, but April 2008 was the milestone: Facebook officially caught up to MySpace in terms of unique monthly worldwide visitors, according to data released by Comscore and shown above. Both services are attracting around 115 million people to their respective sites each month.

Most of Facebook’s user growth, however, has been in international markets - MySpace is still dominates Facebook in the U.S. market, with 72 million monthly uniques. Facebook has 36 million monthly uniques, up from 23 million a year ago.

Facebook added 75 million monthly uniques over the last twelve month, but just 13 million of those visitors are located in the U.S. MySpace added 5 million U.S. uniques during that period - at this rate it will take 4+ years for Facebook to catch up to MySpace in the U.S. market.

There’s a real question about how valuable all these international users are from an advertising standpoint. We’ll be publishing our thoughts on that next week.

Facebook image
Website: facebook.com
Location:Palo Alto, California, United States
Founded: February 1, 2004
Funding: $496M

On February 4th, 2004 Mark Zuckerberg launched The Facebook, a social network that was at the time exclusively for Harvard students. It was a huge hit, in 2 weeks, half of the student body… Learn More

MySpace image
Website: myspace.com
Location:Beverly Hills, California, United States
Founded: August 1, 2003
Acquired: July 1, 2005 by Fox Interactive Media for $580M in Cash

MySpace is a popular social networking site that lets friends share, message and stay connected. The site lets you browse profiles, blog, email and join groups. MySpace also has videos, music and classifieds. Music artists can add friends, stream… Learn More

Russian Billionaires Are Buying All The Pop Stars

amywinehouse2.jpeg

Russian billionaires: they're powerful, they're flush with profits from semi-monopolized industrial concerns, and they're ready to party. So they think nothing of paying outrageous sums to international pop stars to come play private parties for them and their closest friends.

The most recent example is poor drug-addled soul singer Amy Winehouse, who will be pocketing a cool $2 million to play a show for the girlfriend of billionaire politician and businessman Roman Abramovich.

All $2 million of which will surely be spent to further Winehouse's ongoing demise.

The point is, she's not the only superstar who's been seduced by a gig like this. Soon you won't be able to see anyone from Madonna to Rihanna without a plane ticket to Moscow and tight connections to the vestiges of the Kremlin's power structure. It's a trend!

  • George Michael, 75-minute concert on New Year's eve, 2007, for nickel billionaire Vladimir Potanin. Price: $3.5 million
  • Rihanna, 40-minute show for billionaire Oleg Deripaska on New Year's eve, 2008. Price: $500,000.
  • Jennifer Lopez, 40-minute birthday party show for billionaire Andrei Melnichenko in April, 2007. Price: $1.2 million.
  • Christina Aguilera, three songs at Andrei Melnichenko's wedding in September, 2005. Price: $3.6 million.
  • And to put it all over the top, Madonna is reportedly considering an offer from "an unnamed Dubai-based tycoon" for a one-night private performance. Price: $10 million.
Fortunately, you can still hire Pat DiNizio of The Smithereens to play in your living room for $2,000.

Fox News presenter taken off air after Barack Obama 'terrorist fist jab' remark

13/06/2008

A Fox News television presenter is to be taken off air after she accused Barack and Michelle Obama of greeting each other with a "terrorist's fist jab".

The decision by network bosses came as the Obama campaign launched a website to dispel rumours about his faith and patriotism and his wife's views on race as he prepares to compete for the White House in November.

The website, www.fightthesmears.com , offers detailed responses to several rumours that have continued to circulate online and in conservative news outlets, including that Mr Obama is a Muslim.

E. D. Hill, a veteran of the Fox network, made her comment after the presumptive Democratic nominee and his wife affectionately bumped fists on stage last week as he prepared to make his victory speech.

Before a commercial break on her America's Pulse show, she asked: "A fist bump? A pound? A terrorist fist jab? The gesture everyone seems to interpret differently. We'll show you some interesting body communication and find out what it really says."

The gesture, derived from black street culture, is however commonplace in many walks of American life. Media commentators noted that former president George Bush once used it with the tennis player Anna Kournikova.

Ms Hill's remarks are one of several instances where the Right-wing network has disparaged the Obamas recently.

It characterised Mrs Obama as "Obama's Baby Mama", a derogatory term used for black single mothers, while Liz Trotta, a journalist and Fox contributor, joked about assassinating both Mr Obama and Osama bin Laden after supposedly muddling their names.

Both Ms Trotta and Ms Hill apologised, with the latter claiming that her comment had merely "characterised" discussions in the media about the Obamas' greeting.

However it appeared her analysis was extrapolated from a single comment on an article on the Right-wing HumanEvents.com, which posited that Hizbollah fighters used the same mode of greeting as the Obamas.

Some US commentators have noted that the Fox owner Rupert Murdoch spoke approvingly of Mr Obama recently, but it is not clear if the media mogul played any role demoting Ms Hill, who is however staying with the company. A Fox representative said changes to the afternoon schedule had been on the cards for weeks.

Karl Frisch, a spokesman for Media Matters, a liberal watchdog, said: "This is part of a broader problem with Fox: out of bound comments are followed by a half-baked apology. At some point Fox has got to decide if it is a responsible news source."

One of the first items on the new Obama website said that Mrs Obama, who like her husband is black, has never used the racially divisive term "whitey," as some blogs and conservative commentators have claimed.

It also tackles false claims that Obama, who will take on Republican Senator John McCain in the November election, follows Islam, and shows a photograph of Mr Obama with his hand on a Bible when he was sworn into the US Senate in 2007, to counter rumours that he used the Koran.

latimes.com

Judge Alex Kozinski recuses himself from obscenity trial

The 9th Circuit chief judge makes the decision three days after admitting he had posted sexually explicit photos and videos on his personal website.

Judge Alex Kozinski: The Skunk hit the fan




















Judge Alex Kozinski, shotgun, and racoon


By Scott Glover
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

June 13, 2008

A federal appeals court judge today recused himself from a closely-watched obscenity trial in Los Angeles, three days after acknowledging that he had posted sexually explicit material on a publicly accessible personal website.

"In light of the public controversy surrounding my involvement in this case, I have concluded that there is a manifest necessity to declare a mistrial," said Alex Kozinski, chief judge for the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. "I will recuse myself from further participation in the case and will ask the chief judge of the district court to reassign it to another judge."

The obscenity trial in Los Angeles federal court was suspended Wednesday after The Times reported about the images on his website.

Kozinski, one of the nation's highest-ranking judges, granted a 48-hour stay in the obscenity trial of a Hollywood adult filmmaker after the prosecutor requested time to explore "a potential conflict of interest concerning the court having a . . . sexually explicit website with similar material to what is on trial here."

In an interview Tuesday with The Times, Kozinski acknowledged posting sexual content on his website. Among the images on the site were a photo of naked women on all fours painted to look like cows and a video of an encounter between a half-dressed man and a sexually aroused farm animal. He defended some of the adult content as "funny" but conceded that other postings were inappropriate.

Kozinski later said that his adult son may have been responsible for posting some of the material.

Kozinski said that he thought the site was for his private storage and that he was not aware the images could be seen by the public, although he also said he had shared some material on the site with friends. After the interview Tuesday evening, he blocked public access to the site.

Kozinski, 57, is and has been mentioned as a possible candidate for the U.S. Supreme Court. He was named chief judge of the 9th Circuit last year and is considered a judicial conservative on most issues. He was appointed to the federal bench by President Reagan in 1985.


