300000

As of this morning, Tabloidbaby.com's technical staff reports more than 300,000 visits and 685,000 page views-- and counting.

Lohan's Dad from Hell finds God, wants TV show

It was two years ago that our friends at Frozen Pictures were running around the Sunset Strip with video cameras, following Lindsay Lohan's father Michael for a TV series pilot based on his notoriety as Hollywood's Dad from Hell.

Papa Lohan envisioned the series as a tabloid-bashing talk show called "The Lowdown," and he'd lined up his friend Bo Dietl and others to help him root out the sources of phony tabloid stories. But the Frozen producers saw Michael as the greatest show of all, and convinced him to be the center of a reality series called "Hollywood Dad," built around Lohan's futile efforts to contact his daughter-- with a Rupert Pupkin talk show in the middle.

The following day, production moved from the Strip to a building on Ventura Boulevard and a talk show set with lights and cameras, where Lohan would show off his Lowdown interviewing skills. He'd promised to bring along his pal Tom Sizemore to discuss how the media lied about his alleged drug use and other misdeeds. The crew waited. And waited. Sizemore wasn't going to make it. He'd been arrested at his home-- for drugs. Lohan, meanwhile, went missing.

He turned up a few days later on his home turf, Long Island, under arrest for violating a restraining order taken out by his family. Within weeks, a mysterious, fiery drunk-driving crash landed him in prison for a laundry list of convictions, including assault on a sanitation worker and beating his brother-in-law with a shoe.

Michael Lohan has been behind bars ever since. The Frozen guys got him an interview with Rafael Abramovitz during last year's ill-fated relaunch of A Current Affair. Bad enough his lawyer wouldn't let him discuss his family or daughter, but all he asked is that he not be referred to as "the Dad from Hell," and the producers in New York labelled him that exactly.

This week, Lohan called to tell us he's once again been denied parole. He says that if he's rejected at his next hearing in three months, he'll be in the big house in upstate New York until at least October 2007. But the Dad from Hell says he's got a Heavenly edge this time around: he's not only found God, but he's become an ordained minister.

Lohan didn't say whether he'd done it online or sent in a self-addressed stamped envelope, but before the prison cut off his phone call, he did quote Scripture and say he now wants to star in a TV series that teaches kids the evils of drugs.

Hey, Tom Sizemore has a reality show, and he did lots worse things than Michael. Right? The Frozen guys say the cameras are still waiting.

Fun fact: Michael Lohan's full name is Michael Douglas Lohan.

From King of All Media to begging for pennies: Howard Stern steps closer to his free radio return

Yeah, fellow Howard Stern fans.

Tell us the world hasn’t forgotten about your hero.

Howard’s been out of the public eye since he took his radio show to a pay audience at the beginning of the year. Now the people behind his “Howard TV” video-on-demand channel are starting up a pricey ad campaign to hype video reruns of his satellite radio show— and in hopes of getting subscribers, In Demand Networks says it will let people watch the show for a penny from November third through November fifth.

The penny's being charged so they can limit the number of kid viewers. You'll need to go through several steps and content warnings before placing an order. Sounds like a pain in the ass, but they're evidently desperate to get people to see as well as hear the man who was the king of all radio before he took all those pennies to do his (not totally) "uncensored" show (with swear words and boobies) in private.

In Demand is placing sexy ads in the lad and stroke mags, and they’re set to plaster bus stops and taxis with posters of Howard’s face on a penny, with the words: "In Howard We Trust."

Hang in. Those repurposed satellite shows will be showing up on free radio soon. Howard Stern and the money people behind him have no choice. Everyone’s forgotten about Howard Stern. A whole new generation is coming of age without him. And how can you trust someone you don’t even know?

Fox News at 10: Time magazine rewrites history

Time magazine has helped shape the conventional wisdom in American media for decades, and it’s following tradition today by doing its usual mainstream best to rewrite history in its semi-tribute to Fox News’ ten years of power.

Time credits— or blames— Fox News for changing the face of television news. But that’s a little like crediting the Sex Pistols for inventing punk rock. Before Johnny Rotten came to town, there were the Stooges. There were the Dolls.

And in this case, there was tabloid television, as envisioned, invented and carried out by Peter Brennan and his band of Aussie pirates and Yank hangers-on, first at A Current Affair and then at Paramount’s Hard Copy in the late Eighties and early Nineties. They shook up television news and set it on the course that landed Katie Couric in Dan Rather’s seat, long before Roger Ailes got on board at Fox and took the existing tabloid television template, replaced the good-natured Aussie democratic takedown humour with a nasty streak, added noxious right-wing politics and GOP ass-smooching to the mix and began filling hours of airtime with yakking heads.

