Secrets of ALIAS
J.J. Abrams, currently busy with MISSION IMPOSSIBLE 3, gave the 411 about the upcoming season of ALIAS wiht TV Guide Online.
Even though some fans were highly disappointed by season three, Abrams says that he's proud of it and that viewers will, as season four is unveiled, like season three better because it helped build the foundates of the upcoming season. However, he admits he there were some mistakes done last year: "I think one of the biggest mistakes I made last year was to let story and plot dictate episodes rather than have our characters run the show. There was no more Sydney as a real, normal person." But fans can rest assured, Abrams confirms that this season we'll get back to the show's roots and see Sydney as a person and not just a suit.
The ALIAS guru also makes a few revelations about the upcoming season. This season's two-hour premiere will solve season's three cliffhanger involving Sydney finding out something shocking Jack did. Melissa George is not schedule to come back at the moment. They are trying to get Bradley Cooper to reprise his role of Will in at least one episode.
Since Mia Maestro is now a regular, viewers can expect the relationship between sisters to be explored. "[The sisters relationship] won't be without its issues. Ultimately, it'll be very relatable, the kinds of things siblings experience, but transposed onto that sort of odd universe of ALIAS," J.J. Abrams reveals.
The fourth season will also allow the characters to return to the dynamic that worked best for them. "Sloane will no longer be a peripheral character. Vaughn will no longer be the kind of meandering betrayer of Sydney. Marshall won't just be another mouthpiece in conference-room scenes. Dixon will no longer be the authority figure. And Jack will no longer just be the milquetoast dad."
ALIAS fans shouldn't expect Lena Olin to grace the screen again as Irina Derevko even if the ALIAS people would love to have her back. Sark will come back but as a guest star and not a regular.
ALIAS returns on ABC in January 2005.
BUFFY DVDs Lack Gellar Commentaries
It's not lack of interest but time constraints that prevented the BUFFY star from doing episode commentaries on the BUFFY DVDs.
As she explained to Sci Fi Wire, commentaries were done while the stars where filming BUFFY episodes. "I was working constantly, three units. There was never time. It was unfortunate. It was a timing thing. If you tell a line producer, 'OK, we need Sarah for two hours on this day to do commentary,' the line producer is going to tell you, 'Uh-uh.' So that was why I didn't do it during the show. And if I had free time, if for some reason I was getting a day off, I was taking it. I was exhausted," she explained.
Season seven of BUFFY comes out on DVD on November 16.
CHAPPELLE'S SALES
The double-disc DVD of Dave Chappelle's Chappelle's Show Season One: Uncensored selling 2 million copies and breaking the previous record for a television series held by The Simpsons: The Complete First Season, which sold 1.9 million copies, according to Nielsen VideoScan. Under his new contract, Chappelle reportedly receives one-half of the revenue from all DVD sales.
Movie-Goers Hold 'Grudge' Against Affleck
LOS ANGELES - Movie-goers hold no grudges against Sarah Michelle Gellar, but they apparently have a beef with Ben Affleck. Gellar's fright flick "The Grudge" got a jump on Halloween with a $40 million opening weekend to debut at No. 1, while Affleck delivered a holiday turkey with "Surviving Christmas," his critically drubbed comedy that came in No. 7 with just $4.5 million.
The animated "Shark Tale," the top movie for three straight weekends, slipped to second place with $14.3 million, lifting its total to $136.9 million, according to studio estimates Sunday.
"The Grudge," a remake of a Japanese horror hit, stars Gellar as an American student in Tokyo terrorized by a raging spirit lingering in a house with a violent history.
Debuting in 3,245 theaters, "The Grudge" averaged a healthy $12,327 per cinema.
The movie marks the English-language debut for director Takashi Shimizu, who also made the Japanese original. "The Grudge" was produced by the horror outfit created by "Spider-Man" filmmaker Sam Raimi, who got his start with the cult fright flick "The Evil Dead."
Audiences this time of year are in the mood for scary movies, but the big debut for "The Grudge" indicates it grabbed more than the usual Halloween crowd, said Rory Bruer, head of distribution for Sony, which released the movie.