Atlantic Records Sues Stone Temple Pilots' Weiland, Kretz

http://www.stltoday.com/blogzone/the-blender/files/2008/04/stp.jpg

June 13, 2008
Emily Chasan, Reuters

Atlantic Records sued two members of Stone Temple Pilots yesterday (June 12), accusing them of trying to prematurely end their recording contract with the Warner Music Group label.

The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, claims lead singer Scott Weiland and drummer Eric Kretz have threatened to stop performing under their contract and have indicated they would like to end the agreement unless Atlantic makes significant changes.

The record company said in the suit that while Stone Temple Pilots has already delivered six albums, it wants the group to record a seventh album and deliver up to two more if Atlantic decides it wants them.

Stone Temple Pilots reunited last month for its first national tour in eight years. The group, whose momentum was often curtailed by Weiland's drug problems, had fallen apart shortly after a 2002 tour. In late 2003, the other two members of the group, guitarist Dean DeLeo and bassist Robert DeLeo, were released by Atlantic from their recording contract as they said they wanted to pursue separate careers.

Atlantic said in the lawsuit that the group -- Weiland, Kretz and the DeLeos -- was now touring successfully and had indicated its intention to record together again. The record company said its contract with Stone Temple Pilots was written under New York laws and that the musicians are trying to use California laws to terminate it.


Atlantic said claims by Kretz and Weiland that they have a right to terminate the contract "have given rise to a definite, real and substantial controversy between the parties that threatens to harm Atlantic's business."

Atlantic is seeking a court declaration of its rights under the recording contract, the costs of its legal fees and any other relief the court decides is appropriate.

In a statement, STP maintains it "never threatened anything more than remaining away from the studio until equitable terms could be arranged. The precipitous filing of this action is yet another example of the difficulties facing artists in the new music environment, as relationships between artists and their labels fall further and further apart."

The band says it hopes the suit will be shelved "to permit negotiations to continue in a positive spirit rather than under a dark cloud of hostility. Should everyone operate in good faith, STP are certain that a new album from the band will be available soon. Should Atlantic instead pursue this scorched earth policy towards the band, the ultimate victims will be STP's fans, who will never be able to enjoy a new album from the group."

Thursday, June 12, 2008

Metallica reverses their previous blog-reviews position -- blames band manager Q-Prime Management for "error"



Metallica issues official statement on matter:

6/11/2008


While we occasionally enjoy reading the various comments, rumors, speculation, reviews, gossip and all the good that the internet brings, rarely do we feel the desire/need to respond to the "blogosphere" . . .

hey, everyone is entitled to have their thoughts and opinions, right?

However, once we re-surfaced on Tuesday after a few weeks on tour in Europe, we were informed that someone at Q Prime (our managers) had made the error of asking a few publications to take down reviews of the rough mixes from the new record that were posted on their sites.

Our response was "WHY?!!!

Why take down mostly positive reviews of the new material and prevent people from getting psyched about the next record. . . that makes no sense to us!"

So after a few rounds of managerial ear spank and sentencing everyone at Q Prime to 20 push-ups each, we figured why not take matters into our own hands and just post the links here on our site. Kerrang, Metal Hammer, The Quietus.

You see, we have maintained an "in the press" section here on Metallica.com for many years now, posting links to reviews of shows, album and DVD releases, and various other tidbits we've come across while surfing around. Some good, some not so good, but we put 'em all up . . . sort of the same way we treat our message boards on this site . . . welcoming all feedback.

So in the spirit of keeping this section current, we've put as many of the reviews of the rough mixes of the new record up here as we could find.

If we missed any, let us know . . . and in the meantime, we're always adding, so peruse at your leisure.

latimes.com
Perez Hilton
Perez Hilton

“I think what I do is noble. I think my job title is entertainer. I shine the light on celebrities behaving badly, and I also shine the light on those that get it right. And those that get it right, I applaud.”
By Andrea Chang, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
June 13, 2008
The gig: As the self-proclaimed "Queen of All Media," Hilton has become a pop culture phenom with his Hollywood gossip blog, which draws about 7 million page views a day. PerezHilton.com is filled with snarky comments and paparazzi photos and helped usher in 24-hour celebrity "info-tainment."

Education: Bachelor's degree in drama from New York University.

Former jobs: Publicist, actor and journalist at gay publications and tabloid Star magazine.

Got the idea: Hilton, whose real name is Mario Lavandeira, began blogging as a hobby after seeing how easy it was. He focused on Hollywood "because it was something I was inherently curious about, fascinated with. And, let's face it, celebrities -- a lot of them -- are crazy."

Along the path: Started his blog, then called PageSixSixSix, in 2004 with a post about Howard Stern. Within months, tabloid TV show "The Insider" dubbed it "Hollywood's most-hated website." This led to a huge boost in Web traffic.

Name change: After getting sued by the New York Post, which publishes gossip section Page Six, Hilton changed the blog's name to PerezHilton.com. The name reflects his Cuban roots and "the wacky world of celebrities." And what does pal Paris Hilton think? "She loves it."

How it works: Hilton, 30, constantly checks his e-mail, text messages and voice mail and scours the Web for the latest gossip on "A-listers to D-listers to Z-listers," updating his blog an average of 40 times a day. His sources include publicists, agents, managers, dog walkers, nannies and celebrities themselves. Advertisers pay as much as $54,000 to run a one-day ad package on the site.

First big purchase: A new Toyota Camry.

Most surreal moment: When Madonna made him a video in which she seductively asked, "Who do you love more: me or [Hilton's dog] Teddy?" Naturally, Hilton posted the clip -- and his response -- on his blog.

Guilty pleasure: "Cheesy pop music," especially British group Girls Aloud.

The Perez brand: Hilton debuted a clothing line, sold exclusively at retail chain Hot Topic, last week. He also appears in a summer movie, "Another Gay Sequel: Gays Gone Wild," hosts a syndicated radio show, is writing a book on celebrities and is in talks to start his own record label. "I want my own little empire."

What fame hasn't brought: Hilton dishes that "in 2007, I got laid once. One time. Which, for a gay man, is unheard of. That's like, celibate."

In his own words: "I think what I do is noble. I think my job title is entertainer. I shine the light on celebrities behaving badly, and I also shine the light on those that get it right. And those that get it right, I applaud."

latimes.com

Alex Kozinski calls for investigation into his porn postings

The Calif. judge asked an ethics panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to initiate proceedings after the disclosure about his trove of sexually explicit material.




By Scott Glover
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

June 12, 2008

A federal judge who acknowledged maintaining his own publicly accessible website featuring sexually explicit photos and videos today called for an investigation of his own conduct.

Alex Kozinski, 57, chief judge of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, asked a court ethics panel to initiate the proceedings after The Times reported Wednesday that he posted lewd photos and videos on his personal website.

Kozinski was presiding over a closely watched obscenity trial in Los Angeles federal court when he acknowledged the website.

"I will cooperate fully in any investigation," Kozinski said in a statement.

Kozinski suspended until Monday the obscenity trial of a Hollywood adult filmmaker after the prosecutor requested time to explore "a potential conflict of interest concerning the court having a . . . sexually explicit website with similar material to what is on trial here."

Although Kozinski requested an investigation, it's unclear what, if any, discipline he could face. Circuit judges are appointed for life and can only be fired by Congress, though they can be censured by fellow jurists.