Sure, Fox News influenced, confused and led its cable news competitors by calling it “fair and balanced” with a nudge and a wink. They helped keep America in fear after 9/11, gleefully greased the skids to the Iraq war, scared the competition from speaking out against Bush’s regime, kept Bill O’Reilly on the air despite a perverted sex (the repressed Catholic only talked about it) and office sexual harassment scandal, pioneered the don’t-ask-don’t tell gay newsreader policy far better than CNN, and through memos and meetings, kept ominous party line “talking points” in the background of every newsday.

But though “it’s still possible,” as Time says, “to divide the news calendar into BF and AF—Before Fox and After Fox (‘Fox’ meaning Fox News),” it’s a bit offbase when it insists that “much of what you see on TV news exists because of Fox.” Without the tabloid television team that set the stage and provided many of the bodies for Fox News to get off the ground (veteran tabloid innovators Ian Rae and Jerry Burke were among the Fox News start-up crew), Roger Ailes wouldn’t have had a game plan.

Years ago, when Marvin Kitman was writing an authorized biography of Bill O'Reilly (whatever happened to that?), we explained to him that Fox News was succeeding because it looked into the camera lens and envisioned its audience as the same target tabloid television had conjured—white, lower-middle class, with the kids and parents gathered together, with a grandparent in a rocking chair, at suppertime. Kitman was fascinated to realize that the doofus was succeeding because unlike the news vets who ran the straightlaced Inside Edition, his Fox bosses were allowing him to unleash his inner Maury Povich.

We led Marvin to the book, Tabloid Baby. And we lead Time to the book's Epilog, written in Disneyland in 1999:

“…Tabloid television and network news are unrecognizeable compared to what they were when it all began. Former network newsreader Deborah Norville may be hosting Inside Edition, but it was her successor at NBC’s Today show, Katie Couric, who was on the scene in Littleton, Colorado, a couple of mornings after the massacre at Columbine High in April 1999… Yes, the twain have met, they’ve mated, and Murrow’s legacy of idealism has exchanged fluids with Murdoch’s rules of cynicism…”

Specifically:

TIME FACTOID: “In the end, that wink—that is, the Fox gestalt of insouciance, attitude, and even playfulness—has had a bigger effect on the news media than any Bill O'Reilly rant.”

FACT: The wink, the “gestalt” (look it up), the playfulness: Ailes took it from Peter Brennan’s tabloid TV template.

TIME FACTOID:“Fox taught TV news that voice, provocation and fun are not things to be afraid of. “

FACT: Tabloid TV.

TIME FACTOID: “Probably every TV news program outside of PBS has been Foxified by now.”

FACT: Watch PBS news. They do it well.

TIME FACTOID: “The explosive graphics on your newscast: that's Fox.”

FACT: See the “Ka-chung”

TIME FACTOID: “The ‘freeSpeech’ opinion segments on the new CBS Evening News: that's Fox, too. Anderson Cooper yelling at a FEMA official or crusading in Africa: that's Fox. Keith Olbermann ranting at George W. Bush and O'Reilly on MSNBC's Countdown: that's Fox through and through…”

FACT: That’s Tabloid Television.

TIME FACTOID: “Ailes’ argument that nearly every other mainstream media outlet slants left is self-serving and mostly wrong. (The MSM really slant toward the institutional, establishmentarian center, which is a bias as dangerous as any other.)”

FACT: Ailes is right. The “MSM” slants to the left.

Anyway, in days to come, there will be a lot of “think” pieces and features blaming or praising Fox News for its ten-year reign of GOP terror. But tabloid television has been a neglected influence. Its heroes, from Dunleavy to Abramovitz to Holloway, have been largely forgotten by that “MSM.” And remember, when A Current Affair and the team reassembled last year, it was Roger Ailes who wrested power over its broadcast division and quickly pulled the plug on the show—before anyone could recognize that the TV wizard was not a fat man behind the curtain, but actually from Oz.

Read all about it here.

LP, CD, DVD, R.I.P.

AP Business Wire: A federal bankruptcy judge on Friday approved the sale of California-based Tower Records to Great American Group, which plans to liquidate the music retailer. Great American plans to begin the liquidation process and going out of business sales on Saturday, which eventually will result in the elimination of the jobs of some 3,000 Tower employees.

Our fathers had hardware stores. We had Tower Records. The loss of the Tower Records building and facade from the Sunset Strip will be a seismic shift for Los Angeles culture, akin to paving over the Garden of Allah into a parking lot or the plan to turn the Capitol Records building into condos.

