Scientology refugee Marc Headley has written a book called Blown For Good—featuring a dramatic, action-scene-type cover—detailing his 15 years of work inside Scientology. The Village Voice interviewed him about his 1990 "auditing" session performed by Days of Thunder-era Tom Cruise himself.

"You do a lot of things with a book and a bottle," Headley says. "It's known as the book-and-bottle routine." Cruise, he says, would instruct Headley to speak to a book, telling it to stand up, or to sit down, or otherwise to move somewhere.

"You do the same with the bottle. You talk to it. You do it with an ashtray too," he says. "You tell the ashtray, 'Sit in that chair.' Then you actually go over and put the ashtray on the chair. Then you tell the ashtray, 'Thank you.' Then you do the same thing with the bottle, and the book. And you do this for hours and hours."

This was supposed " to get your intention over to the bottle...to rehabilitate your ability to control things." Well then. Tom Cruise can control books and bottles with his mind and don't ever let anyone tell you different.

Headley also says that there are only about 10,000 Scientologists in the whole world. They could be whupped by the Unitarians!
[Village Voice. Pic by Richard Blakeley]

The novelist created the HBO series Bored to Death, starring Jonathan Schwartzman, but had nowhere to watch it the Sunday before last because he didn't own a TV. Insert your own "precious Brooklyn author eschews television" joke here if you like, but Ames insisted on Twitter he's "just very bad at shopping" and, in any case, had frantic fun watching his own show on other people's televisions for two weeks. Or at least that's how things seemed from his tweets.

And then HBO, where because they got tired, worried or charmed by Ames' Twitter begging, finally just bought him a set. Which, frankly is almost too perfect; we wouldn't put it past the network to set up the whole escapade as a publicity stunt targeted at the show's hipster target audience.

It's some comfort, then, that Ames has used Twitter as a cashless flea market before, offering free foreign editions of his books at a Carroll Gardens bar. That experiment didn't seem to go as well: One of us happened to drop by that night and Ames was there, but not one had yet come looking for his very pretty books. Apparently there are some giveaways even Twitter can't facilitate. Sorry, book lovers.

(Pic by mtkr on Flickr)

It's one of the ironies of Morgan's career that he's found bigger stardom as the star of a parody of Saturday Night Live than he ever did on the real thing. And in his upcoming book, I Am the New Black, he mentions who treated him like shit, namely then stars Chris Kattan and Cheri Oteri. Morgan writes, "All I have to say about that is, where's Chris Kattan now? Where's Cheri Oteri now? That bitch can't even get arrested."

But the grudge apparently runs even deeper, because when Morgan sat down to record the audio version (in the clip above) of that passage, he started ad-libbing, expanding on his earlier points: Morgan says he still counts Will Ferrell, Molly Shannon and Colin Quinn as friends, but as for Oteri and Kattan: "Fuck 'em."

Amazing. It's not everyday you hear Tracy Morgan acting like a demanding, slightly unhinged television star who feels underappreciated by his co-workers. It's more like every week.

We're told Mogan will be at the Union Square Barnes & Noble Thursday Oct. 22 at 7pm if you want to see if he'll curse more old colleagues.

There were the sudden job changes, the crazy stories about the famous people he'd met, his total estrangement from his family. But it wasn't until she was in college and discovered that he'd opened several credit cards in her name, running up thousands of dollars in debt and ruining her credit, that she realized that her father's deceptions might run deeper than a few tall tales.

(Images from 'The Impostor's Daughter'; click any image to enlarge.)

The story of how Laurie unraveled her father's lifetime of lies is the basis of her new, amazing graphic novel, The Impostor's Daughter, in which she weaves together the story of her childhood, the discovery of her father's lies, her journalism career and her issues with men, which culminated in a stay at a rehab center recommended to her by one of her interview subjects, Ashley Judd. I couldn't put down her book, so when I met up with Laurie at a cafe in Brooklyn (we coincidentally live in the same neighborhood), I had lots of questions-about her book, about her dad, and about her career interviewing celebrities.

[Doree will be interviewing interesting women every week for us. If you have a suggestion, email her.]