In an interview Tuesday with The Times, Kozinski acknowledged posting sexual content on his website. Among the images on the site were a photo of naked women on all fours painted to look like cows and a video of a half-dressed man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal. He defended some of the adult content as "funny" but conceded that other postings were inappropriate.

Kozinski said that he thought the site was for his private storage and that he was not aware the images could be seen by the public, although he also said he had shared some material on the site with friends. After the interview Tuesday evening, he blocked public access to the site.

Kozinski is one of the nation's highest-ranking judges and has been mentioned as a possible candidate for the U.S. Supreme Court. He was named chief judge of the 9th Circuit last year and is considered a judicial conservative on most issues. He was appointed to the federal bench by President Reagan in 1985.

After publication of an latimes.com article about his website Wednesday morning, the judge offered another explanation for how the material might have been posted to the site. Tuesday evening he had told The Times that he had a clear recollection of some of the most objectionable material and that he was responsible for placing it on the Web. By Wednesday afternoon, as controversy about the website spread, Kozinski was seeking to shift responsibility, at least in part, to his adult son, Yale.

"Yale called and said he's pretty sure he uploaded a bunch of it," Kozinski wrote in an e-mail to abovethelaw.com, a legal news website. "I had no idea, but that sounds right because I sure don't remember putting some of that stuff there."

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, expressed concern about Kozinski's website.

"If this is true, this is unacceptable behavior for a federal court judge," she said in a statement.

Stephen Gillers, a New York University law professor who specializes in legal ethics and has known Kozinski for years, called him "a treasure of the federal judiciary." Gillers said he took the judge at his word that he did not know the site was publicly available. But he said Kozinski was "seriously negligent" in allowing it to be discovered.

"The phrase 'sober as a judge' resonates with the American public," Gillers said. "We don't want them to reveal their private selves publicly. This is going to upset a lot of people."

Gillers said the disclosure would be humiliating for Kozinski and would "harm his reputation in many quarters" but that the controversy should die there.

He added, however, that if the public concludes the website was intended for the sharing of pornographic material, "that's a transgression of another order.

"It would be very hard for him to come back from that," he said.

Kozinski has a reputation as a brilliant legal mind and is seen as a champion of the 1st Amendment right to freedom of speech and expression. Several years ago, for example, after learning that appeals court administrators had placed filters on computers that denied access to pornography and other materials, Kozinski led a successful effort to have the filters removed.

The judge said it was strictly by chance that he wound up presiding over the trial of filmmaker Ira Isaacs in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles. Appellate judges occasionally hear criminal cases when they have free time on their calendars, and the Isaacs case was one of two he was given, the judge said.

Isaacs is on trial for distributing sexual fetish videos, featuring acts of bestiality and defecation. The material is considerably more vulgar than the content posted on Kozinski's website.

The judge said he didn't think any of the material on his site would qualify as obscene.

"Is it prurient? I don't know what to tell you," he said. "I think it's odd and interesting. It's part of life."

Before the site was taken down, visitors to http://alex.kozinski.com were greeted with the message: "Ain't nothin' here. Y'all best be movin' on, compadre."

Only those who knew to type in the name of a subdirectory could see the content on the site, which also included some of Kozinski's essays and legal writings as well as music files and personal photos.

The sexually explicit material on the site was extensive, including images of masturbation, public sex and contortionist sex. There was a slide show striptease featuring a transsexual and a folder that contained a series of photos of women's crotches in snug-fitting clothing or underwear.

Kozinski told The Times that he began saving the sexually explicit materials and other items of interest on his website years ago.

"People send me stuff like this all the time," he said.

In turn, he said, he occasionally passes on items he finds interesting or funny to others.

Among the sexually explicit material on his site that he defended as humorous were two photos. In one, a young man is bent over in a chair and performing fellatio on himself. In the other, two women are sitting in what appears to be a cafe with their skirts hiked up to reveal their pubic hair and genitalia. Behind them is a sign reading "Bush for President."

"That is a funny joke," Kozinski said.

The judge said he planned to delete some of the most objectionable material from his site, including the photo depicting women as cows, which he said was "degrading . . . and just gross." He also said he planned to get rid of a graphic step-by-step pictorial in which a woman is seen shaving her pubic hair.

Before suggesting that his son might have been responsible for posting some of the content, Kozinski told The Times that he, the judge, must have accidentally uploaded the cow and shaving images to his server while intending to upload something else. "I would not keep those files intentionally," he said. He offered to give a reporter a demonstration of how the error probably occurred.

The judge emphasized that he never used appeals court computers to maintain his site.

The presence of copyrighted music files on Kozinski's site raises other issues.

More than a dozen MP3 tracks were listed, and they were neither excerpts nor used to illustrate legal opinions, which experts said might have qualified their copying as "fair use." The artists included Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan and Weird Al Yankovic.

Uploading such files could violate civil copyright laws if friends or members of the public visited the site and downloaded the songs, according to attorneys who have litigated file-sharing cases for both copyright holders and accused infringers.

Even if no one downloaded the songs, just making them available might run afoul of the law, said Corynne McSherry, staff attorney at the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation, which often argues the other side of such issues.

Late last year, three of Kozinski's Circuit Court colleagues noted in a ruling that "the owner of a collection of works who makes them available to the public may be deemed to have distributed copies of the works," a violation of copyright law if done without permission.

"For him to actually be held liable would take some further investigation, but I think it's possible," McSherry said. "It's a strange story. It's surprising to me."

Kozinski was not asked in the Tuesday interview about the music files, and he could not be reached for comment Wednesday afternoon.

Google Apologizes For Killing Newspapers


All these people who accidentally destroyed the newspaper industry feel so bad about it! Craig Newmark, whose Craigslist decimated the classifieds sections of the nation, endowed some chair at Berkeley's journalism school to assuage his guilty conscience.

Now Google, whose ad company is destroying the revenue model newspapers depend on, is hopping on the "we totally love journalism" bandwagon. Google head Eric Schmidt claimed that their DoubleClick ad service will aid newspapers! In getting more online revenue, obv, not with the whole "saving newspapers themselves" thing. "It's a huge moral imperative to help here," Eric said. Too little, too late, Google! ONCE A WHORE, ALWAYS A WHORE.

Without providing specifics about how it might be accomplished, Schmidt said DoubleClick's system for serving up online display ads could generate "significant" revenue online for newspapers.

Still, he acknowledged the boost probably won't be enough to restore the hefty profit margins that newspaper publishers historically have enjoyed from print advertising.

It's sad to see the people who killed print have these regrets so publicly. They probably wake up in a cold sweat after terrifying dreams of bloody broadsheets calling their names—"you killllled meeee!" But seriously, it's too late, Eric. Not only is this ad thing a slap in the face, but Google has a nasty habit of aggregating and indexing lots and lots of newspaper content without paying anyone. So give it up and embrace your role! You are become death, destroyer of print! You made $16.6 billion in revenue last year!

At least Craig bought the newspaper industry a little going-away present. This empty talk is just sad.

