Yes, it’s true. On the latest Forbes list of celebrities and how much they made last year, J. K. Rowling, the author of the “Harry Potter” books, earned more than Oprah. I wonder: when she heard the news, did Miss O take it out on Stedman or Gayle?
I have nothing but affection for the spirit of John Waters, but the news that he’s going to write a treatment for a sequel to the musical “Hairspray” movie has me wary. I suppose it’s a harmless enough idea to bring back the cast of the film — Travolta (pictured) et al — but the track record for musical sequels isn’t very wow-inducing. (”Grease 2,” anyone?) But with the success of the “High School Musical” franchise there was probably no way that a “Hairspray” sequel wasn’t going to rev up. Let’s just hope it’s better than the “Cry-Baby” musical that recently closed on Broadway. And let’s be thankful that the “Hairspray” sequel isn’t debuting onstage — even though the live version of the “Hairspray” musical was, in terms of the cast alone, superior to the flick.
I suppose I should be ashamed to admit this, but I’m not: I know at least 50% of the dialogue to every episode of “The Golden Girls.” So I was a little sad to hear that Estelle Getty (pictured), who played the old lady, Sophia, on the show, died today. Rue McLanahan, who played the slutty Blanche, got it right in her recent autobiography when she said that Getty was really the best character on “The Golden Girls,” even though Bea Arthur — who played Getty’s daughter, even though in real life she was older than Getty — thought her character was the central figure. Getty, who got her start in the Yiddish theater and played Harvey Fierstein’s mother in the Broadway hit “Torch Song Trilogy,” had suffered for years from dementia, but her spirit lives on. You have to like a lady who titled her autobiography “If I Knew Then, What I Know Now…So What?”
Yesterday I suggested that Heath Ledger would probably not win an Oscar for “The Dark Knight” because deceased actors usually don’t take home the prize. Today I’m not so sure. There’s still a fair amount of sentiment in Hollywood, especially among the under-50 voters, that “Brokeback Mountain” was robbed of the Best Picture Oscar. Giving Heath an Academy Award would be a sentimental but fitting payback for that omission.
An International Olympic Committee member said the following, anonymously, to the New York Times: “Had the IOC and those vested with the decision to award the host city contract [to Beijing] known seven years ago that there would be severe restrictions on people being able to enter China simply to watch the Olympics, or that live broadcasting from Tiananmen Square would essentially be banned, or that reporters would be corralled at the whim of local security, then I seriously doubt whether Beijing would have been awarded the Olympics.”
Further complicating the potential for NBC to censor its Olympic coverage is the fact that the network is owned by General Electric, which is unlikely to do anything to jeopardize its billions of dollars of business in China.