Vote for your iconic swimsuit movie moments. Here are the women--led by Phoebe Cates--while Daniel Craig as James Bond leads the men.

I concur on Craig; but my vote for best wet swimsuit in a movie goes to Jacqueline Bisset in The Deep, video below.

When I told fellow Seattle Film Fest juror Paul Federbush about Chastity Bono turning into the transgender Chaz, he told me, "I babysat for Chastity." Federbush and Cher, it seems, shared the same tennis instructor. When he was 15, Federbush used to warm up on the tennis court with Cher, and when she was taking her lesson, he watched Chastity, who was eight. One thing that struck him about the tomboyish Chastity at the time: her deep voice.

Now, it seems, Chastity's going to move forward as transgender man Chaz. And lest any of us step out of political correctness on this, The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) has issued a helpful Media Reference Guide.

Said GLAAD president Neil G. Giuliano: “GLAAD encourages media outlets to cover this story accurately, and to avoid speculation about the details of Chaz’s story before he is ready to tell it in his own words.” The GLAAD Media Reference Guide urges media to use the name and pronoun preferred by the transgender person — in this case, referring to him as Chaz and using male pronouns. For additional information, including related guidelines from the Associated Press Stylebook, please visit the and click on “Transgender Glossary of Terms” and “AP and Other Style Guides.”

Marc Malkin spoke to transgender actress Candis Cayne about the kind of support Chaz will need, especially from his mother.

UPDATE: This hilarious satiric take from UK site The Spoof is probably what GLAAD is seeking to avoid.

Here's a preview of People Mag's Most Beautiful People 2009 list. Channing Tatum's on it.

And marital issues are in the air as Sean and Robin Wright Penn are filing for legal separation--again. On Tuesday night Mel Gibson, who is in the middle of divorce proceedings, stepped out on the town with new girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva on his arm, at the X-Men Origins: Wolverine premiere.

Matthew Broderick is in the news these days, not only for giving blocked director Kenneth Lonergan a reported $1 million to finish his long-stalled movie Margaret (which stars Anna Paquin and Allison Janney), but he and wife Sarah Jessica Parker are expecting twins, via a surrogate mother. UPDATE: Broderick gives a comeback performance in Josh Goldin's Wonderful World, writes Jan Stuart.

Casting is under way on Parker's follow-up to the Sex and the City movie, which is set to start rolling this summer, with Chris Noth, Evan Handler and David Eigenberg set to join Parker, Cynthia Nixon, Kristin Davis and Kim Cattrall as well as writer-director Michael Patrick King. Release date: May 28, 2010.

The LAT picks its top 25 must-follows on Twitter and runs it as a celeb photo gallery. Kids in my USC class admit they get a kick out of getting tweets from celebs. It's the most direct, uncluttered version of fan communication there is. Stars and fans 1.0: responding to fan mail. 2.0: Twitter. Safe, no intermediary. Fans follow you but you don't have to deal with them. It's a one-way street.

The offices at Revolution Studios on L.A.'s Olympic Boulevard are humming. Television/film mogul Gail Berman (who left Paramount's presidency in 2007) is in her element, running in and out of cast auditions for TV pilots: a total of four are in the works. Her partner, Lloyd Braun, sits in his office staring into a giant flat screen monitor tracking the day's breaking stories on the team's newest venture: Wonderwall. "It's alluring," he says, "and addictive."

A year-and-a-half after launching BermanBraun, the popcorn celebrity portal is the first-born child of BermanBraun Interactive, in partnership with MSN. Having started Yahoo OMG and recognizing the success of AOL's TMZ, Braun saw that MSN wasn't aggregating celebrity content. So BermanBraun and their internet division chief Geraldine Martin-Coppola (plucked from Braun's old Yahoo team) persuaded MSN to back a slick, visual, horizontal, content-driven celebrity site designed to hold eyeballs for more than two seconds--and lure premium advertisers.

Berman/Braun launched Wonderwall on February 5, just ahead of the Oscars. "We're fixing things as we roll out content," says Braun, who enjoys using some of his hard-won knowledge from his stint at Yahoo Media Group, where he wasn't able to achieve much of what he had wanted to do.

While celeb content is king on the web, BermanBraun's main push for Wonderwall--a name Berman insisted on using because "it's the point of the whole thing," she says--was to draw people in with eye candy and attitude, and then keep them interested.