The wildest commercial on TV

We at Tabloid Baby have taken a stand against fast food and what it's doing to our kids, but we've been looking to post this advert since the little one made us replay it three times after it showed up during South Park the other night.

This almost makes up for their big buckin' chicken.

Almost.

Our Man Elli, coming to a lectern near you

Every year around this time-- this time being the Major League Baseball playoffs-- our Middle East correspondent, known to readers as Our Man Elli in Israel, finds an excuse to make his way from his home in Jerusalem, back to the USA and its stadiums.

This time, the veteran journalist and native New Yorker is dropping his microphone and taking time from his job as on-air television correspondent for the Israeli Broadcasting Authority to embark on an American lecture tour.

From October 18th through the day before Halloween, Elli is available to come to your town and give you a spellbinding insider’s look at the war he’s been covering live, where the political process is heading and why Israel 's image problem, and how and why the media covers the conflict and why Israel’s got such an image problem. He's sports editor of the second edition of the Encyclopedia Judaica, so he can also speak about Jews in sports. Look for an extensive and lively Q&A after his spiel.

Elli has traversed this great country, from New York City to Seattle, more than once in his illustrious carrer as reporter, editor and TV news producer (just yesterday he reminded us it was 25 years to the day that we'd first met-- in a men's room-- at the sink--on the way out!), he's one heckuva a speaker and he knows how to tell a story. Those are some of the reasons why he’s the focus of the forthcoming documentary, Sex & Baseball, which covers those subjects but a whole lot more, including terrorism and life in a city where he's lived since 1991 and everyone has to think twice before stepping on a city bus.

Here’s Elli’s itinerary so far:

Oct. 19 University of Pittsburgh
Oct. 23 University of Oklahoma in Norman
Oct. 24 University of Kansas in Lawrence
Oct. 25 University of Missouri in Columbia
Oct. 30 University of Florida
in Gainsville

If you’d like to book Our Man Elli for speaking engagement in and around his gigs—or take him out for a drink or (kosher) dinner, email him at unis2424@yahoo.com, or contact us here and we'll get the message to him.

Save Tom Sawyer's Island

Miceage.com has a spectacular scoop: Disneyland’s Burbank braintrust is planning to close Tom Sawyer’s Island and turn it into another Pirates of the Caribbean-themed attraction. Some of the reasons given are the success of the movies, the arrival of a Pirates threequel in May and the fact that their research shows that kids know Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow and they’ve never heard of Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn and Betsy Thatcher.

That’s a shame, isn't it?

Disneyland is Americana. The place has its ephemera and catches onto passing fads, but it’s the traditional, timeless attractions, from the Barbershop Quartets to the Mark Twain riverboat-- to underappreciated Tom Sawyer's Island-- that keep the place above all others.

In this case, trading literature for pop culture (especially when a youth classic is weighed against a movie series that declines in quality and imagination with each installment) is a mistake that will only lead the park down the EuroDisney slide.

Besides, the boys in Burbank already have a dumping ground for bright ideas, just past the ticket booths in what used to be the parking lot and is now called California Adventure. Movie-themed and Pixar-related attractions are the highlights of the pop flop. Find a place for the ancillary Pirates there.

We wish Hollywood Thoughts would come out hibernation and weigh in on this one.

Canoeing around Tom Sawyer's Island on a recent Disneyland visit

Basketball Man a slam dunk in Las Vegas

Yes, we’re more than a few days late reporting on last week's special sneak preview of Frozen Pictures’ documentary film, Basketball Man, at the Las Vegas House of Blues.

Here’s the word: It was a smash.

Go to the film's website for a complete wrap-up, but we can tell you that the funky music hall in the swank Mandalay Bay casino was crawling with sports legends, from Oscar Robertson to Marques Haynes-- and the house rocked with applause, cheers and laughter as the big screen and many monitors unreeled highlights of the feature film on the life and legacy of Dr. James Naismith, basketball’s inventor.

The night was hosted by comedy superstar Tommy Davidson, who accompanied Harlem Globetrotter ball-handling genius Gator Rivers with a sweetly-whistled "Sweet Georgia Brown," then brought down the House on his own with a side-splitting comedy set.

Sharing the starpower was grandson Ian Naismith, who carries the valuable original rules of basketball in the documentary and showed them to the reporter from the Las Vegas Sun and others at the House of Blues:

The briefcase is gold instead of black. And inside, instead of $5,000 in greenbacks to keep an orphanage going, there are just two yellowing double-spaced typewritten sheets of paper kept in clear page protectors. Otherwise, you might confuse Naismith for one of the Blues Brothers.

But unlike Jake and Elwood, he's not on a mission from God. A mission for granddad is more like it…

Basketball Man is headed for nationwide barnstorming promotional tour, including an exclusive Los Angeles theatrical screening in order to qualify for Oscar consideration.