Scientology vs South Park

Tom Cruise Proves Sanity By Calling Shrink Dr. Drew A Nazi

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Drew Pinsky is downright respectable, at least by TV doctor standards. Unlike "Dr. Phil," he has an actual medical degree, practices medicine and even teaches psychiatry. His reality show, Celebrity Rehab, is both more gripping and responsible than other celebrity "reality" vehicles. But Tom Cruise has allowed his lawyer to compare "Dr. Drew" to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, because the doctor told Playboy the following about movie star Cruise's fevered devotion to the Church of Scientology:

A lot of people in the public eye who behave strangely have mental illness we can learn from, and much of it is based on childhood trauma, without a doubt. Take a guy like Tom Cruise. Why would somebody be drawn into a cultish kind of environment like Scientology? To me, that's a function of a very deep emptiness and suggests serious neglect in childhood - maybe some abuse, but mostly neglect.

Cruise's high-powered attorney, Bert Fields, a frequent client of convicted wiretapper and racketeer Anthony Pellicano, called Pinsky an "unqualified television performer who is obviously just looking for notoriety," adding, "The last time we heard garbage like this was from Joseph Goebbels."

Cruise has already spoken on record about his abusive father. Strange, then, that he would snap so viciously over speculation he was neglected.

http://xenutv.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/drdrew.jpg

Perhaps the megastar interprets Pinsky's statements as a slam against his mother, the presumptive neglector. More likely, it was the line about Scientology's "cultish" environment that sent Cruise, a church bigwig, into attack mode.

But a slam this over the top only makes Cruise look more crazy while drawing attention to his own deep involvement with the sect.

Motley Crue to Motley Crue band Manager: We've Been Motley Scrued

The members of Motley Crue have filed yet another lawsuit against their management, once again claiming they're the victims of a major money and power grab.


In the lawsuit, filed today in LA County Superior Court, band members say manager Burt Stein and his management companies were supposed to watch their back -- but instead took money and made backroom deals without their permission in order to cash in on the band's popularity.

If this sounds familiar, it is. Last year the band sued another manager, essentially alleging the same thing. That case was settled.


Motley Crue - "Saints of Los Angeles"




Mail Online

The wife U.S. Republican John McCain callously left behind

By Sharon Churcher
8th June 2008

Now that Hillary Clinton has at last formally withdrawn from the race for the White House, the eyes of America and the world will focus on Barack Obama and his Republican rival Senator John McCain.

While Obama will surely press his credentials as the embodiment of the American dream – a handsome, charismatic young black man who was raised on food stamps by a single mother and who represents his country’s future – McCain will present himself as a selfless, principled war hero whose campaign represents not so much a battle for the presidency of the United States, but a crusade to rescue the nation’s tarnished reputation.

Carol McCainForgotten woman: But despite all her problems Carol McCain says she still adores he ex-husband

McCain likes to illustrate his moral fibre by referring to his five years as a prisoner-of-war in Vietnam. And to demonstrate his commitment to family values, the 71-year-old former US Navy pilot pays warm tribute to his beautiful blonde wife, Cindy, with whom he has four children.

But there is another Mrs McCain who casts a ghostly shadow over the Senator’s presidential campaign. She is seldom seen and rarely written about, despite being mother to McCain’s three eldest children.

And yet, had events turned out differently, it would be she, rather than Cindy, who would be vying to be First Lady. She is McCain’s first wife, Carol, who was a famous beauty and a successful swimwear model when they married in 1965.

She was the woman McCain dreamed of during his long incarceration and torture in Vietnam’s infamous ‘Hanoi Hilton’ prison and the woman who faithfully stayed at home looking after the children and waiting anxiously for news.

But when McCain returned to America in 1973 to a fanfare of publicity and a handshake from Richard Nixon, he discovered his wife had been disfigured in a terrible car crash three years earlier. Her car had skidded on icy roads into a telegraph pole on Christmas Eve, 1969. Her pelvis and one arm were shattered by the impact and she suffered massive internal injuries.

When Carol was discharged from hospital after six months of life-saving surgery, the prognosis was bleak. In order to save her legs, surgeons

had been forced to cut away huge sections of shattered bone, taking with it her tall, willowy figure. She was confined to a wheelchair and was forced to use a catheter.

Through sheer hard work, Carol learned to walk again. But when John McCain came home from Vietnam, she had gained a lot of weight and bore little resemblance to her old self.

Today, she stands at just 5ft4in and still walks awkwardly, with a pronounced limp. Her body is held together by screws and metal plates and, at 70, her face is worn by wrinkles that speak of decades of silent suffering.

For nearly 30 years, Carol has maintained a dignified silence about the accident, McCain and their divorce. But last week at the bungalow where she now lives at Virginia Beach, a faded seaside resort 200 miles south of Washington, she told The Mail on Sunday how McCain divorced her in 1980 and married Cindy, 18 years his junior and the heir to an Arizona brewing fortune, just one month later.

John and Cindy McCainGolden couple: John and Cindy McCain at a charity gala in Los Angeles

Carol insists she remains on good terms with her ex-husband, who agreed as part of their divorce settlement to pay her medical costs for life. ‘I have no bitterness,’

she says. ‘My accident is well recorded. I had 23 operations, I am five inches shorter than I used to be and I was in hospital for six months. It was just awful, but it wasn’t the reason for my divorce.

‘My marriage ended because John McCain didn’t want to be 40, he wanted to be 25. You know that happens...it just does.’

Some of McCain’s acquaintances are less forgiving, however. They portray the politician as a self-centred womaniser who effectively abandoned his crippled wife to ‘play the field’. They accuse him of finally settling on Cindy, a former rodeo beauty queen, for financial reasons.

McCain was then earning little more than £25,000 a year as a naval officer, while his new father-in-law, Jim Hensley, was a multi-millionaire who had impeccable political connections.

He first met Carol in the Fifties while he was at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis. He was a privileged, but rebellious scion of one of America’s most distinguished military dynasties – his father and grandfather were both admirals.

But setting out to have a good time, the young McCain hung out with a group of young officers who called themselves the ‘Bad Bunch’.

His primary interest was women and his conquests ranged from a knife-wielding floozy nicknamed ‘Marie, the Flame of Florida’ to a tobacco heiress.

Carol fell into his fast-living world by accident. She escaped a poor upbringing in Philadelphia to become a successful model, married an Annapolis classmate of McCain’s and had two children – Douglas and Andrew – before renewing what one acquaintance calls ‘an old flirtation’ with McCain.

It seems clear she was bowled over by McCain’s attention at a time when he was becoming bored with his playboy lifestyle.

‘He was 28 and ready to settle down and he loved Carol’s children,’ recalled another Annapolis graduate, Robert Timberg, who wrote The Nightingale’s Song, a bestselling biography of McCain and four other graduates of the academy.

The couple married and McCain adopted Carol’s sons. Their daughter, Sidney, was born a year later, but domesticity was clearly beginning

to bore McCain – the couple were regarded as ‘fixtures on the party circuit’ before McCain requested combat duty in Vietnam at the end of 1966.

He was assigned as a bomber pilot on an aircraft carrier in the Gulf of Tonkin.

What follows is the stuff of the McCain legend. He was shot down over Hanoi in October 1967 on his 23rd mission over North Vietnam and was badly beaten by an angry mob when he was pulled, half-drowned from a lake.

war hero John McCainWar hero: McCain with Carol as he arrives back in the US in 1973 after his five years as a PoW in North Vietnam

Over the next five-and-a-half years in the notorious Hoa Loa Prison he was regularly tortured and mistreated.

It was in 1969 that Carol went to spend the Christmas holiday – her third without McCain – at her parents’ home. After dinner, she left to drop off some presents at a friend’s house.

