(Sorry the picture wasn’t more related, Kermit Bale gets me every time)
Poor Tom Cruise can’t seem to buy good publicity these days, but that tends to happen when you’re a total weirdo. The latest hit is an interview with American Psycho director Mary Harron, and it’s really interesting to hear her talk about her latest projects tell us what we already sort of knew about Tom Cruise. From Blackbook Magazine [via Videogum]:
How did you and Christian Bale develop his character in American Psycho?
It was definitely a process. We talked a lot, but he was in L.A. and I was in New York. We didn’t actually meet in person a lot, just talked on the phone. We talked about how Martian-like Patrick Bateman was, how he was looking at the world like somebody from another planet, watching what people did and trying to work out the right way to behave. And then one day he called me and he had been watching Tom Cruise on David Letterman, and he just had this very intense friendliness with nothing behind the eyes, and he was really taken with this energy.
I can see that. Especially in that one scene where Christian Bale was all, “I like to dissect girls, as long as there are no gay people there.“ By the way, I’m nominating “as long as there are no gays” for the newest meme. “Hey, Bob, what do you say to happy hour?” “I’m in, as long as no gays are in there! You know me, I love to party, as long there’s no gays around! I’ll give a you call the next time no gays are in the room.” “Right on, man, keep f-ckin that chicken.”
Bronson Pinchot has made a career out of playing effeminate foreigners, and he must be set, financially, because he burns some serious bridges in this new interview with the always great Onion A/V Club. Not that that’s a criticism, it’s awesome the 1% of the time when actors are actually honest.
On Risky Business:
We thought Tom [Cruise] was the biggest bore on the face of the Earth. He had spent some formative time with Sean Penn—we were all very young at the time, Tom was 20, I was 23. Tom had picked up this knack of calling everyone by their character names, because that would probably make your performance better, and I don’t agree with that. I think that acting is acting, and the rest of the time, you should be you, but he called us all by our character names. He was tense and made constant, constant unrelated homophobic comments, like, “You want some ice cream, in case there are no gay people there?” I mean, his lingo was larded with the most… There was no basis for it. It was like, “It’s a nice day, I’m glad there are no gay people standing here.” Very, very strange.
Same thing with Eddie Murphy—I remember somebody calling and saying, “You’ll never guess who was just caught with a transvestite!” [Laughs.]
Since May, Tom Cruise has been attached to 20th Century Fox’s Wichita, a surprisingly decent-sounding (for Fox) action comedy from 3:10 to Yuma director James Mangold, co-starring Cameron Diaz. The project had been known previously as “Wichita” and “Trouble Man”, but Fox apparently decided it needed a new title that more fit the studio who brought us Big Momma’s House, Alvin & the Chipmunks: The Squeakwel, etc. So now it’s called… KNIGHT & DAY.
Horrible puns in the title always make for horrible movies — see also: All About Steve, Made of Honor, the Russell Brand-Easter bunny movie entitled I Hop. Was it really worth changing the name just to humor the executive who tells everyone how clever his niece is? “Knight & Day” makes it sound like an 80s buddy flick, in which former radio comedy team Hank Knight and Everette Day have to put aside their differences and reunite for one more big score. In short, it sounds like the 1989 Babaloo Mandel pilot, “Knight & Daye,” starring Marty in the Morning’s Joe Cipriano. And no, I didn’t make any of that up. Well done, Fox. Looks like you really “Mangold” this one! Hey, are you hiring?
As originally rumored a few days ago, Hollywood Reporter is confirming that JJ Abrams and Tom Cruise are teaming up to produce a fourth Mission Impossible, which, if Hollywood sequel-naming trends bear out, will probably be called The Mission Impossible. 
Unfortunately, it looks like Abrams won’t be directing (as he did on Star Trek, which was awesome) and it’s unclear whether Cruise will star (though that part isn’t as unfortunate).
Abrams directed Cruise in the third installment of the TV-derived franchise, which grossed $395 million worldwide in summer 2006. Relatively speaking, “MI:3″ was a box office disappointment, since the second film grossed $545 million worldwide and the original raked in $452 million.
Though Abrams is not on board to direct the new “Impossible,” he and Cruise could reconceive it in a way that is closer to the ensemble approach of the TV series. Or they could reconfigure Cruise as Ethan Hunt in a less front-and-center role, as some kind of mentor to the new M:I crew. Then again, no one can rule out Cruise as the guy who will carry the franchise for the duration. [THR]
Or maybe Cruise will do battle with a horde of space lesbians, accompanied only by his masturbating iguana, Reacharound. Gosh, journalism is fun.
Fox columnist Roger Friedman was famously fired from his crappy column at Fox News for writing about watching a pirated copy of a Fox movie, Wolverine. Like any rational person, Friedman blames his firing on Scientology. And he’s filing a lawsuit.
Friedman is convinced it was a cover story. Last August, Friedman went to Memphis for the funeral of his friend Isaac Hayes, who was a Scientologist. Kelly Preston was also in town for the funeral. Friedman says that when Preston saw him at the Peabody Hotel, she loudly blasted him for his columns criticizing Scientology.
Hmm, I don’t know how you call something that actually happened a “cover story,” but then again, this is the same guy who once wrote that Matt LeBlanc had “literally disappeared.”
The following month, says an ally of Friedman, Preston voiced her complaints about Friedman to Fox News chief Roger Ailes and his then-EVP, John Moody. “Moody talked to her on the phone,” says the source. “When she couldn’t get Moody to fire Friedman, she called him a [obscenity].”
Ailes and Moody later agreed to meet with Preston and Church of Scientology spokesman Tommy Davis (the son of actress Anne Archer), according to the source, who says Friedman’s editors forbid him from writing about the death in January of Preston’s son, Jett.
Meanwhile, Friedman says, 20th Century Fox chairman Jim Gianopoulos had been encouraging him to lay off Cruise’s movie “Valkyrie,” which Fox was distributing internationally.
Last month, Variety reported that Cruise was in advanced talks to star with Cameron Diaz in a Fox action comedy, “Wichita.” A source suspects that Cruise may have made Friedman’s ouster a condition of the actor appearing in “Wichita.”
The original story when he was getting fired was that 20th Century Fox and Fox News were totally separate companies, so it’s interesting that he’s now claiming that 20th Century Fox was pressuring him. And by ‘interesting,’ I mean wow, what an [obscenity].