We hear that the producers from Frozen Pictures (right, with Naismith), the Double Dog Sports & Entertainment executive producers and Davidson have been been huddled all week.

More on that as details develop…

Who'll save TMZ from this smell?

The tape begins with Diamond in a bathtub, narrating what's to come. It ends with Diamond introducing one of the women to a "Dirty Sanchez." Suffice it say, it is unbelievably graphic... To say the least, the video is unique and, dare we say, entertaining.

That's how the megacorporate gossip website TMZ.com describes the "Screech Sex Tape," a premeditated outrage featuring a sad former child star that's being promoted as the most disgusting, repulsive, appalling, insulting, debasing, degrading, unhealthy, unnatural, unkind, anti-feminist heterosexual celebrity sex tape yet: one that’s built around a coprophiliac act so beyond the bounds of human decency that most civilized persons who've heard the term assumed it to be a nasty fantasy used for a laugh in a profanisaurus or a one-upping gross-out gag by Andy Dick in The Aristocrats.

The fact that the tape exists and is being promoted isn't a surprise. What may be unprecedented is that TMZ, and its corporate parents, AOL and Time Warner, are doing the promoting.

Since its inception earlier this year, TMZ has positioned itself somewhere between Perez Hilton and Mark Foley, spending its nights goading teen celebutards outside nightclubs and its days hiding in the bushes, drooling over Matthew McConaughey in various states of undress. In recent months, it's gone to extremes seeking publicity-- provoking Woody Harrelson into slugging one of its pesky video kids, disseminating a sweaty rich kid's obscene tirade against Lindsay Lohan, and making hay from Mel Gibson's DUI arrest.

On September 27th, the website began running promotional video clip teasers for the "Screech Sex Tape," featuring the former star of the TV show Saved By The Bell. Upping the unpleasantness ante, the site this week dubbed the video "Saved by The Smell," and teased the participation and degradation of “two women from the heart of the Midwest and in their early 20's.”

Now, don't get us wrong. Tabloids and celebrity sex tapes are a natural fit. When celebs are stupid enough to tape themselves in the act and the tape accidentally gets into the hands of the public, tabloid journos have a field day embarrasing the high and mighty. The folks behind Tabloid Baby, in fact, helped launch the celebrity sex tape era with A Current Affair back in 1989, when they tracked down and made the Rob Lowe sex tape a national issue (there was an underage girl, criminal charges and a Democratic National Convention involved-- see Tabloid Baby, Chapter 4).

Even in the past few years, as a number of celebs have made sex tapes for the purpose of selling them, journos have managed to keep a distance, reporting on the existence of the tapes, sometimes paying to acquire them, but treating them as news.

The case of TMZ and Screech is different. Here, tabloid journalists and their corporate superiors appear to be working with the pornographer to advertise, promote and market the quasi-celebrity sex tape-- a deliberately offensive sex tape (because of the star and acts involved)-- and quite possibly, were in at the ground floor when the video was planned for maximum shock value.

TMZ calls it a "scoop." Except it’s not really a scoop. It’s a series of promotional ads, using video they didn’t get through tabloid reporting. They got it by paying for it. Or by being in on the deal.

The giveaway is David Hans Schmidt, the porn tape broker who’s featured so giddily on TMZ these days. Some of us at Tabloid Baby dealt with Mr. Hans Schmidt during last year's ill-fated revival of A Current Affair, when he was doing anything he could to squeeze a dollar out of the Colin Farrell sex tape he couldn’t legally market.

Mr. Hans Schmidt doesn’t give away anything for free.

Once again, the website fronted by flamboyant former lawyer and TV personality Harvey Levin is in the middle of another dangerous, dirty game.

Interesting that many of the bosses in the Time-Warner tabloid division are women. How do they feel about this? Is there debate from within, any concern that the TMZ lacks the basic tabloid morality they were schooled in, or worry that the website's values may reflect Hollywood Hills rubber sheet parties but aren't shared by the parents of the teenage girls who make up the bulk of their audience?

Time Warner. AOL. TMZ. Harvey Levin. David Hans Schmitt. Dirty Sanchez.

For TMZ, this could be the donkey punch.

We're an American Tabloid

Tabloid Baby’s appreciation of Oasis as the world’s greatest rock ‘n’ roll band, our more intimate British connections and nose for a good story with which to wrap tomorrow’s fish, is paying off in a big way as we officially find a home across the pond with the most legendary tabloid site around.

Starting now, you can find the best of Tabloid Baby on Anorak.