It wasn’t until some hours later that she was discovered, alone and in terrible pain, next to the wreckage of her car. She had been hurled through the windscreen.

After her first series of life-saving operations, Carol was told she may never walk again, but when doctors said they would try to get word to McCain about her injuries, she refused, insisting: ‘He’s got enough problems, I don’t want to tell him.’

H. Ross Perot, a billionaire Texas businessman, future presidential candidate and advocate of prisoners of war, paid for her medical care.

When McCain – his hair turned prematurely white and his body reduced to little more than a skeleton – was released in March 1973, he told reporters he was overjoyed to see Carol again.

But friends say privately he was ‘appalled’ by the change in her appearance. At first, though, he was kind, assuring her: ‘I don’t look so good myself. It’s fine.’

He bought her a bungalow near the sea in Florida and another former PoW helped him to build a railing so she could pull herself over the dunes to the water.

‘I thought, of course, we would live happily ever after,’ says Carol. But as a war hero, McCain was moving in ever-more elevated circles.

Through Ross Perot, he met Ronald Reagan, then Governor of California. A sympathetic Nancy Reagan took Carol under her wing.

But already the McCains’ marriage had begun to fray. ‘John started carousing and running around with women,’ said Robert Timberg.

McCain has acknowledged that he had girlfriends during this time, without going into details. Some friends blame his dissatisfaction with Carol, but others give some credence to her theory of a mid-life crisis.

He was also fiercely ambitious, but it was clear he would never become an admiral like his illustrious father and grandfather and his thoughts were turning to politics.

In 1979 – while still married to Carol – he met Cindy at a cocktail party in Hawaii. Over the next six months he pursued her, flying around the country to see her. Then he began to push to end his marriage.

Carol and her children were devastated. ‘It was a complete surprise,’ says Nancy Reynolds, a former Reagan aide.

‘They never displayed any difficulties between themselves. I know the Reagans were quite shocked because they loved and respected both Carol and John.’

Another friend added: ‘Carol didn’t fight him. She felt her infirmity made her an impediment to him. She justified his actions because of all he had gone through. She used to say, “He just wants to make up for lost time.”’

Indeed, to many in their circle the saddest part of the break-up was Carol’s decision to resign herself to losing a man she says she still adores.

Friends confirm she has remained friends with McCain and backed him in all his campaigns. ‘He was very generous to her in the divorce but of course he could afford to be, since he was marrying Cindy,’ one observed.

McCain transferred the Florida beach house to Carol and gave her the right to live in their jointly-owned townhouse in the Washington suburb of Alexandria. He also agreed to pay her alimony and child support.

A former neighbour says she subsequently sold up in Florida and Washington and moved in 2003 to Virginia Beach. He said: ‘My impression was that she found the new place easier to manage as she still has some difficulties walking.’

Meanwhile McCain moved to Arizona with his new bride immediately after their 1980 marriage. There, his new father-in-law gave him a job and introduced him to local businessmen and political powerbrokers who would smooth his passage to Washington via the House of Representatives and Senate.

And yet despite his popularity as a politician, there are those who won’t forget his treatment of his first wife.

Ted Sampley, who fought with US Special Forces in Vietnam and is now a leading campaigner for veterans’ rights, said: ‘I have been following John McCain’s career for nearly 20 years. I know him personally. There is something wrong with this guy and let me tell you what it is – deceit.

‘When he came home and saw that Carol was not the beauty he left behind, he started running around on her almost right away. Everybody around him knew it.

‘Eventually he met Cindy and she was young and beautiful and very wealthy. At that point McCain just dumped Carol for something he thought was better.

‘This is a guy who makes such a big deal about his character. He has no character. He is a fake. If there was any character in that first marriage, it all belonged to Carol.’

One old friend of the McCains said: ‘Carol always insists she is not bitter, but I think that’s a defence mechanism. She also feels deeply in his debt because in return for her agreement to a divorce, he promised to pay for her medical care for the rest of her life.’

Carol remained resolutely loyal as McCain’s political star rose. She says she agreed to talk to The Mail on Sunday only because she wanted to publicise her support for the man who abandoned her.

Indeed, the old Mercedes that she uses to run errands displays both a disabled badge and a sticker encouraging people to vote for her ex-husband. ‘He’s a good guy,’ she assured us. ‘We are still good friends. He is the best man for president.’

But Ross Perot, who paid her medical bills all those years ago, now believes that both Carol McCain and the American people have been taken in by a man who is unusually slick and cruel – even by the standards of modern politics.

‘McCain is the classic opportunist. He’s always reaching for attention and glory,’ he said.

‘After he came home, Carol walked with a limp. So he threw her over for a poster girl with big money from Arizona. And the rest is history.’

Five Reasons Why Metallica Will Doom Bonnaroo Forever

If you like the Bonnaroo music festival, don't read this story. As history shows, Metallica's about to ruin everything.

If you like the Bonnaroo music festival, don't read this story. As history shows, Metallica's about to ruin everything.










Bonnaroo, it was nice knowing you.

We'll miss your gray market economy, with Frisbee-chucking weirdos selling burritos, beer and mystery balloons from the back of Econoline vans. We'll miss the way you blended hippie jam bands like Rusted Root with indie rock bands like Death Cab for Cutie and the resultant nine-car social pile up that ensued. Hell, we'll even miss the sunstroke and smell of the non-VIP camping area.

But it's all over now. You could have had yourself a nice little time with David Cross in the comedy tent, dozens of stoners mesmerized by “The Big Lebowski” and maybe a nice Phil Lesh/Lupe Fiasco duet, but no. You got greedy. You wanted a big-time name near the top of the bill. You had to go cock things up and get Metallica.

Let there be no question: Metallica will kill Bonnaroo. When they're done, Manchester, Tenn. will be a post-apocalyptic swath of scorched farmland, burned out VW Microbuses and tufts of shredded hair yanked from hipster beards. Why, you ask? Because this band is like Rogue from the X-Men, it kills everything it touches. Here are five solid examples to ponder before the special brownies kick in.

1. They killed Lollapalooza.

OK, so maybe a festival that included Soundgarden, Nine Inch Nails and Public Enemy on its rosters wasn't the feel-good touring franchise of the century. But before Metallica played in 1996, the biggest problem facing this festival of dancing Shaolin Monks, adult jungle gyms and piercing stations was Billy Corgan getting pissed off because people liked the Beastie Boys better than his band. Once big daddy Perry Farrell left, though, the wheels came off the cart. An event that once featured teens crying over the loss of Kurt Cobain now reverberated with the sound of pizza delivering high school dropouts chanting “Die, Die, Die” as Lars Ulrich and company laid into their Passover-themed crowd favorite “Creeping Death.” The next year, Lolla tried to save face by putting on a Prodigy/Orbital-fueled rave, but it was too late. The whole thing went on hiatus until 2003, when the tour limped to an unmerciful end -- relegated to one-off, stiflingly hot summer shows in Chicago's Grant Park. One of Metallica's lesser offenses, they may not have ultimately kicked the chair, but they certainly helped secure the noose.