Why did you want to do it as a graphic novel?
I did it first as a memoir. I wrote a 350-page memoir. And that was my original intention-it started originally as an essay for Esquire, which I published anonymously in 2003. But that essay ended on all of these questions. I ended it saying, I don't know who he is or what he does, is it this, is it this, is it this? I felt that as much as a writer, I felt as a daughter that I had to get to the truth, to the bottom of things. I wrote and wrote and wrote, and I went to writers' colonies, and I think the story was unfolding as I wrote. It made it difficult to have the proper perspective. It made it difficult to have the emotional truths and that was why I turned back to cartooning, because I'd always cartooned about my dad, and I discovered this box of childhood cartoons.

I'm going to put more of them up on my website. I have hundreds. I looked at those cartoons and realized how fearless they were. I realized I wasn't being that fearless in the memoir, and so I decided to try it as a graphic novel. And it was almost easy for me emotionally to talk about him that way.

I know it's hard to think about this in retrospect, but do you think even at that time you felt like there was something off about your dad?
Oh, yeah. My childhood cartoons were so observant. I knew every single thing that was going on in my house, and my father knew I knew every single thing that was going on in my house because I gave them to him as gifts, and he loved them. In a way he loved that I knew.

It fed his ego in some way.
Yeah. It fed his ego, exactly. I think it was very exciting for him that I sort of saw what he was doing.

In some ways your book reminded me of David Carr's memoir Night of the Gun-
I haven't read it but I really want to.

Because he uses his training as a journalist to go back and recreate these years he basically lost because he was a drug addict, but he's using his tools as a journalist to do it. I thought that was really interesting how you kind of interplay what you're doing as a journalist with your discovery of what your dad was doing. It did seem like it was all related.
Absolutely. My mother constantly bemoans, like, why did I have to have a daughter who's a writer? My mother just very much wanted to keep the family intact and the story a secret, even to herself. I became a writer for this very reason. I didn't set out to become a writer. My father created a writer. He created a digger.

You have that bit in the book where you find out about the credit cards and you write what you wanted to say to him, and you wonder, if you had confronted him at that time, what would have happened.

It was the first real piece of physical evidence really. There were little bits and pieces, little hints. It was the first, direct-not affront, but direct betrayal. And I tell you, even now, 38 years old, I've written a published a book about this, and I still am afraid of my father, I'm afraid of him hurting me, I'm afraid of him hurting himself, and I'm still afraid of losing his love even though I've already lost it. And that stuff is so potent, as a daughter.

He seems really lonely.
He is. He's a total lone wolf. And always has been. No connection to his family at all. Very, very few friends. But the thing is, I feel like if my father were to say something like, I made some mistakes, I own it.

It seemed like he always had some excuse or some rationalization. It was always the other person that was crazy, or he was misunderstood.
Exactly. In a way I wonder if this period of time, to some extent, I wonder if he's enjoying it. He's getting a lot of attention. My sisters and my mother are really sort of rallying around him. So that would be in keeping with his, I hate to say it, with his narcissistic makeup.

You write that this whole experience with your father made you a better interviewer-somehow more empathic with people. How did you discover that?
I think it was my very first in-person cover interview. My very first interview was a telephone interview with Penelope Cruz. That was my first cover story. My first in-person interview was Ashley Judd. And I was really floundering and I didn't know what I was doing, and I was a little bit starstruck at the time. It was a fashion story, and I could tell immediately she had no interest in fashion. She kept trying to flip the interview back to her charity work. I wasn't, at the time, a seasoned interviewer and I didn't know what to do. I had 40 questions about fashion and I just kind of threw away my questions and I just started to talk about my dad, and she was just so drawn in by the story, and I just started a correspondence with her after that. It wasn't like I deliberately said, aha, I'm going to use this, but it became very quickly clear to me that I had always kind of in a way bonded with people over this story. So it was no different in a way than what I had been doing all along, except it was with celebrities.

You come into a celebrity interview with a preconceived concept of who this person is, that's been put together by the press. There's no way to get around that. And there's this whole thing of projection going on with celebrities. And that goes on with my father. I definitely say he was my first celebrity. He was this larger-than-life, shape-shifting, identity-shifting person, and that's what celebrities are. So as much as I got starstruck by them as much as I got starstruck by my father, I also felt at ease in their company. I can do this, that was sort of the feeling.

