· Yet another Great Moment In Movie Marketing: This weekend in Santa Clarita, the arson squad was called in to blow up an LA Times newspaper rack after someone mistook "a red plastic box with protruding wires"—a M:i:III promotional toy meant to play the movie's theme song each time someone buys a paper—for the more common kind of suspicious-box-with-protruding-wires, a bomb. The ensuing buzz around the controversial, but highly chattered-about, advertising ploy is now so strong that Paramount plans on affixing explosive devices to mailboxes and garbage cans that detonate and cover passers-by in a hail of flaming confetti as Tom Cruise's voice shouts "Mission: Impossible III, in theaters May 5th!" from the burning receptacle. [AP]
· Paramount reaches out to the fairer sex with ads playing up Tom Cruise's onscreen relationship with Michelle Monaghan and protection of co-star Keri Russell, hoping to show that he can have relationships with women that don't include brainwashing and/or suspiciously impregnating them. [WSJ.com]
· In dealing with his star's, er, controversial offscreen antics, director JJ Abrams favors a practical approach, i.e., showing up to work and hoping that the tents selling Dianetics with a free massage aren't in the way of his shot: "You obviously worry when you're doing a show or a movie and you realize that if that person does anything in an extracurricular way, is that going to affect what you do? But you have to live in a practical way in that you try to control to the best of your ability what you can control." [LAT]

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