The grossly outrageous sum of $20 million has been replaced by the moderately outrageous figure of $12 million — that's supposedly the latest asking price for the pictures of Angelina Jolie's new twins.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.
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Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban's decision not to sell pictures of their new daughter Sunday to the highest bidding tabloid has many an editor rankled over a lost opportunity to fork over a few million for the exclusive shots. And plenty of rags were willing to do so.
Kidman and Urban are hopping on the human trafficking is wrong theory, foregoing zeroes on a cheque for their mental well-being. And the good possibility that their daughter will grow up resenting her parents.
The couple reportedly have yet to decide whether they'll release an official photo — which would be a smart move, for their privacy's sake, since without anyone scoring the first photos, they'll be hounded by the paparazzi until someone gets it.
Or they could pull a Gwenyth Paltrow/Chris Martin or Sarah Jessica Parker/Matthew Broderick; both couples decided to alert the paparazzi ahead of time, bring their newborns to a public spot for a few minutes, and let the photogs snap away with equal access. It ensures the photo's value is near worthless, and that they'll be able to leave their homes, with their babies, with just 20 photogs in tow. Not 100.
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 »
The endless race for the latest set of exclusive celebrity photos wraps another round, with OK! reportedly snapping up the first pictures of Matthew McConaughey and Camila Alves' son Levi Alves, adding to this week's long-expected coup of Jamie Lynn Spears' new daughter Maddie. Of course, this is just a small battle compared to the People v. OK! bidding war for Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt's new bundle of paydays.
Update: The price for the pics? Three million dollars, says TMZ, with the deal including the baby's first Christmas pics too and the option to bid first on their weddings photos should they tie the knot.
Tom and Katie. Uh huh. Nicole and Keith. Uh huh, uh huh. Madonna and Guy. Yep, uh huh, but where's … ohh, there she is! It's Ms. Jamie Lynn Spears, American's latest teenager mother, at last popping out her daughter and making good on the $1 million deal she inked with OK! for the first exclusive photos and interview with the new mom and Maddie. That we are now celebrating and rewarding young, unwed women having children is an absolute delight to see on today's newsstand. On the plus side, the kid looks nothing like big sis Britney, so she's already got one leg up in the world. [OK!]
The frozen foreheaded actress has given birth to her first baby, a girl. Her name is Sunday Rose Kidman Urban, and it'll only be a couple years before Kidman and Urban decide to homeschool her instead of letting kids tease the crap out of her. [Us]
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.
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.
You know what you get when you're a celebrity and you sign an exclusive deal with a tabloid? Bad karma from the rest of the magazines.
Jamie Lynn Spears, who signed a $1 million exclusive deal with OK! for her pregnancy story and pics, is getting stabbed by Star with a dramatic cover story exclaiming, "Delivery Room Drama!" Since Spears is prohibited from playing ball with the other celeb weeklies, there's only one thing Star can do: deliver one piece of bad news after another. If only Spears hadn't signed with OK!, she could've scored some protection. CONTINUED »
With Britney by their side, Jamie Lynn Spears and fiancé Casey Aldridge welcomed a baby girl Maddie Briann this morning. This is bad news for brother Bryan, who was enjoying his first 3 minutes of fame. [People]
Celebrity’s baby photos are fun to look at, and, if said celebrity has undergone extensive plastic surgery, incredibly illuminating. Here’s part one in a series of celebrity kids — see if you can guess who’s who.
Never say never, Mary.
Entertainment Tonight host Mary Hart joins exec producer Linda Bell Blue in standing by the show's story about Angelina Jolie giving birth, telling the LA Daily News (via women-hater Liz Snead) on Saturday at a Cedars-Sinai Heart Foundation event: "No one has seen Angelina in the last two weeks. I hope that the babies were born when we said they were and that we had our facts straight. I have never retracted a story in 26 years, but all I can do now is wait and see."
Oh really, Mary? Never. had. to. retract. a. story. in. 26. years? CONTINUED »
As the mystery behind Entertainment Tonight reporting Angelina Jolie had given birth reaches its climactic buzzkill, new questions emerge!
Namely: Where are Brad Pitt and Angelina now? They haven't been seen in days, which is like, forevs in paparazzi years.
Oh, and this: Jolie's assistant, Holly Goline, is said to have never had a BlackBerry email address, according to AP reports. But here she is with Jolie (that's her in the back, wearing sunglasses, and also pregnant), at the Cannes photo call for Kung Fu Panda, on May 15th, with a BlackBerry in hand.
So maybe ET's claims that they were emailing with the real Goline, at holly@tmo.blackberry.net, have some foundation? Or, more importantly, how did Goline score the first-name BlackBerry email? Because we'd love david@tmo.blackberry.net, please.
Los Angeles Times blogger Elizabeth Snead has a simple solution to ending all this madness about whether Angelina Jolie actually gave birth: Show yourself!
"So where is Angelina? It's her 33rd birthday today," Snead wrote yesterday. "If she would only show her face — and her bump — all these birth rumors would be instantly put to rest, without having to waste money paying expensive lawyers to write threatening letters to news organizations."
Yes, Angelina, feed the beast. That's some brilliant advice, Snead. This, from the same supposed Hollywood expert who thinks it's coincidental that Jolie and Gina Gershon, along with every other Hollywood talent, hired the big-mouthed law firm Lavely & Singer.
JOSSIP REPORTS
So how did the "ANGELINA GAVE BIRTH!!!" rumor – that got Entertainment Tonight in a giant cauldron of boiling shit for its fake world exclusive – even get started?
As all terrible things in life do: On a blog.
It all started May 26, four days before ET's since de-bunked report, when someone, identified only as "Jenah" and supposed from New York City, posted to famousbabesblog.blogspot.com (since disappeared from the web) claiming to be "the best friend to one of Brad & Angelina's nannies, I believe I can report this before any other news outlet: THEY HAD THEIR TWINS!"
And as these things are wont to do, the item got circulated all over celebrity message boards, before winding up on the French website PurePeople, which noted the report came from a blog, and thus shouldn't be treated as fact. (BLOGS LIE!!, after all.) That item got picked up by JustJared, which cited "media outlets in France" but noted, "This rumor has not been confirmed by any reps of the Jolie-Pitt clan."
From there, Entertainment Tonight got wind, claimed the exclusive as their own (and even copying the babies' names given in the original report). Then the tabloid magazines posted the news on their blog, until word arrived that the report was false, everyone backtracked and debunked the rumor, while ET remained its source was reliable. Cue Jolie's attorneys at Lavely & Singer to begin circulating letters explaining how somebody was impersonating Jolie's assistant Holly Goline, all the while ET has sat idly by pretending the whole thing never happened, even though they knew their source was bad.
All of which brings up two big questions: CONTINUED »
