Mother of God, is that a Hawaiian shirt made out of peacock feathers? WANT.

It may seem like we’ve seen a lot of trailers for Steven Soderbergh’s Liberace movie lately, but one of those was actually The Great Gatsby trailer. In any case, today brings the longest trailer yet for Behind the Candelabra, which premieres May 26th, starring Michael Douglas as Liberace and Matt Damon as his lovaah Scott Thorsen (please, no lisp jokes). Soderbergh has been on a roll after Magic Mike and Side Effects, so I’d love to see him prove all the studios who thought it was “too gay” – this in a world where Glee enjoys wild popularity and the Disney Channel styles all of its stars like fastidious homosexuals – wrong.

But I dunno, man. First Jeremy Irons says I have to gay marry my dad, and now the guy from Basic Instinct has to play the gayest man in the world? Thanks a lot, Obama.

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I didn’t follow the Phil Spector murder case all that closely when it happened, and I admit I just assumed it was another Robert Blake/OJ Simpson case, where a dude murdered a female acquaintance and then tried to use the “but I’m famous!” defense. But David Mamet’s Phil Spector movie on HBO, which I watched at least half of the other night, seems to suggest that maybe Spector didn’t do it, and he was just lumped in with Blake and OJ, and people wrongly assumed he was a murderer on account of him being weird old A-hole. With Spector currently serving 19 years for second-degree murder, you’d think his people would be happy with any publicity of the Phil-Spector-not-being-portrayed-as-a-murderer variety, but it seems his wife, Rachelle Spector, is actually none too thrilled with HBO and Mamet. Her big beefs? Party invites and improper wig depictions, it seems. Seems like a real stable lady.

Mrs. Spector claims she explicitly was not invited [to the March 14 screening the cable network participated in at LACMA].
She tells THR that her PR rep received an invite for another client, prompting the rep to call HBO, which said it couldn’t accommodate her. That’s when Rachelle, who married Spector in 2006, did what any self-respecting wife of an incarcerated music legend would do: She crashed it.
“Pretty amazing I had to sneak into a screening of a movie about my husband,” the 32-year-old posted March 14 on Facebook. Seems she didn’t realize the screening was public. But she walked out while director David Mamet spoke. “Mamet said that he had access to my husband’s hair, which he calls wigs, and he measured them so he could get the height right,” she says. “I’m like, ‘Wow, that’s interesting, I didn’t know somebody snuck into my house and had access to my husband’s hair.’ ”
An HBO rep says Mamet used photos to gauge Phil’s hair size, as he said at LACMA, and that Rachelle was offered a private screening. [THR]

So who are you going to believe, HBO, or the lady who came up with the idea of sporting this hairstyle and outfit to murder court in the first place?

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When Al Pacino plays an eccentric, megalomaniacal music producer in a biopic written and directed by David Mamet, you can bet it’s a recipe for ACTING, with a capital A. The script might as well be in all caps, and when it premieres on HBO March 29th, you might want to add a sneeze guard to your flatscreen to keep from getting sprayed like the first two rows at a Shamu show. STAND BACK, EVERYONE! PACINO’S GONNA SHOUT SOME WORDS!

Regardless, Phil Spector should slake your thirst for goofy wigs and opulence until Soderbergh’s Liberace picture hits later this year. Spector tells the uplifting story of Spector’s relationship with his defense attorney, Helen Mirren as Linda Kenney Baden (who also worked with Casey Anthony), as Spector’s first trial for the murder of Lana Clarkson ended in a mistrial, and eventually got him 19 years for second-degree murder in a second trial. Pacino reportedly refused to meet with Spector, which probably helped him deliver lines like “FIRST time you got felt up – guess what? You were listenin’ to one a my sawngs!” with a straight face.

In any case, you can watch the trailer below, and click on for a cataloging and naming of all of Pacino’s wigs. This one up top, we call that the John 3:16.

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If you didn’t get your Hemingway fix from this morning’s clip from Woody Allen’s old stand-up act about Hemingway punching him in the face, after the jump I’ve got the first trailer for Hemingway & Gellhorn, an HBO film premiering May 28th starring Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman. It tells the story of the romance between Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn after they meet covering the Spanish Civil War (best Spanish Civil War book: Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia), and promises to paint Hemingway as the manliest man ever to rock a beret. “Who is that large dirty man in those disgustingly soiled clothes,” as Kidman’s Gellhorn puts it. She makes it sound all romantic, but most people ask the same thing about your average IT guy. Or blogger.

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Jay Roach has had a weird career. (He also looks a bit like Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer, but that’s another story). Between directing horrific anti-comedies like Dinner for Schmucks and Meet the Fockers, he does acclaimed political retrospectives for HBO like Recount, about the 2000 election. In the same vein, Game Change is based on the 2008 book about the McCain/Palin ticket, starring Ed Harris† as John McCain and Julianne Moore as Sarah Palin. You can check out the trailer below, and just in time. It felt like it was almost five minutes since I’d last heard that c*nt’s name.

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