2. They killed hair metal.

The average long-haired, black-shirted true believer wasn't altogether pleased when The Black Album went platinum and “Enter Sandman” was all over MTV, but at least this gave Metallica a chance to knock the world on its ass with some thrash metal, no? Wrong, fucko. After Sandman's success, they cut their hair short. Then singer James Hetfield, who inspired the band's nickname "Alcoholica," got sober. Finally, the band released Load, which will go down in history as one of the greatest adult contemporary albums ever released -- easily equaling anything released by Carly Simon or Bread. To pour rock salt into the wound, a year later, the band released the equally pitiful and decidedly unmetal ReLoad, then followed that with an album of Bob Seeger, Thin Lizzie and Blue Oyster Cult covers called Garage Inc., and punctuated the whole mess with symphonic recordings of several of their songs in 1999. With metal's flagbearers out of the picture, metal became the punchline to a cultural joke: Pat Boone recorded an album of metal covers, Ozzy's reality TV show turned him into America's Sweetheart, and Sebastian Bach ended up on The Gilmore Girls.

3. They killed Woodstock '99.


If you like the Bonnaroo music festival, don't read this story. As history shows, Metallica's about to ruin everything.










Some would argue that Woodstock as a franchise needed to be killed (which is true) and that the mayhem that erupted at the 1999 edition was Limp Bizkit and Rage Against the Machine's fault (which is slightly false). That's like saying Scottie Pippen and Toni Kukoc were the driving forces behind the Chicago Bulls dynasty. Professional wet fart Fred Durst and fair-weather activist Zach de la Rocha (our feelings on that here) may have fanned the flames, but the inclusion of Metallica in the lineup made the presence of those bands possible in the first place. Organizers rolled the dice with Metallica once at Woodstock '94 and got lucky. Not this time. There's oppressive heat, overcommericialization and $4 water at nearly all such events, but Hetfield & Co. lit the fuse. You know, it takes a special breed of asshole to see how unhappy the crowds were and still crank out “Fight Fire With Fire” while beer-fueled idiots tear the place apart and then act stunned when there are four rapes and the place is torched a night later. Welcome to the peace festival, motherfuckers!

4. They killed Napster.


Remember this? Back in 2000, "Napster Baaad!" became one of the Web's first viral videos.



There's a reason many of your friends' CD collections come to an abrupt halt in the mid-'90s. It was called Napster, and it was good. Labels and artists cried that it stole their livelihood, but made the same argument about blank cassette tapes years ago. So they adjusted, right? Well, no. Ulrich and several other millionaires called a press conference in 2000 to rat out more than 300,000 fans that downloaded music "illegally." (Technically, it wasn't illegal yet.) Lars singlehandedly saved the music industry and kept CD sales flourishing while labels and artists alike came up with new and innovative ways to get their music to listeners and still earn a profit. At least that's what he'll tell you. Today, the music industry is on deathwatch and the only people who got rich off legal downloads seem to work at Apple. The rest of us still download music illegally, only it's more difficult, stealing songs from Hype Machine and that one guy at work who downloaded every album ever made from Napster eight years ago.

5. They killed Jason Newsted.


If you like the Bonnaroo music festival, don't read this story. As history shows, Metallica's about to ruin everything.










The death of original Metallica bassist Cliff Burton in tour bus accident was a tragic and senseless accident. But what they did to poor Jason Newsted makes the shit that goes on at Guantanamo look like a visit to Six Flags. Listen to the ...And Justice For All album sometime and point out the bass parts. If you can't, you're not alone, as Newsted says he was elbowed out as part of Hetfield and Ulrich's little frat-boy hazing ritual that only intensified over time. Sure, they threw Newsted's belongings out hotel windows, jarred him awake at 4 a.m. and tricked him into eating wasabi just for laughs, but how bad did it get? Consider this excerpt from a January 2001 interview in Playboy:

PLAYBOY: Did you know they were telling people you were gay?

NEWSTED: No. I mean, dude, there was so much, that's like a minor detail.

Flogged like an unwanted stepbrother for much of his time with the band, his departure was foreshadowed when Hetfield told him “Jason, you're too metal for your own fucking good, man” during a concert in Mexico City recorded for the band's Live Shit: Binge and Purge boxed set in 1993. Ten years later, as Hetfield and Ulrich had their group hug during the Monster therapy sessions, Newsted was working on a side project. Feeling threatened by Newsted's other venture, Metallica got pissed and Newsted finally had his Tina Turner moment, calling the band's therapy adventure, “really fucking lame and weak.” Newsted's in some band called Voivod now, which is the metal equivalent of the witness protection program.


Outrage directed at Fox over 'baby mama' smear

June 12, 2008

One would hope that Barack Obama's just-unveiled myth busting Web site won't need to reproduce a copy of his and Michelle's marriage license, but it seems some in the conservative media are unconvinced of the validity of their matrimony.

Fox News, the network of assassination fantasies and "terrorist fist bumps," is being called out for its reference to Michelle Obama as her husband's "baby mama." The phrase is offensive on a variety of levels, according to various liberal commentators, who point out that the term generally refers to unmarried women who are estranged from the fathers of their children.

The "baby mama" reference was printed on a graphic during a segment discussing the coming wave of right-wing attacks on Michelle Obama, including an announced "documentary" that would feature damaging footage of the candidate. (Some pro-Hillary forces, such as committed Clinton fan Larry Johnson, also have been instrumental in spreading smears and rumors about Michelle Obama, as the segment noted.)

Unmentioned in all the condemnation of Fox's apparent racism is the fact that their structuring of the segment further demonstrated the extent to which the network has abandoned any attempt to live up to its "fair & balanced" moniker. The only guest invited to speak about the smears and rumors was ultra-right-wing blogger Michelle Malkin; no liberal or moderate voices are present in the segment at all.

The phrase "implies that like too many people in the black community, she is a mother on her own with no man around doing his job," writes blogger Oliver Willis, who is black, in a post titled "Hey Fox News, Just Call Her A N** And Be Done With It, Okay?"

Except, Barack and Michelle Obama are the exact opposite of this, and that is one of the reason America - especially black America - are so proud of them.

But Fox News is the network that tears down those who do not toe the line, and if that means they should resort to jive to describe a black woman as a “baby mama” despite the strength of her family and her own personal success, so be it.

Screw you guys.

According to a tally being maintained by Jeff Fecke at the blog Shakesville, the "baby mama" smear is at least the 54th instance of racially motivated hostility directed at Obama.

So yeah, irony is officially dead. Tomorrow, I assume Fox will put up a graphic, "Obama downs a 40 of malt liquor, and shoots cop in drive-by." Or perhaps they can just post a picture of the Obama family with the legend, "Negroes." Only, you know, the other N-word, just in case you didn't get the point that the Obamas are totally black.

Unsurprisingly, there are at least a few Fox-can-do-no-wrong voices defending the conservative network and trying to pass off the smear as no big deal.

Firedoglake, though, points out that this is just another example of behavior trotted out around every election.

Every four years the nation gathers, not just to vote, but find out what slander the Republicans will use against the wife of the Democratic Presidential Nominee this year:

1988: Kitty Dukakis, and the myth of the feces coated flag.

1992: Hillary Clinton and the "ball-busting communist harpy" (should be 1992 to present)

1996: See above, add dash of "murdering lesbian inside-trader".

2000: Tipper Gore, broke the heart of Oliver's old rich-guy father Oliver, claimed you never had to say you're sorry and later co-starred in 'Convoy'.

2004: OMG! Teresa Kerry is rich, intelligent and has an accent, and she replaced a Republican with a Democrat. We cannot have TWO Arianna Huffington's in this world!

2008: She's well-educated, a lawyer, and a black woman -- unleash the hounds!


