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Madonna has finally posted a tribute to late producer and collaborator William Orbit.
She mentions his “crooked teeth.” See below.
Madonna fails to note Orbit’s scathing post from March 17th of this year, when he said she ignored his plan to make a sequel to their “Ray of Light” album. She wouldn’t even speak to him.
Orbit wrote: “I am writing a book, and that’s where I will put that entire story along with my candid reflections…Have transitioned now to a man for whom Fs are no longer on offer. Zero fucks. For the music biz. But who likes to hear somebody go on about feeling good. So, for the history books, she doesn’t love me any more waaaaaaaaaaaah”
It gets worse.
Orbit wrote: “Right. Let’s put this Madonna ROL 2.0 thing to rest here and now folks. Can get exhausting. Is NOT going to happen. Look, why don’t I just lay it out, cos I get asked constantly. I have an album ready that imho is indeed the successor to ROL. Everything about how it was made and how it sounds yells that from the first few bars. And I reached out. And there has been heard. Nil response. A week later. I speak with many close to her, including fam, but have not had a single syllable back in over two decades…last time we spoke was at in Midtown Manhattan, MSR Studios, for MDNA.”
Orbit continues: “Zero zero absolute zero hard feelings. Are you kidding, I will always love that woman. For real. She made my career. But am I crying?”
You can read his whole post below. In case it gets taken down, I’ve screen shot it.
Was Orbit ill in March and reviewing his life? Was something else going on? I don’t know. Maybe we will learn more. And get to see his book.
As I predicted, “Spider Man: Brand New Day” sailed to $510 million yesterday.
With another $29 million added to the till, “Brand New Day” should finish the weekend with $600 million.
Yesterday’s drop was an infinitesimal 11%. People just keep going to see this movie, and the huge box office numbers don’t even include IMAX. It’s all from regular ticket pricing and a lot of discounting.
Stan Lee must be doing cartwheels in heaven. Steve Ditko, too. Stan created the whole scenario of Peter, MJ, Uncle Ben, and Aunt May, and the villains. Also, the high school setting. Ditko brought them all to life. This was back in 1962. And t just goes on and on and on!
“One Night Only,” the romcom with Callum Turner and Monica Barbaro, scored only $750k Thursday. With pre-previews, the total comes to $1.1 million. This movie is DOA. This was pretty clear from the jump, when the trailer was released.This is a blemish for Turner, who maybe was going to be James Bond.
Brandi Carlile has just taken a wrecking ball to her tour schedule in Europe and the UK.
She’s the latest artist to cancel or reschedule shows –in this case a whole tour — “due to personal circumstances.”
Now her fall tour abroad has been moved to next spring 2027. Some cities have been changed, others dropped.
It’s kind of a colossal mess.
Lately, artist after artist has been dropping or changing dates at a moment’s notice either for illness of lack of ticket sales. The Lionel Richie/Earth Wind & Fire tour just did it for the second time, Barry Manilow just moved a date, and on and on. I thought Mercury was out of retrograde but I guess I’m wrong. These are not easy decisions. Brandi doesn’t explain anything else, but let’s hope she and her band are ok.
Meantime, her current tour in the US is sold out, including August 18th at Tanglewood in the Berkshires.
She writes on social media:
To my friends in the UK and Europe,
I need to let you know that due to personal circumstances, I have no choice but to reschedule my UK and European tour from this fall to the spring.
I have been so profoundly anxious about this decision and I’m aware that this change may be disappointing and inconvenient for many of you, especially those of you who were planning on traveling internationally, but I am hoping this gives you all enough time to adjust any plans.
My team has been working really hard behind the scenes to reschedule the tour with as little disruption as possible. However, due to availability, a few of the venues have changed, but we thought it was more important to get back over there and play these shows as soon as we possibly could. The good news is, this has also enabled us to add more shows which I couldn’t be more excited to play!
To my beloved Portuguese fans, sadly Lisbon was the only show that we could not make work with these rescheduled dates. I’m so sorry and I promise we will do everything in our power to get back to you as soon as we can.
Thank you so much for your patience and understanding. I want nothing more than to see my friends across the pond and I have done everything in my power to avoid rescheduling this tour. I sincerely hope you’ll all come back and see me in the spring. I promise I will make it up to you and that it will be worth the wait!
Legendary singer Barbra Streisand is publishing a new book.
A couple of years ago she published a 900 page memoir.
Now she’s got a children’s book called “And by the way…”. Let’s hope it’s not 900 pages!
Barbra says, “I love being “Gamma Barbra” to my three beautiful grandchildren. Since reading is such a wonderful way to engage and stimulate young minds.”
Streisand actually has four step grandkids by her 30 year marriage to James Brolin. (And they said it would never last!) Three are from actor Josh Brolin, and one is from James’s daughter, Molly. She’s very close to the whole family, including son Jason Gould.
“And by the way” is actually only 40 pages, and is illustrated by Paige Keiser. Publisher is Flamingo Books, a division of PenguinRandomHouseetc.
The book’s amazon page offers a little bit of Streisand’s poetry:
Dress up, speak up, and dream big.