"I would say that when you do $40 million, it's got to be more than" the Halloween influence, Bruer said. "You have Sam Raimi, who's got incredible knowledge of this genre. We had tremendous marketing, and Sarah Michelle Gellar, who was out there pounding the pavement, fighting for this film."
"Surviving Christmas" did barely better than Affleck's notorious 2003 bomb "Gigli," which had a $3.8 million opening weekend.
The movie stars Affleck as a lonely guy who hires a pretend family for the holidays. Critics trashed the movie, whose release was delayed a year to avoid bumping up against Affleck's thriller "Paycheck" during the 2003 holiday season.
Executives at DreamWorks, which released "Surviving Christmas," were unavailable for comment Sunday, a spokeswoman said.
Along with terrible reviews, "Surviving Christmas" may have been hurt by its October release date, unusually early for a yuletide movie.
"It is a little early, but people would accept Christmas in October if it had been a really good movie," said Paul Dergarabedian, president of box-office tracker Exhibitor Relations.
After three weeks in limited release, critical favorite "I (Heart) Huckabees" expanded nationwide and broke into the top 10 with $3 million.
Another darling of critics, the road-trip comedy "Sideways," had a stellar debut in four New York City and Los Angeles theaters, grossing $208,293 to average $52,073. Directed by Alexander Payne ("About Schmidt"), "Sideways" stars Paul Giamatti as a loser in love on a bachelor spree at California wineries with a buddy who's about to marry.
"The Machinist," starring Christian Bale as a man coming unhinged after a year without sleep, also opened strongly in limited release with $64,000 in three New York City and Los Angeles theaters, averaging $21,333.
Here are the estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at North American theaters, according to Exhibitor Relations Co. Inc. Final figures will be released Monday.
1. "The Grudge," $40 million.
2. "Shark Tale," $14.3 million.
3. "Shall We Dance?", $8.6 million.
4. "Friday Night Lights," $7 million.
5. "Team America: World Police," $6.6 million.
6. "Ladder 49," $5.4 million.
7. "Surviving Christmas," $4.5 million.
8. "Taxi," $4.25 million.
9. "The Forgotten," $3.4 million.
10. "I (Heart) Huckabees," $3 million.
Did 'SNL' Gaffe Expose Simpson Vocal Aid?
NEW YORK - Singer Ashlee Simpson's "extra help" may have been exposed when a "Saturday Night Live" audience heard her voice — singing the wrong song — while she held a microphone at her waist.
Her record company blamed a computer glitch and she blamed her band for Sunday morning's incident, which cut off her planned performance of the song "Autobiography" on the network comedy show.
Simpson had performed her hit single "Pieces of Me" without incident earlier in the show. When she came back a second time, her band started playing and the first lines of her singing "Pieces of Me" could be heard again.
She looked momentarily confused as the band plowed ahead with the song and the vocal was quickly silenced.
Simpson made some exaggerated hopping dance moves, then walked off the stage 35 seconds into the performance. NBC quickly cut to a commercial.
"What can I say?" guest host Jude Law said with Simpson standing next to him at the end of the show. "Live TV."
"Exactly," Simpson said. "I feel so bad. My band started playing the wrong song. I didn't know what to do so I thought I'd do a hoe-down."
Her record company, Geffen Records, said there was a computer glitch. Instead of some pretaped electronic percussion, the recording of "Pieces of Me" started mistakenly performing, the record company said in a statement.
But it sounded suspiciously like a guide vocal that's a common — although almost always unspoken — concert aid. Either the singer "lip synchs" by mouthing words to a backing tape or has a live microphone and sings along to the tape, making the voice sound more powerful than it is.
Such vocal tricks have been used before on the show, making "Saturday Night Live" not entirely live, said a show insider who spoke on condition of anonymity.
A Geffen spokeswoman did not immediately return a call for comment.
Simpson's walk-off joins the lore of other unexpected music moments on "SNL": Elvis Costello stopping and changing songs on live TV, and Sinead O'Connor tearing up a picture of the pope.
AC/DC Honored with Street Name in Australia
MELBOURNE (Billboard) - AC/DC formed in Sydney in 1974, but it's the Australian city of Melbourne that has honored the veteran hard rock band with its own street.