You know, Anorak, one of the UK’s original and best-loved web magazines, having gained fans and notoriety in the past decade for its irreverent style and sense of humour as it reviews the UK papers and showbiz magazines— as its slogan says: “keeping tabs on the tabloids.” (Anorak, named for the ubiquitous snorkel parka of UK geekdom, even has its own dictionary—which should soon be collected and put on the reference shelf next to our copy of the Viz Profanisaurus.

Anorak is required reading in the Tabloid Baby office. And now even more so, because Anorak is training its jaundiced eye on the American media—and running some of Tabloid Baby’s more incisive and less self-promoting posts (beginning with our dissection of People magazine and Olivia Newton-John) on its new American Tabloid page.

So link to Tabloid Baby from Anorak! Our staff is on notice to come up with the goods.

In keeping with the spirit:

Oasis rules!

And while we’re at it:

Jim Davidson’s a wanker!

Readers of Anorak-- and Tabloid Baby-- know what we mean…

Exclusive! Cloud 9 heads to pay-per-view

Our pals at Frozen Pictures have a big season ahead. Fresh off the Las Vegas preview of their new documentary film, Basketball Man, they've announced that their Burt Reynolds sports comedy, Cloud 9, is headed to homes across America.

Frozen Picture's first movie will run nationwide as a pay-per-view and video-on-demand selection on various cable networks beginning November 1st.

The film will initially be available for thirty days.

Cloud 9, a runaway hit on Fox DVD since its release in January, was written and produced by Brett Hudson and (our own) Burt Kearns of Frozen Pictures, along with Oscar-winner (The Godfather, Million Dollar Baby) Albert S. Ruddy. Executive producers include Oscar winner Gray Frederickson (The Godfather Part II) and John Simonelli. Along with Reynolds, the cast includes D.L. Hughley, Paul Rodriguez, Angie Everhart, Gabrielle Reece, Kenya Moore, Tony Danza, Tom Arnold and Gary Busey.

Cloud 9 was released on 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment DVD and remains a popular seller and rental. The license with the cable networks was arranged by Pinnacle Entertainment, LLC, which acts as broadcast sales agent for “Cloud 9” and Graymark Productions.

See the Cloud 9 trailer here.

And watch this space for a rundown of Basketball Man's debut at the Las Vegas House of Blues.

People helps Newton-John spin McDermott story

Fifteen months after the mysterious disappearance of her alleged boyfriend Patrick McDermott, Olivia Newton-John has finally laid out her official account in the new issue of People magazine. It’s an extraordinary collaborative work of revision and spin that includes a well-rehearsed interview, staged photographs and succinct explanations of Newton-John's behaviour throughout the scandal.

The star is crying by the end of the first paragraph and pushing a new album “to honor” McDermott by the second.

“Life After Loss,” beginning on page 77 of the October 9, 2006 issue of People, is a classic example of how the Hollywood machine cleans up after its celebrities and keeps the protective curtain pulled high around their private lives. All the questions that Newton-John’s actions raised after the mysterious disappearance of Patrick McDermott are glossed over, folded into the continuing saga of the diva’s tragic life, and ultimately used to promote a product.

And in an incredible twist, Newton-John's machine even brings McDermott’s ex-wife into the fold.

Actress Yvette Nipar, who’d brought McDermott into court, accused him of violent tendencies, fought him for child custody and support, and who'd maintained a steely silence through fifteen months of accusations that her pressures may have led him to fake his death, now tells People: "Never in a million years would I put my son's father in jail."

Then again, People reveals that Nipar “has become close friends with Newton-John during the ordeal,” and “now talks to Newton-John almost every day.”

Vanity Fair, Entertainment Tonight and The Black Dahlia have nothing on this: an article that deserves study in every journalism school as an example of the devil’s bargain that’s struck when magazines and celebrities make deals that trade control for exclusivity, and how every deal, no matter whose lives are involved, are used in the end, to sell something.

Readers of this site know the basics. Patrick McDermott, who has publically been identified as Olivia-Newton John’s lover since 1996 (the year she split from her much-younger husband) disappeared from a fishing boat on June 30, 2005. But his disappearance didn’t make headlines for seven weeks, until an intrepid tabloid journalist attached the name to the celebrity.

From Day One, there was confusion and uproar over why Newton-John had never reported him missing, nor gone to the media in case he was walking around with amnesia (in fact, she’d carried on with happy public appeaarances). Within days, it was discovered that McDermott was in a nasty custody dispute with his ex-wife, that he owed child support, had declared bankruptcy, and may have faked his death.

Newton-John’s silence quickly led many to suspect that McDermott may have been a “beard” or employee, hired to accompany her in public (she had been the target of dangerous stalkers in the past). It was also theorized that Newton-John may have belped McDermott disappear because of his financial troubles or other problems.