Fill your backpack with a book, paint, and paper. An idea could strike at any moment. Wear your rain boots. You never know when you’ll find the perfect puddle. Reach for the moon with your big ideas. And by the way . . . in my heart, you’re already a shining star.
A year ago next week, the Kennedy Center Honors were announced.
The recipients ranged from weird to strange, with Sylvester Stallone. country music icon George Strait, legendary rock band KISS (Paul Stanley, Gene Simmons, Peter Criss, Ace Frehley), Tony Award-winning star Michael Crawford, Grammy-winning disco pioneer Gloria Gaynor as the group.
Crawford, nice as he is, is known for one show: “Phantom of the Opera.” Gaynor had one hit — “I Will Survive,” but it turned out later she’d been donating to Trump and the GOP for a long time. KISS was the shopping mall equivalent of a rock group. Stallone’s whole career was based on “Rocky.”
Unlike the four prior decades, there was no independent artists committee that weighed the nominees. Trump’s then-henchman, Ric Grenell, brought the culturally deprived president a list, and he approved it. Then Trump hosted the show in December.
This time around it will be the same, except Grenell has been replaced, and the Kennedy Center is closed for renovations. Liza Minnelli told me exclusively that she would accept the honor even under Trump because she’s 80 years old, and the time is now. But who will else will accept? More Republican country singers? Trump acolytes Dennis Quaid or Mel Gibson? Anyone from Broadway or classical music?
And then there’s the matter of where this would be filmed for TV. The only other theater in Washington of this size is the National. They’re booked in November and December with Broadway shows “Hell’s Kitchen,” “Waitress,” and “Hamilton.” The latter, ironically, moved from the Kennedy Center when Trump took over. Ford’s Theater would cause a lot of macabre jokes, but it only seats 600.
Whatever happens next week, it’s going to cause a ruckus. And if Trump doesn’t leave office until the end of the term, there will still be two more years of this debacle.
Tony Dokoupil sold his soul to work for Bari Weiss as anchor of the CBS Evening News in January. He’s followed Weiss into a deep hole, pushing Trump’s agenda and featuring his team of whack job lunatics. His performance has been embarrassing and detrimental to his career.
Now comes the kicker. Dokoupil was off last week, and Matt Gutman — brought over from ABC’s World News Tonight — subbed in. The result was Gutman’s week getting the biggest ratings in 17 weeks, the first time the show has broken 4 million viewers. It’s still number three, but this is a jolt.
It’s not like viewers were suddenly warming up to Dokoupil and thought he’d be on screen when they tuned. They knew right away he was off, and that Gutman had taken over. The face is, Dokoupil has lost all credibility with the viewers who were still counting on CBS News to overcome the Weiss-Ellison attack.
It’s also not as thought they love Gutman. But by the point he arrived anyone would have been popular. It was just a relief to see Weiss’s puppet not in the anchor seat.
Dokoupil will maybe learn a lesson here. When he returns on Monday, the party is over. Now his replacement is preferred. He must earn respect from the audience and push back against Weiss, even if it means he loses his job — if he wants another one.
Again, last week’s ratings according to AdWeek were 4.127 million total viewers and 570,000 demo viewers. CBS News’ newscast grew by 4% in total viewers and 10% in the key age demo compared to the previous week. Its year-ago week numbers showed CBS Evening News gaining viewers by 8% among total viewers and 3% in the demo.
Amazon knows something about David O.Russell’s new movie that we obviously.
They’re sending “Madden,” directed by David O. Russell, straight to streaming in November.
The feature stars Nicolas Cage as the famed NFL announcer, and Christian Bale — a Russell regular — as Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis.
The cast also includes John Mulaney, Sienna Miller, Kathryn Hahn, Shane Gillis, and Joel Murray as Pat Summerall — basically, the one person I want to see succeed in this thing., Murray was so good in “Mad Men” and other projects, he needs a moment in the spotlight.
So what’s going on? Amazon will just do an Oscar qualifying week in New York and Los Angeles in one theater in the middle of the night, then send “Madden” off to Prime.
Last week I’d heard some mixed reaction to “Madden,” which surprised me because Russell has made mostly excellent, successful movies like “Silver Linings Playbook,” and “Three Kings.”
He did have a big disappointment with his last one, “Amsterdam,” in 2022, which was bizarre, to say the least. But “Madden” is a straightforward biopic, and I’m sure with that cast, very entertaining.
Who will be the first to say this movie is “Maddening.” Let it be me, thank you.
Summerall, by the way, who’s gone now, had a daughter. Do you know her name? It’s Susie Wiles, chief of staff for Donald Trump. That’s right. I can’t imagine any of these people going to the White House for a screening, but maybe Jeff Bezos will do it anyway.
Going to Ireland for a bit seems to have been the right move. A year and a half later she’s performing her one woman show, “Common Knowledge,” at the off Broadway Daryl Roth Theater on Union Square.
I didn’t know what to expect, so it was more than a pleasant surprise to discover the 75 minute show is charming, delightful, and beautifully written. It’s also deftly performed by Rosie, who is so disarming and funny that even the dramatic parts — there are a couple — are smooth sailing.
