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.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist