Morning Briefing:
Let the "blow" puns begin: The London tabloid the Mirror is blowing the Kate Moss drug abuse story wide open. The paper ran stills from a video clip of Moss "allegedly" doing line after line of cocaine in a New York recording studio as her boyfriend, Babyshambles frontman Pete Doherty, was recording guitar tracks for the band's new album. The pictures show überwaif Moss laying out about 20 lines of coke from a "mammoth stash kept safely wrapped in her handbag," and then "hoovering up every last grain of the Class A drug." (Gawker has a scan of the Mirror front page here.) It didn't stop with the photos, though. On Friday, the Mirror also ran a retelling of her insipid drug-induced conversation, a story about Doherty's nasty, oozing heroin scar and an account of her reacting to the news of the video's existence when a Mirror reporter approached her and Doherty outside Balthazar in Manhattan -- resulting, unsurprisingly, in Doherty's shoving a photographer to the ground. (Rush & Molloy, The Mirror via Gawker)
Paltrow hates America? For a while on Thursday, the Drudge Report -- under the headline "Paltrow: I Don't Want to Live in America" -- featured a link to a news story mostly about Paltrow's refusal to be pigeonholed into talking about celebrity life. Toward the end she says, "I feel like we're really in trouble. I just had a baby and thought, 'I don't want to live there.' Bush's anti-environment, pro-war policies are a [disgrace]." New York Daily News gossip columnists Rush and Molloy were quick to point out (third item) that Gwynnie has no plans to flee the country any time soon, though she splits her time between the States and a home in London with her Coldplay husband, Chris Martin. "I've been here as much as there. I'm sticking around," she says. (Globe and Mail via Drudge, Rush & Molloy)
NBC pursues the faithful: In a departure from the usual media mantra of trying to skew ever younger, ever more urban, NBC is starting a new, red-state-only campaign for viewers for its new show, "Three Wishes," featuring Christian singer Amy Grant. Showing true creative imagination, marketers have been going to places like Goody's and handing out money -- $1 bills "affixed with yellow stickers (removable, consistent with Treasury Department guidelines) that ask, 'What's your wish?' and implore people to watch the show. All told, the network expects to give away 150,000 of those dollar bills in 15 cities and towns," the Times writes. The network has also sent out 7,000 copies of a screener DVD to clergy members across the country; included is a special message from Grant herself saying, "At its core, 'Three Wishes' is faith in action." Barbara Blangiardi, NBC's v.p. of marketing, said that "absolutely the Christian community was a target audience." (New York Times)
Also:
Renée Zellweger and her country-singer husband, Kenny Chesney, are having their four-month-old marriage annulled. Without any elaboration, Zellweger named "fraud" as the reason in court papers. The couple first met last January Donald Trump just keeps on moving into new markets: He's going to be appearing on "Days of Our Lives" on Oct. 24, causing NBC senior vice president Sheraton Kalouria to blather, Trump "intimately knows drama from his many business ventures to his weekly boardrooms on 'The Apprentice.' Little does he know that the drama on 'Days of Our Lives' is often more intense!" Kevin Bacon and Colin Firth have been thinking about taking the comedy routine they developed for the upcoming movie "Where the Truth Lies" on the road. "We fantasized about getting an act together," says Bacon. "We had a pretty easy crowd (on set) paid a lot of money to laugh at us very loudly. I don't know how we'd go down with a hostile crowd" A Broadway musical about the life of John Lennon is closing its doors after just six weeks. It was helped to the grave by reviews like the one from the New York Post that said the show is "so shaky it can scarcely stagger from one side of the stage to another" The photographer who took topless photos of Cameron Diaz back in her pre-"Mask" days of obscurity has been sentenced to three years in prison for trying to scam the actress into buying the photos back for $3.5 million. When Diaz said she never signed a model release form for the snaps, John Rutter appeared in court with a doctored release form bearing Diaz's autograph from a publicity photo Cinematographer Guy Green -- who won an Oscar for his work on the 1946 film "Great Expectations" -- died in Beverly Hills, Calif., on Thursday. He was 91.
Money Quote:
Jeff Probst, host of "Survivor," on his thoughts about leaving the show: "I don't want to be the David Caruso of reality. I'm not an idiot. But six years of being away, it does sometimes make you think ... Signing another long-term deal would be hard, just hard. I want to start a family." (N.Y. Daily News)
Reese Witherspoon on being asked to speculate about Brangelina: "I don't know those people, I don't know anything about them. They're not my friends!" (The Awful Truth)
Turn On:
Friday night features the debut of supernatural thriller "Threshold" (CBS, 9 p.m. EDT), starring Carla Gugino from "Sin City" and featuring Peter Dinklage ("The Station Agent") and Brent Spiner ("Star Trek: The Next Generation"). On Sunday, Ellen DeGeneres hosts the "57th Annual Emmy Awards" (CBS, 8 p.m. EDT).
-- Scott Lamb
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