"Wonderwall is not like TV, a destination medium," Braun says. "Engagement is terrible on websites. The web portals didn't have a deep well of experience in programmed content. They're closely focused on technology or search algorithms. On the converse side, traditional media companies are only now beginning to understand digital. Now we have the rare opportunity of understanding both."

Wonderwall provides "something MSN hasn't been able to do," says Braun. "Through the technology behind the site, we're taking information and presenting it to the consumer, with a POV and spin. It's a content management system with a horizontal presentation, an experiment with engagement."

The partnership with MSN was key. "It allowed us to build this in a way that we would never have been able to on our own," says Berman. "It's important as the site grows to make its point-of-view clear for people. It's fun, not just photos, but design and voice."

Part of the fun, beyond writing clever celebrity photo captions, is to respond swiftly to the day's breaking news. Like improvisational comedy, "We're doing this in real time," says Braun.

When Mickey Rourke's dog died, for example, Wonderwall's five editors (four in L.A., one in NYC, who starts the day early) compiled Famous Celeb Pets. Traffic skyrocketed. On St. Patrick's Day they mounted Favorite Irish Celebrities. Led by managing editor Alex Blagg, the edit team boast experience at Radar, People, Us Weekly, People, Best Week Ever, The New York Post, and Alloy.

No wonder my Twitter followers are growing by leaps and bounds: I've been selected as one of the top 20 entertainment feeds worth following by Business Insider, along with Variety.

Screenwriter Rob Long (KCRW's Martini Shot) explains how Tweets could change the Art of the Pitch.

Ex-MySpace publicist Paul Armstrong has admitted to writing the mediaisdying Twitter Feed.

And Entertainment Weekly examines the Twitter celebrity phenomenon---a new way to share directly with fans, and build a fanbase. So does the Chicago Tribune and the NYT. Ashton Kutcher (aplusk) has more followers (299,675) than Mrskutcher (136,910), it seems.

UPDATE: The Wrap examines the inevitable Twitter backlash. The WSJ explains it all to you. And P. Diddy, who is on Aplusk's short follower list, takes to serious tweeting.

It's the end of an era: the energizer bunny of gossips, Liz Smith, has lost her berth at The New York Post. Lloyd Grove talks to the octogenarian daily columnist.

Smith's column still runs in many outlets: Daily Variety runs it on Tuesday and Thursday only in its L.A. edition. With the Post out of the picture in New York, Variety has now not decided whether or not to add Smith to the Gotham edition.

Truth is, Smith plays to the older crowd. The rest of us get our gossip online, from the likes of Marc Malkin, Perez Hilton, TMZ, Just Jared and Go Fug Yourself.

The New York Times, meanwhile, has cut the frequency of its fashion supplement T down from 15 to 12 editions a year.

UPDATE: The late departed Movieline Magazine (no longer owned by founder Anne Volokh) is joining the online movie gossip fray by hiring the trio of bloggers who just left Hollywood gossip site Defamer, led by Stu (The Reeler) VanAirsdale. After Mark Lisanti left Defamer, the trio came in and managed to push traffic up via multiple daily postings, but could only get so far. Gawker Media czar Nick Denton--who is a relentless traffic-builder--is merging Defamer into Gawker, which has a wider readership. I liked Defamer, but it was tough for the trio to get cooperation from the PR community. Post-Defamer they are sticking together and have agreed to help Movieline revive its brand online. (I was hoping VanAirsdale would revive The Reeler.) The release is on the jump:

It's the holidays, and the paparazzi are staking out famous people in bathing suits. Here are the Obamas in Hawaii.

Brad Pitt makes his photography debut at W Magazine this month, which assigned him to take up-close-and-personal shots of mama Jolie with her kids. It was a brilliant idea and will be hugely successful. The intimacy of the shots is something that would be difficult for any outsider to achieve.

[Hat Tip: Just Jared.]

Check out this LA Times photo gallery on celebrity noses. They're getting noticeably smaller.

[Photomontage courtesy LA Times]

{Posted by David S. Cohen}

With all the furor over the McCain ad that dissolves from Britney Spears to Paris Hilton to Barack Obama, calling the latter a celebrity, let me add one small voice in defense of Ms. Spears.

The meme here seems to be that they are all celebrities, that is to say, people who are famous for being well-known. Plenty of people are defending Obama against that charge, but not Spears.

Now I don't know the woman and I'm not a fan, but not so long ago Britney Spears was mainly known as a star performer, something that requires some actual skill and hard work. More recently, even after she became a tabloid train wreck, her last album got some pretty good reviews. She got famous by becoming a star; she didn't become a star because she was famous. So, without going out of my way to be snarky about Paris Hilton, she's not Paris Hilton.