“Common Knowledge” is a refrain throughout the show, a phrase she learned from her wise gender fluid autistic child, Clay — who by the way has an amazing vocabulary and memory. Don’t think that Rosie is unlike a regular mother whose daughter told her first she was changing her name from Dakota, then declaring herself gender free. What made O’Donnell so relatable in her TV talk show is the same here: she can’t believe it, but she’ll go with it. It could be worse. She still has trouble with pronouns, so she had the word “They” tattooed on wrist. Even that hasn’t kept her from flubbing sometimes.
Rosie — now with a mane of plush gray at age 64, and slim from Mounjaro — tells the story of losing her mother to cancer in 1973, when she was just 10 years old. That’s the sad part of the story, which she assures us passes quickly. Then it’s on to her family’s move to Ireland during The Troubles, of all things, and their return to a changed New York. We learn about her family and friends, her own coming out, and her decision to adopt — eventually — five children. (Note: four of the five are flourishing, and Rosie has recently become a grandmother!)
Family is key to “Common Knowledge,” which becomes clearer and clearer as the laughs come. O’Donnell’s monologue is not short on heart, or incisive observation about creating a family all over again.
Eventually, the show must turn to Donald Trump, who started attacking her 20 years ago, long before his campaign. He’s been obsessed with her all this time, even declaring he’d revoke her US citizenship (something he can’t do). O’Donnell, who is a very good artist, has made so many paintings Trump — two hundred and eleven — that her therapist called her (not the other way around) to make sure she was okay.
How will she handle Trump this month when she guest hosts “Jimmy Kommel”? I told you earlier that ABC already put the kibosh on her hilarious parody of “If I Only Had a Brain.” (She sings it in the show, and the audience– not an empty seat in the house — sings along with the delicious lyrics.) Rosie has a plan: she debuted a new parody last night, called “Hello, Donny!” sung to “Hello, Dolly!” She’s got some of the lyrics done, and they are sly. ABC had better let her go for it.
“Common Knowledge” is very savvy in that it is not a bromide, nor is it angry. It’s incredibly sweet, and disarming. O’Donnell has been working on it for 18 months, trying it out in Australia and Scotland to rapturous crowds. It would be a shame if it’s filmed for posterity before the run ends on Saturday night. We can only hope she comes back and does it again, soon.
PS Yes, plenty of celebs come every night. Last night, it was Natasha Lyonne, with Jeff Garlin, and Ian Armitage from “Young Sheldon.” I didn’t know that his father is Euan Morton, the Broadway actor who played Boy George in Rosie’s musical, “Tattoo.” O’Donnell introduced Ian’s parents to each other! Small world!
The Rosie O’Donnell Renaissance is in full swing, and it couldn’t be better timing. By the way, she and Clay are returning to Ireland for the school year. If there’s ever another talk show, it will be after Trump is long gone.
Also, I hope the critics groups that cover off Broadway have come by to see this show. It deserves special citations next spring.
Today’s Page Six is all but dead and almost forgotten Hollywood blogger Nikki Finke.
They say her estate, whoever that might be, is shopping her old manuscript around. It was supposed to be an “expose” of the movie biz and all the people she viciously attacked over the years.
But I say, wait a minute. Page Six doesn’t mention that the proposed book, called “Pay or Play,” had a publisher once upon a time. That was Turtle Bay Books.
Finke never turned in a manuscript. It was a long running inside joke. She was unable to complete one despite venting her spleen several times a day online at Deadline.com, the website she invented.
No, Nikki did not like deadlines for long piece. Back in the late 80s, when she was at the LA Times, Nikki was supposed to write freelance articles for me at Fame magazine. Getting them was an adventure. This was before email. She’d insist she was faxing over her work. Assistants would stand at the fax machine, waiting for the famous grinding noise of missives being printed out.
They were few and far between.
Years later, she wrote pieces for my friend Peter Kaplan at the New York Observer. He and I talked about it all the time, how extruding work from Nikki was just like pulling teeth with a string attached to a doorknob.
So maybe someone has finished “Pay or Play,” hoping to cash in. But it’s all old news. Nikki died in 2022. She hadn’t been active for years after Jay Penske bought her out and she was prevented from writing about Hollywood. Most of the people she knew are dead or sitting a comfortable chair with a lap blanket. Does anyone care now about what Ron Meyer said to Mike Ovitz at Spago when it was on Horn Avenue?
Think of it. There was no streaming in Nikki’s time. Netflix sent discs out in red envelopes. Blockbuster was where you got movies. William Morris was an agency. So was ICM. It would be a little like when I walk into a restaurant and say, “Do you know what this used to be?” I just get blank stares.
So, have at it. For the dog days of August, this is something to chew on. But I’d much rather see the outtakes of the late Julia Phillips’ “You”ll Never Eat Lunch in this Town Again.” I read them, back in 1988. The full manuscript was like the Leaning Tower of Pisa on my desk. Then the lawyers came in and vetted it. Whoops! No one will ever know what Ryan O’Neal was really up to.
And many reading this will ask, Who is Ryan O’Neal?
