The first public photos of Knox and Vivienne Jolie-Pitt have already been taken! And, despite our suggestion to nobody in particular that Brad and Angelina split their newborn twins into two separate photo shoots to really maximize profit potential, the babies were photographed together.
But the babies will be split up in one sense: People magazine has secured North American rights to the photos, while British tabloid Hello!, which sports numerous international editions, will have other worldwide rights.
Sound familiar? That's because People and Hello! teamed up in 2006 to publish Brangelina's other baby, Shiloh.
In the end, the price is pegged somewhere between $11 and $15 million, though that could be off by as much as a multiple of two. And while the price is certainly one for the record books (for now), keep in mind that the price includes two babies; so really, we're talking bargain.
Not that it's any consolation to OK! publisher Richard Desmond. CONTINUED »
Congratulations, People! You've been fingered as the winner in the bidding for Brad Pitt and Angelina's baby twin photos. And while OK!'s Richard Desmond opened up his checkbook to secure the photos, everyone sort of expected you to nab the pictures, since The World's Most Famous Couple has a soft spot for ya. Now that you've been chosen to pay some $15 million (plus or minus $7 million) to the charity of Brangelina's choice, the big remaining industry question is: Will Getty Images "photojournalist" Brent Stirton — who shot Shiloh Jolie-Pitt for People in 2006 — get the Knox and Vivienne assignment? It's the boring question that shows we, just like a tabloid, we can drag out a single storyline forever!
Brad Pitt's loudmouthed attorneys at Lavely & Singer are, preemptively, trying to clamp down on a series of photos that "were surreptitiously taken of Mr. Pitt and his family as they engaged in familial activities on private property, namely, in the privacy of the estate in which they are presently residing in France and where they had a reasonable expectation of privacy." Not content with issuing a cease and desist letter after the pictures' publication, L&S want to make sure these photos never make it into the public eye. (Too late, as you'll see.)
Supposedly, the publication of these photos — showing Pitt and wife Angelina Jolie with the kids — infringe not just on Pitt's privacy rights in the State of California, but also in France!
Except, according to one understanding of the law, this is wrong. Oh, and also? In Touch already published the pics. CONTINUED »
Look, it's Brad and Angelina! And their kids! Just not the new ones! [B-G]
Oui! Oui! Oui! Whereas we deep-fried Americans lounge behind computers and blog angrily ("I'ma break this fuckin' MacBook, y'all!!!1!) when news about Angelina Jolie and her ubiquitous brood overtakes all the other headlines, the French take to the fucking rues and let the world know they're pissed:
Angelina Jolie is today expected to leave the hospital in Nice, France — where she gave birth to twins Knox and Vivienne — via helicopter. The same way she arrived.
Enterprising photographers have already chartered their own choppers to snap shots of her mid-flight, while legally responsible photographers will understand France's privacy laws might get them in trouble for that sort of thing.
There's also the possibility Jolie has already left the hospital, or is leaving another day, and will send look-a-like assistant Holly Goline aboard a helicopter to throw off the press. We quite like believing in these conspiracy theories.
Tabloid television show Entertainment Tonight has decided it will not issue an official retraction of its bungled Angelina Jolie birth report, which wasn't so much an example of the show's bad reporting as it was their producers' decision to turn an anonymous blog report into a full-blown news item. Turns out, there's no reason to! The weeks-early report, which said Jolie gave birth in May, stained the brand's reputation inside the gossip community — but doesn't appear to affected its reputation among viewers. After all, Americans expect even the tabloid news media to get the story wrong. CONTINUED »
The grossly outrageous sum of $20 million has been replaced by the moderately outrageous figure of $12 million — that's supposedly the latest asking price for the pictures of Angelina Jolie's new twins. While one might think People has a lock on the pics, because it's their nature to have a lock on these sort of things, OK!'s Richard Desmond has a trick up his sleeve: He gets to spread the cost around his 17 international editions of OK!. Or maybe Time Inc. will partner up with an international rag, like Hello, and find a clever way of splitting its costs, too.
The case could be made that we've already over-analyzed the over-analyzing of Brad and Angelina's baby twins as we tried to find the winners and the losers in previous nine months of baby speculation. But we did some digging through our tabloid archives and found a few shining stars among the blight, where some celebrity weeklies fared better in their guessing game — is she having a boy? a girl? twins? two girls? — than others.
It's not an exhaustive examination of every Brangelina-related baby cover of the past year, which would show that every tabloid got some info right and wrong at some point. But treat it as evidence that plenty of folks didn't really know what they were doing, and that "inside sources" could often be replaced by "magic 8-balls" or "Crazy Aunt Zelda." CONTINUED »
Blogger accounts. Twittering. Facebook status updates. Everyone is pouring their personal lives out online, which leads the Journal to ask, Does everybody need their own personal website? "The answer is still 'no' — but that 'no is no longer quite so firm as it used to be. And sometimes that hesitation is a sign that the wheels of social change are starting to turn — that 'no' will turn into 'maybe' and then from there move quickly to 'yes' and then finally to 'it's weird that you don't.' If you're a thirtysomething, you've seen answering machines, voice mail, email addresses and cellphones complete the journey from curiosities to perceived necessities, just as our elders saw the same thing happen with TVs and phones."
But how to tell where this trend is really headed?