So... ummm... leave Britney Spears alone?

Holy batshit! Shades of Russell Crowe are haunting Dark Knight star Christian Bale, who got into something in advance of the record opening of the second Christopher Nolan Batman installment that caused his mother and sister to file assault allegations. Wow. We don't yet know what went on here.

How bad can it be to star in what could be the biggest movie of the year? Bad timing indeed.

Just because the New York Post reports that someone who used to work at Miramax is writing a Weinstein tell-all does not mean it will ever see the light of day.

Much as I would love to read it.

But what goes up, must come down. Michael Eisner, Mike Ovitz, Joel Silver and the Weinsteins are not what they once were. Haze your way up in this business, and it's rougher on the downward slope. Your friends can become your enemies. And when things are rough, as they are now for the Weinsteins--many folks are asking how long Goldman Sachs will support their company's current scale and scope--all the knives come out.

People in Hollywood love to jump gleefully on a once-fierce competitor when they aren't so strong anymore. But the Weinsteins have many friends in New York politics and publishing, so we shall see.

The would-be Weinstein book author attached a seven-minute audio file to his pitch to Page Six:

The recording is of a Dec. 12, 1996, phone call between Harvey and Joe Roth, then president of Walt Disney Studios, in which the two complain about the $138 million severance deal that Mike Ovitz negotiated to leave Disney after 16 months.

"Please fire me," Weinstein facetiously tells Roth. "I'll split whatever I get . . . I'll meet you in St. Barts. We'll buy both halves of the island . . . If you don't fire me, then I think we should make bad movies next year. Let's make a series of [bleep]y movies."

Roth replies: "I obviously made a mistake. I made good movies." Harvey says, "Joe, you are a success, so therefore you are a failure in this town." The two then name Peter Guber, Michael Fuchs and Jon Peters as having won huge golden parachutes.

"Everybody got wealthy on failure," Weinstein says. Roth replies: "You know what the problem is with you and me? We care about the movies." Weinstein laughs: "We have character flaws that must be overcome."

Here's the podcast (in California, isn't it illegal to record someone without their knowledge?), which is amusing and I see their POV, actually:

Speaking of Joel Silver, he does not come off so well, nor does producer Larry Gordon (Hellboy2), in screenwriter Larry Gross's juicily candid memoir of working on Walter Hill's 1982 48 HRS., which helped to define the Hollywood buddy comedy genre for decades to come, and made Eddie Murphy into a star. MCN is publishing the pieces in serial form; part four is up now. It's a must-read, and I understand that it is making Silver and Gordon none too happy. The person who emerges smelling like a rose is director Hill, whose Broken Trail and Undisputed should put him back on the must-hire list. Hill can do comedy, tragedy, action, and subtle character work. But does Hollywood have work for someone who doesn't do tentpoles? That is the question.

According to Us and People Magazine, Entertainment Tonight jumped the gun on reporting that Angelina Jolie has given birth to twins in the south of France, where she recently promoted two upcoming films, Kung Fu Panda and Clint Eastwood's Changeling.

This morning, I was scanning pregnancy photos and reading about the names Jolie had given her children. My first reaction was that given that she's carrying twins and was working the red carpet ropes like a pro just last week, it was early to be giving birth. What gives? In the rush to be first, are people just making this shit up?

The UK's Daily Mail columnist Liz Jones is shocked, shocked by all the sordid goings on in Cannes, with raunchy older men and much younger models reveling at yacht parties galore. Of course she goes out of her way to track down all this stuff, of which she heartily disapproves. If she had ignored all of it, on the other hand, and watched some good movies instead, it wouldn't have made such gossipy, salacious, entertaining copy. Tropicana girls are not news. But the Mike Tyson quote is money.

MTV Movies managing editor Josh Horowitz has launched the bizarre Pudding Show:

It's devoted to "pudding," he writes in an email, "and my first guests were swimsuit model Marisa Miller, hated director Uwe Boll, and a certain "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" star (don't miss the end). It's horribly awkward, bizarre, and…well it's REALLY awkward."

Check out this clip:

While I laughed out loud several times, I doubt many publicists will book their clients on an ongoing basis: this gag will likely be short-lived.

Variety columnist/blogger Army Archerd is the kind of guy who can flip through his rolodex and call Shirley Temple on her 80th birthday. She'll even talk to him. And tell him how she broke her arm.