Within weeks, Newton-John resumed her public concert schedule and McDermott was all but forgotten-- but not by Tabloid Baby, which broke the news in March that the US Coast Guard was pursuing reports that McDermott was alive, and that he’d been sighted in a remote region of the Baja Peninsula.

In July, Australian journalist Nick Papp followed the lead to the area and found witnesses claiming to have seen McDermott. The chase's momentum was foiled by the celebutainment show, Extra (a Time-Warner product-- like People & Newton-John), which was handed a visor believed to be McDermott's, made a great show of promising to conduct DNA tests-- yet mysteriously returned the hat, untested to the Baja, possibly contaminating the evidence in the process.

The People story takes a different tack.

Newton-John on the nature of the relationship:

“He was the most romantic person I have ever known.”

Why Newton-John never reported him missing, and carried on a seven-week public schedule while he was gone:

“We were on a break, but we had been on breaks before and we got back together. We had a wonderful relationship.”

Why McDermott lived in blue-collar Van Nuys, and why Newton-John didn’t help her “soulmate” of nine years wih his financial problems:

“He had a lot of pride. So I didn’t know the extent of it.”

On the weeks and months after McDermott’s disappearance was announced, when Newton-John went on with a planned album promotion tour and concert tour:

People: “In any event, the first six months of McDermott’s disapperance were almost unbearable for Newton John.”

Newton-John: “I took antidepressants. I had to.”

On why Newton-John did not report her lover missing, and went on about her business for seven weeks while the Coast Guard searched for his body:

People: “She was in Australia visiting a critically injured goddaughter.”

Of the mysteries regarding McDermott’s disappearance, and suspicion from the start that he had faked his own death:

People turns then into conspiracy theories-- “a more bizarre alternative” that arose “earlier this year.”

The article continues with a continuation of its decade-long Newton-John tragedy saga, bringing in her 1992 bout with breast cancer and divorce. It does not bring up the homicidal stalkers that led her to seek help from Hollywood security consultant Gavin de Becker, nor does it mention de Becker’s involvement in this case.

Instead, the article focuses on “another crazy confirmation that good comes out of bad”: Newton-John’s new CD.

Yet, midway through the article is a reminder: a boxed sidebar story: “THE CASE IS STILL OPEN.”

The Patrick McDermott story continues...

Who Is Killing The Great Blues Artists of America? (Part II)

Etta Baker, an influential blues guitarist who was honored by the National Endowment for the Arts, died September 23 in Fairfax, Virginia. The cause of death at 93 was not announced. Her versions of "Railroad Bill" and "One-Dime Blues" on the 1956 compilation album, "Instrumental Music of the Southern Appalachians," influenced the growing folk music revival…

Henry "Mule" Townsend, who fled home for St. Louis as a boy and then stayed for a prolific career as a blues guitarist that spanned eight decades, died September 24 of pulmonary edema in Grafton, Wisconsin. He was 96. Townsend was being honored at a blues festival as the last surviving musician from the old Paramount Records…

In the first installment of our post-Katrina inquiry, we noted that they had Died in 3s. This doesn't bode well for one more living legend...

Miami Vice: Multimillionaire marries his daughter!

The tabloid story of the year has broken out on Miami’s exclusive Fisher Island and Tabloid Baby's pal, America's most intrepid newspaper editor Tony Ortega, has shepherded it from a tawdry posh hiding place to the cold light of newsprint.

It’s Chinatown meets Miami Vice on the corner of Wall Street, a sordid, diamond-encrusted scandal that Tony calls a "doozy," proves that South Florida is the reigning hotbed of tabloid lojinks, and is definitely the material from which movies are made:

A multimillionaire loves his daughter... so much… he marries her... in a ceremony at Westminister Abbey.

Allegedly, of course. With photos.

To top it off, when the taboo-bending affair is exposed, the multimillionaire denies it, but according to reporter Kelly Cramer, “he doesn't explain how his and Linda's DNA turned up on a vibrator that Linda's husband uncovered in her luggage.”

"Linda" is Linda Marie Hodge McMahan Schutt. The multimillionaire dad is D. Bruce McMahan. According to the extraordinary story in the Broward-Palm Beach New Times, she was 35 when she and he was thirty years older when they exchanged rings and pronounced themselves husband and wife on June 23, 2004.

