Haiti’s devastating earthquake has moved Hollywood and pop music stars to lead a rally for disaster relief donations and open their own wallets, led by Haitian hip-hop artist Wyclef Jean.
Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were the first to reach out to Haiti by donating US$1 million from their foundation to Doctors Without Borders, which has been tending to victims of the quake that demolished buildings in Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, on Tuesday. Tens of thousands are feared dead.
Doctors Without Borders said on Friday that actress Sandra Bullock had also donated $1 million.
Madonna donated $250,000 through Partners in Health and said in a statement she was praying for the Haitian people.
Jean launched a texting campaign, calling on fans in the US to donate US$5 each to his Yele Haiti Earthquake Fund charged to their cell phone bills by texting “Yele” to 501501.
He raised more than US$1.9 million by Friday for the disaster relief effort and is in Haiti “giving aid and assessing the situation,” according to his Web site, www.yele.org.
Lady Gaga, another pop star who is chipping in to help Haiti, has canceled four of her US concerts, citing exhaustion and dehydration.
The Grammy-nominated singer, one of the top-selling artists of the last two years with hits like Bad Romance and Poker Face, pulled out of a show in Indiana on Thursday and on Friday postponed or canceled shows on Jan. 16 to Jan. 18 in Connecticut and Atlantic City.
“I’ve been crying for hours, I feel like I let my fans down 2nite,” the 23 year-old singer wrote on social messaging site Twitter on Thursday. “An hour before the [Indiana] show, I was feeling dizzy and having trouble breathing.
“Paramedics came to take care of me, and told me my heart-rate was irregular — a result of exhaustion and dehydration.”
“I am so devastated. I have performed with the flu, a cold, strep throat: I would never cancel a show just based on discomfort,” she added.
Gaga also announced that all the ticket and merchandising proceeds from her Jan. 24 concert in New York would go to relief organizations for the earthquake in Haiti.
“I worry that young people don’t know enough about what’s going on there,” she said of Haiti.
In other news, NBC’s late-night woes have become the biggest drama on US television, as comedians and TV executives trade increasingly bitter barbs in public.
With the struggling network still scrambling to sort out its failed prime-time experiment with host Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien and Jimmy Kimmel have played out their talk show wars with Leno all week in what media watchers called a public relations disaster from which NBC could be slow to recover.
Senior NBC sports executive Dick Ebersol entered the fray on Friday, blaming O’Brien for much of the fiasco and telling the New York Times the on-air jokes against Leno were “chicken-hearted and gutless.”
Hollywood insider Web site TheWrap reported late Friday that the network had agreed to pay O’Brien US$30 million to exit The Tonight Show. NBC told Reuters the report was “not true.”
NBC, which is at the bottom of the big four US TV networks in audience share, has made no official comment on the talks, which also reportedly put Leno back in his old job as host of the flagship The Tonight Show.
The vitriol started even before NBC confirmed last week that it would end in February The Jay Leno Show in the 10pm prime-time slot because of low ratings and a backlash from its local TV stations.
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