"Thanks to all my new friends in Austin for making last night's screening such a great success! I love Austin! One of the if not the best audience in the world. Literally. Hope to come back soon... On to Denver!"
The film director, whose fine work included Mayor of the Sunset Strip, died last night in Denver at 47. He made the post yesterday, before heading to Denver for a film festival with his new movie. Casino Jack starring Kevin Spacey opens in December. His cousin John Hickenlooper is mayor of Denver, a former brewpub owner who's running for governor of Colorado.
George Hickenlooper's last Facebook profile photo:
Robert Schimmel has been fighting non-Hodgkin lymphoma, cirrhosis and demons for a few years now. None of them could kill him. A car crash could. Schimmel died last night from injuries in an accident Thirsday on Highway 10 in Phoenix. He wasn't even driving. His 19 year-old daughter Aliyah was. She swerved and lost control. She's in stable condition.
Schimmel was a "dirty" comic and frequently hilarious. He said his hero was Lenny Bruce.
His life was a real comedy.
He married his first wife, Vicki, in 1977, and they had four children. Their son Derek died of cancer at age 11.
In 1998, he he suffered a heart attack. In June 2000, he was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin lymphoma. His treatments included chemotherapy and required long stays in the hospital. During one session, his daughter Jessica brought her best friend, Melissa, to visit, and he began an affair with Melissa, who was about half his age. When Schimmel's cancer went into remission,he broke off with Melissa and returned to Vicki. Schimmel then reunited with Melissa, and she got pregnant. He divorced Vicki and married Melissa. They had two sons.
During an interview on Howard Stern's private pay radio show on January 28, 2010, Schimmel revealed that he'd contracted cirrhosis as a result of a Hepatitis C infection from a blood transfusion and that he was trying to get on a waiting list for a donated liver.
On May 2, 2009, he was arrested for alleged domestic battery of Melissa. On May 8, 2009, Melissa Schimmel. The DA eventually declined to press charges.
We'll stop there. Robert Schimmel was booked to play the Improv in Kansas City this weekend.
All of a sudden the corporate porn-pushing gossip site TMZ.com cares about Lindsay Lohan? After years of harassing, intruding, taunting, bothering and humiliating the talented, troubled, hard-partying, hardly working actress, they run an "exclusive" story that her drug use is out of control and she may be near death?
What's their game? Lindsay's father Michael Lohan has been shouting that fact from the rooftops for three years now. We've raised the alarm on a regular basis (as seen below).
Is it a coincidence that the shaved bronzed midget frontman and his toddler army run this "exclusive" story the very same week we threw up our hands and suspended our long-running Lindsay Lohan Watch, that Michael Lohan threatened physical harm paparazzi who endanger his daughter, and a former employee sued the sleaze operation, alleging drug and booze use and harassment?
What do they know? Is TMZ about to be implicated in something? We know they don't care about Lindsay Lohan's health, so why now?
Her tumble into a cactus after a night of revelry is another reason we've discontinued our Lindsay Lohan Watch, and stopped chronicling the activities of the talented, troubled, hard-partying, hardly-working sometime actress Lindsay Lohan. Why bother?
Ryan O'Neal, currently preparing a sequel to the Farrah's Story television special based on his on-off lover Farrah Fawcett's losing cancer battle, is photographed with his formerly-estranged daughter Tatum O'Neal at an awards ceremony in Los Angeles.
The pair were caught looking both festive and pensive at the American Society of Cinematographers 24th Annual Outstanding Achievement Awards.
Father and daughter last made headlines together in August, after Ryan O'Neal confessed in Vanity Fair magazine that he'd inadvertently "hit on" Tatum at Farrah's funeral.
The O'Neals have been estranged for years, at least since Tatum, 46, published her autobiography A Paper Life in 2004, describing her drug addiction, and a strained relationship with her father, painting a very unflattering picture of him.
The O'Neals starred together in the 1973 film Paper Moon, for which Tatum won a for Best Supporting Actress Oscar®. They've been estranged at least since 2004, when Tatum published an autobiography that described her horrific childhood and life of drug addiction.
Ryan O'Neal, 68, recently said he and Tatum have been trying to repair their relationship in the months since Farrah's death. In his recent interview with Alana Stewart's son Ashley Hamilton on Extra, he said he missed Tatum. In that Vanity Fair interview, however, he revealed he was still very angry at his daughter:
"She wrote a book— bitch! How dare she throw our laundry in the street for money!
"…She didn't call after Farrah's show! She'll have to explain that."
There are reports that a sex tape featuring hard-living, hardly-working, troubled and talented actress Lindsay Lohan is being circulated among certain circles and is about to be released on the Internet through an "offshore porn site." The video is supposedly 47 seconds long and shows Lindsay frollicking naked and performing a sex act with an unidentified male. Aware of the embarrassing news that could pose another roadblock in any attempt to regain her potential as a respected star, Lindsay responded by appearing last night at a West Holywood nightclub called Voyeur at a party for something called Vida, which is described as a "luxury sex toy." She was dressed for the occasion.
Back in the Seventies, the days of punk rock and "disco sucks," Teddy Pendergrass of Philadelphia was in a class of his own. His raw, passionate work with Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes led to a solo career, international stardom and, with an image as the ultimate Ladies' Man, sold-out "women only" concerts. Then, on March 18, 1982 he crashed his Rolls Royce while driving home from a 76ers game. He injured his spinal cord. His passenger, who escaped with cuts and bruises, was a transsexual. Tenika Watson was a top drag performer on the East Coast who allegedly had a rap sheet that included thirty-seven arrests for prostitution.
Teddy claimed he didn’t know that Tenika was really a man. There were rumors that the wife of a former sports superstar was also a passenger in the car but left the scene of the accident to avoid scandal. Whether that was true, whether the story was planted to soften the blow to Teddy's image was never known. No one investigated whether Teddy was a pioneer not only in R&B but in that Eddie Murphy-Magic Johnson freakiness that would become so popular a decade later. It wasn't a topic of conversation in those days.
Besides, Teddy Pendergrass was paralyzed from the chest down, a quadriplegic. He'd be confined to a wheelchair for 28 years, until his death yesterday at 59. What a great singer.
UPDATE: Obituaries of Terry Pendergrass in the New York Times, written by Jon Pareles, and the Los Angeles Times, by Randy Lewis, omitted any mention of Ms. Watson's involvement in the crash or what the scandalous nature of the revelations did to Teddy's reputation as a ladies' man.
Hard-living, hardly-working troubled and talented actress Lindsay Lohan has spent more time as a prize on a billionaire's yacht in St. Barts than she did on her recent journey to India. Shown here with her sad little sister who was brought along as an extra treat, Lindsay looks worn out from all the partying and twittering the sad news that yet another friend and colleague (and fellow tabloid lesbian) from the paparazzi party circuit has succumbed, apparently to the lifestyle, too young. Who will save Lindsay?
Hard-living, hardly-working troubled and talented actress Lindsay Lohan has dodged the Grim Reaper and in deed spent the final days of Celebrity Death Year 2009 shopping.
We sincerely hope she moves from the paparazzi pages and back to the big screen in 2010.
This was the year we started turning to the obit pages first. This was the year we realized we've created so many celebrities over the past fifty years that we're bound to be losing several a day. This was the year they were dying in fours and fives rather than threes. This is the year we were running so many posts about pop culture and tabloid figures who'd popped their clogs that we began running a Death of The Day column, with no end in sight. This was the year too many people died.
Word on Christmas Eve morning of the death of a young, charismatic Christian music star is news. The death of Christian music star Derek Loux is the American Christmas tragedy of the season.
Derek Loux was on his way home to Grandview, Missouri from a ministry conference in Colorado yesterday morning when the SUV he was in skidded out of control on black ice on a snowy Highway 80 near Cozad, Nebraska. He died from his injuries.
Loux was a pleasant enough singer who touched the Contemporary Christian charts a couple of years back with an album called Paper Religion. He worked the Christian evangelical industry as a director of and preacher for something called the International House of Prayer (yes, also known as IHOP) in Kansas City, Missouri. If the story stopped there it would be just another ironic chuckle from the 2009 Celebrity Death Reaper on the way to taking sportscaster George Michael-- but it doesn't stop there.
