The eponymous production company of megastar Tom Cruise and his agent/producing partner, Paula Wagner, found their cushy studio contract with Paramount — and its roughly $10 million in guaranteed annual overhead — not renewed yesterday after a breakdown in ongoing negotiations, but that wasn’t necessarily the worst of the news for the star.

“As much as we like [Cruise] personally, we thought it wrong to renew his deal. His recent conduct has not been acceptable to Paramount,” Sumner said.

That “recent conduct” — a tabloid-fantasy implosion of the star’s carefully cultivated public image — of course includes Cruise’s wacko, slightly-too-insistent courtship of Dawson’s Creek weak link Katie Holmes, his vociferous criticizing of the use of anti-depressants and other prescription medications and simultaneous touting of Scientology, an angry exchange with Today show host Matt Lauer regarding the same, and, naturally, his Mad Hatter couch-hopping routine on Oprah Winfrey’s daytime talk show (above).

Cruise/Wagner Productions has been housed at Paramount since 1992, but still, this severing or whittling down of expensive ties was not a complete surprise, given Mission: Impossible III‘s disappointing domestic box office take — despite the fact that more money was spent on cappuccinos during its production than most folks make in a year. No, the shock was in the way Redstone went out of his way to drop n-u-t-s on Cruise.

I love the apparently surging trend of twilight-era Hollywood producers and media moguls evidencing the sort of gruff bluntness that’s probably helped get them to where they are, whether it’s this or Morgan Creek Productions CEO James G. Robinson blasting Lindsay Lohan for her serial tardiness and absenteeism. But Redstone’s flat-out admission/assertion of his company’s trouble with Cruise’s erratic public behavior — already countered by the expected claims from Wagner that negotiations with Paramount had already been broken off — runs counter to the normal Tinseltown niceties, where as much (if not more) is often left unsaid as actually stated in these matters.

Honesty is typically such a lonely word, but it looks like it’s making some new acquaintances in Hollywood these days. Movie stars, you are on notice.

This is just one of those images that first makes you randomly laugh, then piques your interest, then slowly scares the bejesus out of you, because you start to think: “Sweet mother of pearl, wait a second… are they making a movie together?”



Early ’90s ass kicker Steven Seagal last tasted a nominal big screen hit in 2001 with Exit Wounds. Since then he’s tasted many donuts, and is now relegated — and has been for some time, actually — to having various stuntmen run headlong into his fists and feet in a string of straight-to-video re-hashes while he stands around whispering eco-friendly platitudes, and cinematographers, directors and costume designers figure out new ways to mask his corpulence.

Prop comic and disturbingly plastic-faced commercial pitchman Carrot Top, meanwhile, has uncorked really only one headlining movie stinker, the utterly atrocious Chairman of the Board, which is notable for an extended belching scene shared with Courtney Thorne-Smith that, somehow, is still more dignified than any randomly plucked moment of her work on According to Jim.

Seeing this photo, though, has me in terrified stitches. I mean, what would the title of such a pairing be — Laugh Past Dead? Hard to Kielbasa? Out for Just Ice? Enemy of Comedy? The Slimmer Man? Red Yawn? Actually, in my current fog I’m now coming around to the idea, though for what it’s worth I think the photo was taken at one of Seagal’s musical gigs (he’s cut several country/rock albums). Still, that makes you wonder who opened for whom. It also makes you realize that Carrot Top is on the cusp of being one degree away from Tommy Lee Jones in the “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” game. I’m just saying…