Cramer writes:

Afterward, she flew home to her legal spouse in Mississippi and he went home to his compound on Fisher Island, a ferry ride from Miami…

What followed was a breakup on an even grander scale than their wedding and a legal battle every bit as obsessive as each has been about the other. For more than a year, attorneys have been kept busy in Miami, New York, Mississippi, and San Diego with the fallout over the breakup of McMahan and Linda in five lawsuits involving not only father and daughter but also their legal spouses, as well as Linda's current boyfriend and soon-to-be father of her child…

On September 13, as Tony and his team was preparing the New Times article for print, all five lawsuits were settled. As part of the settlement, a federal judge in San Diego sealed the files of the California lawsuit and took the rare step of wiping out any record that the lawsuit had ever existed.

There's lots more: court documents and exhibits that include his denial of paternity, the paternity test that allegedly proves him wrong, details of McMahan and Linda's extraordinary wedding and their years as lovers, and Linda's videotaped deposition, all on the New Times website.

Howard Stern's sad return to "free" radio

Will Howard Stern return to free “terrestrial” radio by syndicating portions of his pay-satellite radio show? Oh yes. Oh yes, indeed.

Because a few hours ago, Stern did the unthinkable: he returned to morning radio in Los Angeles—as a guest on the execrable show that was dumped into the slot he vacated when he took the money and disappeared!

For some reason, Howard Stern was a guest on the low-rated program hosted by Adam Carolla-- you know, the monotonal droner who cuts off his guests with long, boring rambles about his high school days and then trundles the guest out of the studio (or more often, off the phone), so he can dedicate longer, even more tedious segments to his brutally unfunny “Deaf Frat Guy” character.

Howard Stern and his gang phoned from his studio to the most intentionally corrosive show on LA radio—on the morning Rick Dees returned to Los Angeles radio (with Jack Nicholson as a guest!)— to give his “approval” to the show (probably in the same manner that Letterman gave his blessing to Tom Snyder or that Scottish guy who follows him now— knowing he looks godlike in comparison).

Howard Stern is making cameo appearances on the “Free FM” he left in shambles less than a year ago. He must feel very lonely and forgotten.

He’ll be back, all right. And soon.

Showtime for 'Basketball Man'

Academy members, sports buffs and doco fans alike are closer to seeing the documentary that's been the talk of the summer.

Frozen Pictures' feature Basketball Man will be previewed Wednesday night in Las Vegas.

Approximately twenty minutes of the documentary about basketball inventor Dr. James Naismith will be screened at the House of Blues in the Mandalay Bay Hotel & Casino, at a star-studded event sponsored by the Naismith International Basketball Foundation and hosted by comedy superstar Tommy Davidson.

Basketball Man also focuses on Naismith's grandson, Ian, as he promotes sportsmanship by showing off the original rules of the game. Ian travels the country with the rules, appraised at between 10 and 20 million dollars, in a gold attache case.

The film is jam-packed with basketball stars and legends, including Steve Nash, Carmelo Anthony, Kirk Hinrich, Tayshaun Prince, Bob Cousy, Oscar Robertson, Rick Barry, Norm Nixon, Red Auerbach, Pat Summitt, John Wooden and NBA commissioner David Stern.

Basketball Man, directed by Burt Kearns, is produced by Brett Hudson, Kearns and Jerry Peluso, with original music by (former Hudson Brother) Hudson. It will soon be available in a deluxe DVD set, after a limited theatrical release.

(Click the photo to enlarge the poster and find how to get tickets)

Chris Wallace wasn't smirking

During his spirited self-righteous explosion broadcast on Fox News this morning, President Bill Clinton accused host Chris Wallace of having a "smirk" on his face.

Sorry, Bill, but he wasn't smirking. That's Chris Wallace's natural expression. It's the way his face is made.

In fact, "the smirk" has been annoying us for about twenty-five years, from the days we had to log Brokaw's nightly news at NBC, and despite his status as an arrogant network newsstar slumming at a right-wing propaganda machine shop, apparently Mike's son (and Eames Sr.s' stepbrother) can't help it.

Racial profiling at the California Pizza Kitchen

A recent lunch at the popular California Pizza Kitchen chain in the tony Brentwood section of LA (made famous by OJ & Nicole) has left us with a distinctly unpleasant aftertaste. It wasn't the pizza, but a survey that came with the check.

The survey claims to rate "customer satisfaction." It actually rates the customers.

When the waiter handed us that check, he told us we'd get a free appetizer on our next visit if we took a survey on a website listed on the receipt. We're always up for a free lettuce wrap, so we checked it out when we returned to the Tabloid Baby office. The survey covers a dozen web pages. Most of the items are fairly innocuous, rating things like ambiance, the server’s menu knowledge, accuracy of the order, speed of service and wait time.

But the survey takes bizarre twist on the tenth webpage, where the questions include:

What is your gender?
What category best describes your age group?
What category best describes your annual household income?
What category best describes your ethnicity?
What is your home zip code?