Derek Loux's IHOP ministry was focused on promoting the adoption of disadvantaged and special needs children. He started something called The Josiah Fund to raise money to build a group home for orphaned kids in hopes of encouraging fellow Christians to take them in. And he his wife Renee walked the walk. Their family includes ten children, eight adopted-- three with special needs.
Whose idea was it to spread around these photos now? Days after the death of troubled and talented actress Brittany Murphy, troubled and talented actress Lindsay Lohan, who has seen her fortunes fall and her career dip to photo shoots bordering on soft-core pornography, works up some holiday cheer, surely realizing she narrowly avoided the sweep of the 2009 Celebrity Reaper's scythe, with a photo shoot on a beach in Santa Barbara.
"My heart and condolences go out to Brittany Murphy, her family and even my daughter, who all have suffered and have to deal with the effects of this horrible tragedy of a gifted and blessed human being."
Michael Lohan, Tabloid Baby's 2007 Person of The Year, was already dealing with a Twitter imposter who claims he's suicidal, new legal troubles with his ex-galpal Erin (and the second high-profile shoe-attack incident in his tabloid career), and worrying about the health of talented and troubled daughter Lindsay, when word of tragic actress Brittany Murphy's premature death at 32 hit a little too close to home.
In the early hours of the morning, he sent us this email:
Update if you care to post...
To rebut all the phony individuals pretending to be me on Titter, my attorney (Stephanie Ovadia), has contacted Twitter's legal Dept., to track down and prosecute the imposter(s). She has also advised me to open a REAL Twitter account, to prove the others are not me.
In the meantime, my attorney (Tony Grandinette) has sent subpoenas out to John Ankleman, Stratis Morfogen, Adam Liberman, John Murray ( Erin's brother in law), Dr. Pitch, Brookhaven Memorial Hospital Psych Ward, Marriott, Verizon Wireless and Michael Kors, in order to prove ALL the charges against me are FALSE!
Lastly, my heart and condolences go out to Brittany Murphy, her family and even my daughter, who all have suffered and have to deal with the effects of this horrible tragedy of a gifted and blessed human being.
While we monitor the tragic habits of talented and troubled actress Lindsay Lohan comes word that talented and troubled actress Brittany Murphy is dead at 32. Recently fired from her latest film, lampooned on Saturday Night Live, and widely rumoured to have had a drug problem, the movie star known for trying a little too hard to be sexy reportedly went into full cardiac arrest at her home this morning and was dead before she reached the hospital.
Warnings don't matter in Hollywood. And the Celebrity Reaper is taking no holiday as we head toward the end of Celebrity Death Year 2009.
For working Hollywood, it is a weekend of major film openings, big box office and outstanding performances. For talented and troubled (and obviously tired) actress Lindsay Lohan, it is another weekend of hard partying.
Days after her return to Hollywood from a brief documentary-filming field trip to sacred India, and the week that the Screen Actors Guild and Golden Globe nominations were announced and her father's most recent mugshot was released, talented and troubled actress Lindsay Lohan is back on the party scene on Sunset Boulevard, in torn stockings.
Click the photo for our complete coverage of the death and legacy of the Las Vegas superstar
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"Sad, funny, undeniably authentic, Tabloid Baby tells the tale of what befell too much of mainstream television news over the past couple of decades as the bad drove out the good."
--Mike Wallace, 60 Minutes
"Burt was there for the birthing of tabloid, he became the heart of the genre, and now he's written the bible."
--Maury Povich
"... the boozy, Vegas-stomping, strip-club-hopping, Sammy Davis Jr.–fawning life he describes, in vomit-in-the-office-trash-can detail, is emulated by mainstream media personalities today!"
--LA Weekly
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Click the photo to see how a corporate porn-pushing gossip site fooled the world by reporting Michael Jackson's death before it was confirmed
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"Dear Burt: While you always had quite a flair for the dramatic, you never had much regard for the truth... Apparently you can't be bothered to read anything carefully. Maybe that is why you, like O'Reilly, make half your crap up.
Glad to hear you finally got sober." -- Barry Nolan, 04.12.08
"Hey! Who said Burt got sober?" -- Tabloid Baby, 04.12.08