On Oct. 1, Melbourne City Council renamed Corporation Lane in the city center ACDC Lane, at a ceremony attended by 500 fans. A bagpiper played the 1975 track "It's a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock 'N' Roll)" at the festivities, while local bands played other AC/DC material for five hours in a nearby bar.
Recording commitments prevented the band from attending, but guitarist Angus Young sent a message: "Melbourne was our stomping ground in the early days. If you could make it in Melbourne, you could make it anywhere else in the world."
Present at the ceremony were Fifa Riccobono, CEO of AC/DC's Australian label, Albert Productions, and TV presenter Ian "Molly" Meldrum, an early supporter of the band.
The council debated the name change for several months, and it proceeded despite local protests from a restaurant and a Christian group.
Porn Star Hits It Big as Best-Selling Writer
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - She has two bodyguards, four dogs, a surgically enhanced double D-cup bust and an almost 600-page book on the best-seller list.
And the fact she spends a lot of her time naked has nothing to do with living in the sunny climes of Scottsdale, Arizona.
Indeed if, as some have suggested, porn stars are the new socialites, Jenna Jameson, whose raunchy memoir has been on the New York Times best seller list for months, is more at home in a G-string than an evening gown.
"How To Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale," written with Neil Strauss, is more self-absorbed than Bill Clinton's autobiography although Jameson says :"Clinton had more sex."
That depends, of course, on what ones mean by sex, undeniably the thrust of Jameson's oeuvre. The book teems with pictures of bare-breasts, comic book panels, handwritten diary entries and graphic detail.
"I've had ... women tell me I'm their idol," 30-year-old Jameson said in an interview. "They want to be like me. They're seeing the glamour icon but don't realize ... there are more facets to me besides spreading my legs."
Born in Las Vegas to a cop turned criminal father and showgirl mother who died when she was two, Jameson entered the X-rated world at age 17.
Wanting to be a stripper at Las Vegas's Crazy Horse Too, the voluptuous blonde was told to come back after getting rid of her braces. That night, Jameson says, she yanked them from her teeth with pliers and wire-cutters and never looked back.
Changing her name to Jameson (after the Irish whiskey), she made her way from stripper to X-rated photo model, eventually becoming a porn performer. The book chronicles a litany of sordid escapades, including a gang rape and Jameson's eating disorders, drug addictions and numerous lesbian and three-way affairs, both on and off camera.
As a cinematic porn goddess, Jameson says she worked only five times a year, usually with the same partner. "I was lucky to not have caught any sexual diseases, even though I worked without condoms for two years."
Today Jameson says she is monogamous and happily married and only has sex -- both on-screen and off- -- with her husband, Jay Grdina, an adult-film studio owner and business entrepreneur. The couple started a film production, marketing and web hosting company. So with Jameson a millionaire who no longer needs to bare her body for bucks, one wonders why she persists.
LOVES WORK
"I love what I do for a living," said Jameson, dragging on a cigarette, the only vice she claims to still have.
"I'm also trying to change the way the industry is run, which is mostly headed by men who don't take women seriously as business people. To change things for girls going into the industry, I have to continue. I want to continue."
Like many actresses, Jameson worries about losing her beauty. "Our looks pay our bills. I get Botox and love it. I'm very expressive and I'm trying to keep lines from appearing. I did have a chin implant and I'm having breast-reduction surgery," she said.
Downsizing her implants to a C cup seems right, Jameson says, because to remove them completely "would leave too much extra skin."
"I'll get a full reduction after I have children," she said.
In the interim, the couple continue to produce hard-core films, with a Hollywood deal in the works for her autobiography.
"I initially wanted Kate Hudson to play me," said Jameson, "but she's not as endowed as I am. My fans have mentioned Pamela Anderson, Jaime Pressly and even Meryl Streep."
Absurd as that sounds, it's no more farcical than living in a world where a porn star achieves the American dream.
"I don't know if I can spit out another book. Maybe it'll be a coffee table book of photos or maybe I'll focus on something more family-oriented.
"If I do have a daughter," she said with resolve. "There's no way in hell I would allow her to be a porn star and go through the things I went through."