It was almost like, no one could intimidate you as much as your father could intimidate you.
Exactly. No one could intimidate me as much as my father had intimidated me. I'll repeat that so you can use it in my words. That's really good.

Do you ever feel like you have to tell a certain story at Glamour?
Well, they have certain themes that they're interested in. It's very different doing a Q&A format from a running text story. If I were doing a running text celebrity interview, I would have lots of observations that I would make that I don't have the chance to make in a Glamour interview. On the other hand, you get to hear their voice and it's their voice. Yeah, the Glamour audience has certain interests so I try to stick to those interests, but obviously Glamour's also interested in breaking news and scoops and so I try to do that too.

It's hard with a monthly.
Yeah. It's very hard with a monthly to do that kind of thing. But what I've learned is that celebrities are so media savvy. They're more media savvy than anyone you can imagine. So if there's going to be breaking news, it's breaking news they're going to give you, essentially. The Ashley Judd thing-the rehab story, which was one of our biggest selling issues ever-she decided to tell me.

Because she felt like she had this relationship with you?
I think it was because she felt like she had a relationship with me, and because she decided that she wanted that story in Glamour. A lot of celebrities will decide, I want this story in Vanity Fair. They're very media savvy. It's not like I'm going to crack them. Once in awhile I guess it can happen.

I feel like especially with actors-I feel like when people claim they're getting the "real" Reese Witherspoon-it's like, she's an actress.
And she's a very good actress, on top of that.

Yeah.
I actually try very hard in my celebrity interviews to in a way throw out my questions. The skill that I learned from my father literally is the only time I've ever gotten anything new or interesting from a celebrity-when I just talk to them and they like me as a person. If they like me as a person, and I'm not saying they're going to tell me about how their heart was broken that you don't know about-it's not that. It's just that what they talk about is going to be more authentic and interesting and you'll hear something new. If you just sort of stick to the typical celebrity interview format, you're going to get a pat and boring celebrity interview.

Why are people so fascinated with who celebrities are dating?
Every celebrity I interview asks me the same question.

On a fundamental level, it's gossip. In high school, you gossip about, Oh, Laurie broke up with Dan, oh my God.
I think it's because we mistakenly believe that we know them and we mistakenly believe they're one of our friends. I think we really do believe they're part of our circle in our minds. So they're part of our circle to discuss and pick apart and to bring them down and to have them be human like us.

Or we think, like, we could be friends. Like if it just so happened that I met Taylor Swift at the mall, she'd probably like me and we'd be friends.
Exactly. It's totally true. And even I've had that starstruck moment with certain celebrities. I wouldn't say I'm starstruck, like nervous, to meet any of them, but there are certain celebrities that for whatever reason-like Sarah Jessica Parker-who I just have a girlcrush on. So when I interviewed her, I thought that we were going to get along, and maybe we'll be friends. And I met her and she was completely unlike anything that I had imagined. Very reserved and not like her persona.

You expect her to be Carrie Bradshaw.
I did. I kind of did. Which is ridiculous. I mean, I should know better after all these years of doing these interviews.

But also, because she always plays that character.
She always plays that. She projects that in every film, in every character. So I was like, I'm going to like this woman, I know who she is. And she was very kind of reserved, and sort of serious, and so I walked away feeling like I really admired her, really respected her, really liked her, but there was no pretension that we were going to be friends. And really it would be part of my job to not be friends with the people I interview.

You do have this sort of bond with Ashley Judd.
Yeah. It went above and beyond the interview. She recommended the rehab center.

She saved your life.
Yes, you could say that, absolutely.

Has she seen the book?
To be honest, I didn't want to just use her name if I didn't have her permission for the book. So I sent her the text. She hasn't seen the drawings yet. She read the text and she approved it. I was actually surprised-she didn't make any changes, she was fine with it.

