A Los Angeles judge gave Irish Hollywood star Colin Farrell hope earlier this week that he still might be able to block distribution of a sex tape he made with a former Playboy pinup girl.
The judge rejected arguments by Playboy Playmate of January 2002 Nicole Narain, who wanted Farrell's suit to block distribution of the tape dismissed, according to a court official.
Narain, then Farrell's girlfriend, said she has the legal right to copy and market the tape they made together three years ago, portions of which have shown up on the Internet in recent months.
Similar sex tapes involving personalities like Pamela Anderson, Paris Hilton and Tom Sizemore have proven highly lucrative when marketed to the public.
Farrell, 29, a rising star with roles in Oliver Stone's Alexander and Steven Spielberg's Minority Report in his pocket, maintains that the two had agreed the tape would remain private, his lawyers said, and filed suit last July claiming violation of an oral contract and of his privacy.
Narain said as "co-producer" of the video she has the backing of copyright laws to make money by selling it.
Legendary Scottish actor Sean Connery sued a California golf club earlier this week for breach of contract, saying its managers cheated him out of more than US$500,000.
The former James Bond star joined the Sherwood Country Club of Thousand Oaks, a Los Angeles suburb, in 1990.
According to the lawsuit, Connery, 75, considered the US$35,000 dollars a year he was paying in dues an investment, and that he could recover 80 percent of it after three years, while the club's owners capitalized on his fame to attract new investors.
But the club refused to repay Connery when he canceled his membership in 2004, according to the suit filed by his lawyers in a Los Angeles court on Monday.
Oscar-winner George Clooney took a prominent US political commentator to task on Wednesday for posting on her Web site a blog made to look like it was written by the superstar.
Clooney denied writing the blog on Arianna Huffington's www.HuffingtonPost.com, which includes commentaries from celebrities, politicians and experts.
The blog turned out to be a compilation of remarks Clooney made in media interviews. The actor, a liberal, said he had given Huffington permission to use the quotes, but complained that they were made to look like his own blog.
"Miss Huffington's blog is purposefully misleading and I have asked her to clarify the facts," Clooney said in a statement. "I stand by my statements but I did not write this blog."
John Travolta and Jennifer Lopez have been offered starring roles in a big screen adaptation of the 1980's television series Dallas, the industry newspaper Variety reported Tuesday.
Travolta, star of Pulp Fiction and Get Shorty, has been asked to play the show's villain, J.R. Ewing, while Lopez has been offered the part of Ewing's wife, Sue Ellen, in a production being planned by 20th Century Fox, Variety said.
Luke Wilson has been proposed to portray Bobby Ewing, and Shirley MacLaine for the role of the family matriarch, Eleanor Ewing.
With production due to begin at the end of the year, Australian Robert Luketic, who directed Lopez in Monster-in-Law and Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde, has been named as the director.
Airing on US television from 1978 to 1991, the Dallas prime time soap opera series about love and betrayal among Texan oil magnates was exported around the world.
Young film star Scarlett Johansson will take the title role in an adaptation of the novel The Nanny Diaries, film industry press reported Monday.
The Nanny Diaries, by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus, follows a New Jersey girl to upper-class New York, where a couple hires her to care for their children.
May 6 to May 12 Those who follow the Chinese-language news may have noticed the usage of the term zhuge (豬哥, literally ‘pig brother,’ a male pig raised for breeding purposes) in reports concerning the ongoing #Metoo scandal in the entertainment industry. The term’s modern connotations can range from womanizer or lecher to sexual predator, but it once referred to an important rural trade. Until the 1970s, it was a common sight to see a breeder herding a single “zhuge” down a rustic path with a bamboo whip, often traveling large distances over rugged terrain to service local families. Not only
Ahead of incoming president William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20 there appear to be signs that he is signaling to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and that the Chinese side is also signaling to the Taiwan side. This raises a lot of questions, including what is the CCP up to, who are they signaling to, what are they signaling, how with the various actors in Taiwan respond and where this could ultimately go. In the last column, published on May 2, we examined the curious case of Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) heavyweight Tseng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦) — currently vice premier
The last time Mrs Hsieh came to Cihu Park in Taoyuan was almost 50 years ago, on a school trip to the grave of Taiwan’s recently deceased dictator. Busloads of children were brought in to pay their respects to Chiang Kai-shek (蔣中正), known as Generalissimo, who had died at 87, after decades ruling Taiwan under brutal martial law. “There were a lot of buses, and there was a long queue,” Hsieh recalled. “It was a school rule. We had to bow, and then we went home.” Chiang’s body is still there, under guard in a mausoleum at the end of a path
Last week the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) released a set of very strange numbers on Taiwan’s wealth distribution. Duly quoted in the Taipei Times, the report said that “The Gini coefficient for Taiwanese households… was 0.606 at the end of 2021, lower than Australia’s 0.611, the UK’s 0.620, Japan’s 0.678, France’s 0.676 and Germany’s 0.727, the agency said in a report.” The Gini coefficient is a measure of relative inequality, usually of wealth or income, though it can be used to evaluate other forms of inequality. However, for most nations it is a number from .25 to .50