Wait a second: What category best describes your ethnicity?

We’re allowed to select one:
- Caucasian
- African American
- Hispanic or Latino
- Asian/Pacific Islander
- Some Other Ethnicity
- Prefer Not to Answer

So here’s our own survey question: Why does the California Pizza Kitchen need to know our race?

Are the survey answers weighted to take into account that African Americans may complain more, that Hispanics are more choosy because they’re used to working on the other side of the kitchen doors, or that Caucasians should be taken more seriously?

Or are they worried that the selections on their menu might have too much appeal to an undesireable ethnic group, and that if they don’t watch out they’ll turn into a Red Lobster?

Those questions make sense when you add in CPK's questions about annual household incomes and zip codes.

The CPK survey ends with a six-number validation code that must be given in order to get the free appetizer.

That’s another clue. As a test, we took the survey twice, giving different answers both times.

Both times, the validation code was different. Is that a code to the staff when we return for our free appetizer? Do the code numbers tell them whether the customer complained last time? Whether the customer should be white or not?

Paranoid? Put it this way: We don’t trust anyone who puts pineapple on pizzas.

Will bin Laden's death give life to documentary?

Reports say Osama bin Laden may be dead. If that's the case, perhaps American networks will no longer be afraid to run John Parsons Peditto's riveting and explosive documentary, Bin Laden's Escape. The Parco Productions doco has aired to great acclaim overseas, but no domestic news or entertainment boss has been brave enough to run the report on how the United States forces let bin Laden slip away at Tora Bora-- and more important, where he's travelled in the years since.

Bin Laden's Escape contains exclusive, unseen footage and explosive interviews with government agents, experts, and journalists on the front lines of the most intense manhunt in history. There are tales of personal encounters with bin Laden by the last Western reporters to interview him face-to-face, CNN terror expert Peter Bergen, and John Miller, former ABC News correspondent and current FBI spokesman. This documentary also contains extensive first-person footage shot by journalists along bin Laden’s escape route, as well as a hidden camera interview with an Osama collaborator by French Algerian journalist Mohamad Sifaoui in Karachi, Pakistan.

There's been a lot of praise for CNN's documentary special, 'In the Footsteps of bin Laden.' But the Parco documentary picks up where that one left off. And that seems to be part of the problem. Peditto is a broadcast journalism legend, and he and his team are giants, veterans who've taught the ropes to many of the suits and shirts & ties running the news establishment today. But they're mavericks, and time and again, from exposes of the Lennon assassination to talk TV to 9/11, John Parsons Peditto and company keep showing up the big boys.

Gay Morning America

If Clay Aiken doesn’t want people to think he’s gay, he shouldn’t name his albums “Measure of A Man” and “A Thousand Different Ways."

If Good Morning America wants to beat the Today show in the national ratings, its producers had better start thinking a lot less TMZ and a little more FHM.

We just a got a look at Diane Sawyer’s interview with poor Aiken, and we gotta ask: are these guys serious? Charlie Gibson hasn’t been gone a month and they've turned the show into Queer Eye for the News Guy.

Yesterday morning, while the tabloid Today show was perving out about the phony Tiger Wood wife nudes, over at GMA, they were segueing from the twinkly weatherman to Diane Sawyer trying to make the poor kid singer come out of his closet—to a “stepping into the closet” joke teasing an Isaac Mizrahi segment! Isaac Mizrahi in the morning, ripping off Gordon Elliott's doorknock routine!

The Aiken segment was sad. It wasn’t the usual choppy, ham-fisted editing (despite an extra camera with the special gauzy Sawyer lens). It was the tone: Diane Sawyer, Nixon’s gal, bearing down on this pathetic little warbler trying to get him to admit he loves men, like she's the correspondent for the Michelangelo Signorile show or something. It takes a lot of nerve for Diane to insist, “Honest to goodness, I am a firm believer in people’s private lives,” when she’s done such a great job for so many decades protecting her own.

Despite Disney’s gay-friendly reputation, this interview and show may be a turning point in the reinvention of Good Morning America, which is already subject to open ridicule, referred to smirkingly by New York media websites and magazines as “Gay Morning America."

(See Gawker.)

Obviously there's a powerful gay contingent on both sides of the camera at GMA. But no matter what they think of Madeline Albright or who they do in their private lives, the producers have got to realize they’re living in a New York high life bubble but working a mainstream morning new show. The guys at CNN know it (and so does Fox News!). And take it from us, acclaimed as a fiercely gay-friendly news organization: if they don’t start thinking mainstream soon, they’re all going to wind up at Bravo. Or CBS.