By looking to a certain pair of individuals who have dictated whether any trend in life is noteworthy, or not worth persuing at all.
Their names? Brad and Angelina. CONTINUED »
Sorry. No. Absolutely not.
The photos of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's new kids, Knox and Vivienne, will not be sold with a price tag as high as $20 million, as some outlets are reporting. Sure, "in the celebrity world, it seems to be the double-second coming," as Darryn Lyons, owner of paparazzi agency Big Pictures, tells it. But the fee that either People or OK! hands over, while enormous, will not even come close to the figures being reported. CONTINUED »
The birth of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt's new twins — son Knox Leon and daughter Vivienne Marcheline — is not just the second coming of Jesus, but also the culmination of nine months (longer if you count the speculation period) of a gossip industry frenzy, where celebrity weeklies flew off the shelves with breathless reports about Brangelina's coming spawn, tabloid entertainment shows drew ratings with each new "bump" report, and the gossip blogs recorded traffic spikes anytime they pasted their pages with Brangelina rants and raves. Everybody had an opinion. Everybody was a spectator. And everybody wanted in.
So now that Angelina finally gave birth, via C-section, in Nice, France, the matter of her pregnancy is all over with. And before we even get to figuring out which tabloid is spending the GDP of some small nations on scoring the first exclusive pictures of Knox and Vivienne (we suggest they split the two up, and sell each kid to separate magazines), there's another matter to clear up.
Namely, who actually was on their game with this Brangelina birthing business, and which media outlets were merely along for the ride, picking up the crumbs while others trailblazed the way with either a roster of excellent sources or, equally as plausible, very lucky guesses.
After all, if the biggest mystery is the sex of the twins, there's a 1-in-4 chance of getting it right. CONTINUED »
Entertainment Tonight did it! They finally did it! After weeks of refusing to retract their false report that Angelina Jolie had given birth to her twins, they're owning up to the fact that they got it wrong.
Sort of!
None of this would've have been such a big deal if exec producer Linda Bell Blue admitted the bogus Internet rumor their story was based on was total bunk, but now it's just an embarrassing stain on their, ahem, reputation. CONTINUED »
It's too bad the tabloids' sources on Angelina Jolie aren't as strong as the leak-y doormen at Madonna's New York City apartment building — this whole "Did she give birth? Is she giving birth? What's up with those heroin rumors?" mystery could finally be put to rest. But it hasn't been! So we find it to be our civic duty to bring you up to speed on where we are in The Longest Pregnancy In The History of Humanity: CONTINUED »
Inevitably, the report from French magazine Closer — that Angelina Jolie had finally unloaded the most talked about sets of DNA ever — is wrong. Ms. Jolie has, in fact, checked into a hospital in Nice, France, but just so she can get a head start on making her army of handlers go on ice trip runs. Somehow, Jolie's camp let hospital spokeswoman Nadine Bauer talk to the press, and she is still living, having told the media, "There's no urgency. It's been planned for a long time. She's very well. Everything is fine." Or maybe she just sent assistant Holly Goline — who looks very much like her and was at the center of Entertainment Tonight's false birth report — to the hospital as a body double, and is actually in Switzerland with OK!'s photographer waiting outside the delivery room.
If you won't believe Entertainment Tonight, might you believe French magazine Closer that Angelina Jolie has given birth? They're reporting the twins were born Wednesday morning after Jolie went into labor Tuesday night (mind the time difference!). Who knows if it's true! But maybe ET will finally be able to return the headline to its homepage.
As Wired wraps its head around Wanted, the $50 million opening weekend excuse to up Angelina Jolie's income statement, and all the tricks it employs to make things like a high-speed train crash look like something a little better than a four-year-old crashing in Thomas the Train toy, it finds what is quickly becoming the most recycled character devices on screen: tattoos. CONTINUED »
And heeeeeere we go. Yesterday we forecasted that In Touch's photos of Angelina Jolie looking very pregnant in France while playing with Zahara and Shiloh would be met with the requisite skepticism, especially since Entertainment Tonight reported Ms. Jolie already gave birth, and they're standing by their story. And it's happening. "Some remain unconvinced," reports Rush & Molloy, that Jolie is still carrying the twins inside her. That photo of her with the belly? "Prosthetic tummy!" So where are the babies? If they were born, they were premature, which means they are "being secretly cared for in a French hospital" until they're strong enough for People or OK! to pay eight-figures to take their photo.
Hollywood press eager for a catfight made no effort to play down the fact that Brad Pitt's former and current gals were going to face off against each other on Oct. 24, when they both had movies opening. But while Angelina Jolie's Changeling is still set to open that weekend, Jennifer Aniston's He's Just Not That Into You has been pushed back — to February 6, 2009. Not only does the change affect the trades and gossip blogs yearning for a box office receipt throwdown, but it also make's this month uncomfortable Marie Claire situation — which had Aniston feuding with co-star Jennifer Connelly so much that she reportedly refused to share a cover with her — a moot point. Boo.
Below, some of the headlines carrying the original news of a Jolie-Aniston tete-a-tete. CONTINUED »
This week In Touch made Los Angeles Times blogger Liz Snead — who's been calling on Angelina Jolie to SHOW YOURSELF!!! – a very happy woman: At last, since Entertainment Tonight first falsely reported the superstar mom had given birth to her twins, there's photo evidence that … she hasn't. CONTINUED »
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