It remains to be seen whether whoever crafted the graphic will be reprimanded or if Fox News again trot out a less-than-sincere seeming apology for its latest affront to the Democratic candidate and his family.

latimes.com

Alex Kozinski suspends L.A. obscenity trial after conceding his website had sexual images

The 9th Circuit chief judge admits he posted some of the explicit content. He says he didn't think the public could see the site, which is now blocked.

Alex Kozinski
Alex Kozinski

By Scott Glover
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

June 12, 2008

A closely watched obscenity trial in Los Angeles federal court was suspended Wednesday after the judge acknowledged maintaining his own publicly accessible website featuring sexually explicit photos and videos.

Alex Kozinski, chief judge of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, granted a 48-hour stay in the obscenity trial of a Hollywood adult filmmaker after the prosecutor requested time to explore "a potential conflict of interest concerning the court having a . . . sexually explicit website with similar material to what is on trial here."

In an interview Tuesday with The Times, Kozinski acknowledged posting sexual content on his website. Among the images on the site were a photo of naked women on all fours painted to look like cows and a video of a half-dressed man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal. He defended some of the adult content as "funny" but conceded that other postings were inappropriate.

Kozinski, 57, said that he thought the site was for his private storage and that he was not aware the images could be seen by the public, although he also said he had shared some material on the site with friends. After the interview Tuesday evening, he blocked public access to the site.

Kozinski is one of the nation's highest-ranking judges and has been mentioned as a possible candidate for the U.S. Supreme Court. He was named chief judge of the 9th Circuit last year and is considered a judicial conservative on most issues. He was appointed to the federal bench by President Reagan in 1985.

After publication of an latimes.com article about his website Wednesday morning, the judge offered another explanation for how the material might have been posted to the site. Tuesday evening he had told The Times that he had a clear recollection of some of the most objectionable material and that he was responsible for placing it on the Web. By Wednesday afternoon, as controversy about the website spread, Kozinski was seeking to shift responsibility, at least in part, to his adult son, Yale.

"Yale called and said he's pretty sure he uploaded a bunch of it," Kozinski wrote in an e-mail to Abovethelaw.com, a legal news website. "I had no idea, but that sounds right because I sure don't remember putting some of that stuff there."

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, expressed concern about Kozinski's website.

"If this is true, this is unacceptable behavior for a federal court judge," she said in a statement.

Stephen Gillers, a New York University law professor who specializes in legal ethics and has known Kozinski for years, called him "a treasure of the federal judiciary." Gillers said he took the judge at his word that he did not know the site was publicly available. But he said Kozinski was "seriously negligent" in allowing it to be discovered.

"The phrase 'sober as a judge' resonates with the American public," Gillers said. "We don't want them to reveal their private selves publicly. This is going to upset a lot of people."

Gillers said the disclosure would be humiliating for Kozinski and would "harm his reputation in many quarters" but that the controversy should die there.

He added, however, that if the public concludes the website was intended for the sharing of pornographic material, "that's a transgression of another order.

"It would be very hard for him to come back from that," he said.

Kozinski has a reputation as a brilliant legal mind and is seen as a champion of the 1st Amendment right to freedom of speech and expression. Several years ago, for example, after learning that appeals court administrators had placed filters on computers that denied access to pornography and other materials, Kozinski led a successful effort to have the filters removed.

The judge said it was strictly by chance that he wound up presiding over the trial of filmmaker Ira Isaacs in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles. Appellate judges occasionally hear criminal cases when they have free time on their calendars, and the Isaacs case was one of two he was given, the judge said.

Isaacs is on trial for distributing sexual fetish videos, featuring acts of bestiality and defecation. The material is considerably more vulgar than the content posted on Kozinski's website.

The judge said he didn't think any of the material on his site would qualify as obscene.

"Is it prurient? I don't know what to tell you," he said. "I think it's odd and interesting. It's part of life."

Before the site was taken down, visitors to http://alex.kozinski.com were greeted with the message: "Ain't nothin' here. Y'all best be movin' on, compadre."

Only those who knew to type in the name of a subdirectory could see the content on the site, which also included some of Kozinski's essays and legal writings as well as music files and personal photos.

The sexually explicit material on the site was extensive, including images of masturbation, public sex and contortionist sex. There was a slide show striptease featuring a transsexual, and a folder that contained a series of photos of women's crotches in snug-fitting clothing or underwear.

Kozinski told The Times that he began saving the sexually explicit materials and other items of interest on his website years ago.

"People send me stuff like this all the time," he said.

In turn, he said, he occasionally passes on items he finds interesting or funny to others.

Among the sexually explicit material on his site that he defended as humorous were two photos. In one, a young man is bent over in a chair and performing fellatio on himself. In the other, two women are sitting in what appears to be a cafe with their skirts hiked up to reveal their pubic hair and genitalia. Behind them is a sign reading "Bush for President."

"That is a funny joke," Kozinski said.

The judge said he planned to delete some of the most objectionable material from his site, including the photo depicting women as cows, which he said was "degrading . . . and just gross." He also said he planned to get rid of a graphic step-by-step pictorial in which a woman is seen shaving her pubic hair.

Before suggesting that his son might have been responsible for posting some of the content, Kozinski told The Times that he, the judge, must have accidentally uploaded the cow and shaving images to his server while intending to upload something else. "I would not keep those files intentionally," he said. He offered to give a reporter a demonstration of how the error probably occurred.

The judge emphasized that he never used appeals court computers to maintain his site.

The presence of copyrighted music files on Kozinski's site raises other issues.

More than a dozen MP3 tracks were listed, and they were neither excerpts nor used to illustrate legal opinions, which experts said might have qualified their copying as "fair use." The artists included Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan and Weird Al Yankovic.

Uploading such files could violate civil copyright laws if friends or members of the public visited the site and downloaded the songs, according to attorneys who have litigated file-sharing cases for both copyright holders and accused infringers.

Even if no one downloaded the songs, just making them available might run afoul of the law, said Corynne McSherry, staff attorney at the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation, which often argues the other side of such issues.

Late last year, three of Kozinski's Circuit Court colleagues noted in a ruling that "the owner of a collection of works who makes them available to the public may be deemed to have distributed copies of the works," a violation of copyright law if done without permission.

"For him to actually be held liable would take some further investigation, but I think it's possible," McSherry said. "It's a strange story. It's surprising to me."

Kozinski was not asked in the Tuesday interview about the music files, and he could not be reached for comment Wednesday afternoon.

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

HBO Polanski documentary changed after 'fabrication' complaint

Roman Polanski

LOS ANGELES (AFP) — A documentary on fugitive director Roman Polanski has been altered after complaints from Los Angeles court officials over a key assertion in the film, US cable channel HBO said Monday.

A statement regarding a judge's action in the film "Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired", which spotlights the film-maker's 1978 trial for having sex with a 13-year-old, drew an angry response by the Los Angeles Superior Court.

The initial version of the film said a Los Angeles judge in 1997 had told lawyers Polanski could return to the United States and face no further time behind bars -- provided his sentencing hearing was televised.

However the Los Angeles Superior Court on Monday issued a statement describing the assertion "as a complete fabrication without any basis in fact."

A spokeswoman for HBO later said the wording of the text in the film, due to be premiered in the US for the first time later Monday, had subsequently been changed to reflect the court's complaints.

"We have updated a statement at the end of the film to reflect new information that was provided to us by the court only late last week," a statement from HBO said.