Prince charged $200 a ticket to a rash of Hollywood stars attending an impromptu concert Wednesday night, reports Marc Malkin.

Radar reports that Brad Pitt has let go his long-time PR rep Cindy Guagenti. He's going to take it alone, like his partner Angelina Jolie. I've long thought that Pitt's PR was well-handled; we'll see where it goes from here. Remember what happened when Tom Cruise and Pat Kingsley parted ways?

Here's Pitt's latest announcement.

Always candid and provocative, Madonna tells us more than we want to know about her sex life with husband Guy Ritchie.

UPDATE: Here's her cover story in Vanity Fair, which also features a Madonna photo gallery look back at all her Vanity Fair layouts. I had forgotten that she did her own series of Marilyn Monroe-inspired photos, long before Lindsay Lohan.

This Huffington Post report about the various tabloid and celeb mag reports this weekend about the possible New Orleans wedding of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie is fascinating. The New York Daily News, for example, reported Saturday that they were married, citing The Star website. But Sunday, Fox News relies on People Magazine's assertion that it's not true.

At ShoWest, Shrek star Mike Myers admitted that he had a "man crush" on Jeffrey Katzenberg, and kept looking at his ass. Easy laugh.

When Sarah Silverman made a video announcing that she was shtupping Matt Damon, the obvious response from her boyfriend Jimmy Kimmel was to do the same with Ben Affleck.

Now the latest attention-grabbing SNL comedy short has Superbad chub-star Jonah Hill dating Andy Samberg's Dad:

Bust a taboo, kiss a man, easy laugh.

I found this blog truly depressing.

Page Six has the scoop on Vanity Fair's April cover story on today's crop of comediennes. Annie Leibovitz shoots Queens of Comedy Tina Fey, Sarah Silverman and Amy Poehler for the cover, while inside, they and Sandra Bernhard, Jenna Fischer, Chelsea Handler and Wanda Sykes impersonate the likes of Amy Winehouse, Lindsay Lohan and Lil Kim.

Did you see this amazing photo of Amy Winehouse in The New Yorker? Talk about skanky. (Here's the piece that goes with it.)

I don't usually run gossipy items from the London tabloids. And that's clearly what this story is, especially when it gets into discussing leftist political leanings and so on. No, I celebrate the magnificent Tilda Swinton, who held off the press appropriately here. But the Daily Mail went ahead and wrote what they wanted to write. So who knows if this Bloomsbury-Boho fantasy is true? All power to her either way.

[Photo montage courtesy defamer]

Check out this Jimmy Kimmel Show fifth anniversary video from Sarah Silverman, who says she is fucking Matt Damon. Damon confirms:

Cloverfield ate up the weekend boxoffice, reports Pam McClintock.

Many of us press folks are getting inundated with this kind of email:

Subject: REMINDER - Outfest Queer Brunch, Sunday January 20 Hi all, Just reminding you about the 12th annual Outfest Queer Brunch this Sunday in Sundance at 11am [location] presented by here! Networks. Attending the brunch will be a wide range of stars attending Sundance, including Paris Hilton, Sharon Stone, Winona Ryder, Quentin Tarantino, Kirsten Dunst, Sean (P. Diddy) Combs, Dennis Quaid, Ginnifer Goodwin, Ellen Page, Hugh Dancy, Wes Bentley, Nick Cannon, and many others.

One colleague forwarded this one with the comment: "this is simply impossible, unthinkable, a kind of celebrity version of thermonuclear warfare...."

What's with the beards? The New Yorker writes about men in transition growing beards during the Writers Strike. I offer you:

Sean Penn, accepting an award at the Palm Springs Film Festival.

David Letterman, accepting the keys to New York City from Mayor Bloomberg on behalf of his beard.

Steven Soderbergh, on the set of Che.

[Illustration of David Letterman and Conan O'Brian courtesy The New Yorker.]

Love the London Daily Mail, which shares these photos of Uma Thurman, hosting the recent Swarovsky Fashion Rocks in this clinging see-through Valentino. Fashion victim?

And Nicole Kidman, 40, appears to be following Renee Zellweger's lead and gaining weight for her role in The Reader, in which director Stephen Daldry wants her to thicken into middle age.

The man behind Celebrity Justice and TMZ.com, Harvey Levin, is expanding his 24/7 celeb coverage to cable.

I found this photo-shop celebrity site amusing.

The Wash Post's Ann Hornaday thinks the celebrity interview needs overhauling.