According to the HBO statement, the film's wording says that the judge involved in the case agreed Polanski would serve no more time in custody if he returned to the United States.

"'However the judge insisted that the hearing be held 'in public, on the record and in open court.' Given the possibility that it would be televised, Polanski declined,'" the updated text reads, according to HBO.

The original wording read: "The judge agreed that if Polanski returned to the US, he would serve no more time in custody. On one condition: The judge wanted the proceedings to be televised. Under those circumstances, Polanski declined."

Polanski, 74, remains a fugitive from US authorities, having fled the United States before sentencing. US prosecutors have vowed to arrest him if he ever returned, a fact that prevented Polanski from collecting his best director Oscar for "The Pianist" in 2003.

The image “http://www.deadlinehollywooddaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/polanski.JPG” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

The New York Times
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June 9, 2008
The Media Equation

Golden Age for TV? Yes, on Cable

Maybe it’s because I’m from Minneapolis, but I’ve always had a soft spot for the Saturday nights on CBS that I spent with Mary Tyler Moore during her show’s heyday in the ’70s. Sure, Saturday night on the Tiffany network also had “All in the Family,” “M*A*S*H” and “The Bob Newhart Show,” but who else could take a nothing day, a Saturday for instance, and suddenly make it all seem worthwhile?

How about Kimbo Slice, a massive guy with a Unabomber beard and bare hands capable of performing autopsies?

A week ago, Mr. Slice — and I mean absolutely no disrespect, in case his range of interests includes this newspaper — stepped into the ring on “CBS EliteXC Saturday Night Fights,” the first in a series of mixed martial arts cage matches on the network, and solved a few mysteries.

1) Who would watch this stuff on network television? A lot of folks, 4.9 million of them in fact, including the precious young males advertisers love.

2) Is Saturday night, as Frank Sinatra suggested, the loneliest night of the week? Not when Mr. Slice has drawn a bead on you. Son, if that’s the case, you have plenty of company.

3) Most compellingly, what could possibly be inside the cauliflower ear of Mr. Slice’s opponent, a tomato can named James Thompson? As all of us found out by the end of the fight, some really yucky stuff.

In CBS’s Saturday night pantheon, the girl who could turn the world on with her smile has been replaced by a man whose missing teeth may be his most compelling feature.

Confronted by an audience that is either on the Web or a milk carton, and a writers’ strike that left the scripted cupboard a little bare, networks are opting in on all manner of contests and challenges, including human cockfighting.

Randomly flip on a network broadcast and people are dancing, fighting, singing and conniving their way to the top. The sitcom laugh track is petering out, as are the kinds of tent-pole dramas and news coverage that gave networks their brand identity.

However, for anybody with cable — and that includes most of us — television is in something of a golden age. Cable networks other than the fancy subscription services like HBO and Showtime used to be the realm of stupid human tricks and commercials for six-minute abs, but networks have shot by them in the race to the bottom.

Channels like TNT, AMC, FX and others came up with their own versions of “Trading Places” and carved out niches, sometimes huge ones, by letting viewers know that narrative, quality and drama have not gone off the grid. Those characteristics have just switched coordinates. Sure, “House” and “Grey’s Anatomy” still rule the water cooler, but shows like “Mad Men,” “The Closer” and “Saving Grace” are bubbling up as well.

Need more evidence of cable’s sneaky plan to produce quality programming to get quality audiences? NBC’s big push for next season is expanding “The Biggest Loser” to two full hours. Those of us who are looking forward to the third season of “Friday Night Lights,” a riveting drama about the American family through a pigskin prism, will have to wait because the network decided to share the property with DirectTV by splitting production costs and letting satellite viewers get first dibs.

If networks are no longer in the business of coming up with must-see serials that mature over time — we all know that “M*A*S*H,” “Cheers,” “Seinfeld,” you-name-it took a long time to turn into hits — what business are they in?

“They are on an endless search for the next big thing,” said Steve Koonin, president of Turner Entertainment Networks, which includes TNT and TBS. “There is very little consistency in what they are doing, and people don’t know what to expect when they turn on the broadcast networks. They are still in the business of appointment television, but there are fewer and fewer appointments. There’s a great big opportunity for cable networks.”

The writers’ strike may have done some damage to the network mode, as well. Not only did viewers tune out in droves — all three networks were down double digits — but competitors also grabbed a tasty share of that pie, with ad-supported cable audiences up 9 percent. Over the course of the strike, cable grew to a 48 percent share, up four points, all of it coming from the hide of the networks.

And it’s not just broadcast entertainment that is hurting. Part of the reason that networks seem to be losing their exalted status is that news programming, typically great for the image and not so much for the ratings, has been given over to the cable news stations. When issues of civic moment are nigh, consumers have been trained to tune in to Wolf or Chris, not Brian or Katie.

Last Tuesday night was a historic one, given that a black candidate became the presumptive presidential nominee of a major party. ABC made the lonely decision to cut away from regular programming to give its viewers a seat on history. NBC covered it with short news breaks while telling its viewers to head over to MSNBC for news. And CBS broadcast the speech only to pre-prime-time West Coast audiences.

For its trouble, ABC was beaten in the ratings by a cable station, CNN. According to my colleague Brian Stelter, it was only the second time in history that a cable news network attracted more viewers than a broadcaster during a major news event. (Fox News lodged the first during the Republican convention in 2004.)

There are other signs that the signal between cable and networks is being scrambled. Tonight at 8 p.m., CBS will broadcast an episode of “The Bill Engvall Show,” a TBS sitcom. In exchange for getting a shot on network air to promote the second season of the show, which begins on Thursday on the cable network, TBS has agreed to give CBS space this coming fall to promote its new lineup.

The move suggests that cable commercial time, once thought of as the province of cheap kitchen gadgets and cut-rate loan sharks, has gained luster. And it will give additional momentum to a “The Bill Engvall Show,” a goofy family program of the kind in which networks used to excel. Last year, the show gathered 4.1 million viewers.

Turner is not only sporting networklike numbers, but it is also beginning to act like a network. Last month, the cable network went toe to toe with the networks at the upfronts, giving a presentation during the same week. Mr. Koonin did everything he could to etch a shift in paradigm, pointing out with a pop quiz from the stage that while TNT has shows with gilded performers like the Oscar winner Holly Hunter and the Emmy winner Kyra Sedgwick, the networks were pushing shows about talking cars and guys in leotards.

ABC finished the upfronts with a flourish of its own, hyping “Wipeout,” a contest that brings the aesthetic of “America’s Funniest Home Videos” — gee, that looked like it really hurt — to a set that involves robotic boxing gloves and giant rubber balls. ABC picked YouTube’s pocket to bring a little mayhem to the small screen with better resolution by producing “I Survived a Japanese Game Show.” Now if it could just get a series out of that video where a bear gets shot out of tree with a tranquilizer gun, hits a trampoline and lands on a 4-year-old, my life would be complete.

Sensing an opportunity, ad-supported cable networks will jump in front of the fall network television station lineup with new episodes of “The Closer,” starring Ms. Sedgwick, and “Saving Grace,” starring Ms. Hunter, in July, while USA has already introduced its heavily promoted show about the witness protection program, “In Plain Sight,” and Lifetime’s spicy “Army Wives” came back for a second season last night.

In the meantime, network viewers will have to settle for Mr. Slice. Saturday night’s all right for fighting, but then, so is just about every night on the network schedule.