Ben. Or "Ben." [Laurie's ex-boyfriend, whose name is changed in her book.] Has he seen the book?
I actually sent him the entire manuscript. Like Ashley Judd, I sent him the entire manuscript and gave him the option to change his name. Because originally I didn't change his name. And I also changed a couple of details about him to make him less recognizable and he said yes, please change my name.

Is he a well-known person?
Yes. He is not famous, but he's known. He's a director, which I say in the book. I asked if he wanted me to change that detail, but he said no.

Is he with anyone now?
I have no idea. He didn't want to be friends. I would have been friends but he didn't want to. He wrote a film about me and I don't know what's going on with that. I have nothing bad to say about him, but for whatever reason I wasn't in love with him.

Do you think you can be in love?
With anyone? No. I was in love, but with the worst people. So can I be in love? No. I mean I'd like to say that's not true because I've done lots of therapy and I'm very much at a point in my life where I very much want the real thing. I'd like to find a stable relationship. But I so far have not been capable of being in love. I was thinking about my next book potentially being called Commitmentphobe, about female commitmentphobia. It's amazing to me because just like the next person, I want it as much as the next person does, but once I'm in it, I feel like I'm in a claustrophobic elevator and can't breathe. Look at the father I had. It's very hard to overcome that. It kind of sucks. I got at least a great career out of my dad, out of growing up that way, but it's completely been a problem in my love life.

And how are you doing with all the stuff you went to rehab for?

Sober for three years. So that stuff has been great. I'd kind of like to be able to have a glass of wine. I didn't go there for alcohol but there's this concept of cross-addiction and when you're an addict, you're an addict. Plus I think to get through all this stuff about my dad and have a healthy relationship at some point I think it would be good for me not to turn to the chemicals.

What about the religion stuff you talk about in the book?
It's funny-a couple people have said, oh, you became religious. No, I did not become religious. I am not religious. I opened myself to the possibility of spirituality and God. I've been a lifelong atheist. So I'm sort of saying, I would like to believe in God, but inside I'm sort of like, come on. It's very hard for me to accept that concept. The thing that I mentioned in my book that I think is true is that my father was really God to me. And once I sort of removed him from the equation, at the very least I'm able to open my mind and say, you know what, maybe I'm more agnostic than atheist, and I'm able to maybe say I don't know what's out there, and maybe there is and maybe there isn't. So not religious and would marry a non-Jewish guy and all of that, but I'm definitely into the idea of spirituality with a pinch of God.

The Impostor's Daughter [Amazon]

Powell's movie is part blogger story and part Julia Child biopic; Meryl Streep plays Child, the famous home-cooking guru.

Now in preview screenings, Julie and Julia is already being savaged in food blogger circles. Chef, cookbook author and food blogger Virginia Willis' slam set the tone. While professing "no malice," it took Powell to task for daring to question Child's recipe, once:

One day she made a comment implying a recipe being wrong for roast chicken. I honestly don't remember what it was, but it struck me as being so disrespectful, completely without deference to Julia Child, that I stopped. What the hell did she know about food? Had she even heard of poulet au Bresse? Didn't go back.

Actually, the term Willis was looking for was poulet de Bresse, but we shouldn't interrupt a master bravely defending Child against a disrespectful (gasp!) acolyte:

People who happen to eat and are able to type are now our new food experts... Good grief, people who don't know how to begin to roast a ding dang chicken without following a recipe can be our new, ahem, food experts.

The bitter anger of a lone chef-writer? Hardly; other food bloggers quickly agreed. "Thank you, Virginia for... bravely expressing your frustrations," wrote one. Another: "Great post." Another: "A very well written article about something which, despite being an amateur food blogger myself, does frustrate me to no end." One blogger, after watching only a trailer, said Child "deserves more than being the other half to a Nora Ephron-penned romcom about a 'lowly cubicle worker' who blogs and struggles and cries and gets a book deal." Oh, plus also, Child thought Powell was a mere stunt artist! A clown, really! What a gleeful thing, to be able to report.

Powell, you see, has made enemies of her obsessive online peers. What infuriated them most was a 2005 New York Times op-ed decrying the "insidious... snobbery of the organic movement" — an all-out assault on the Church of Alice Waters. The reaction was furious: "today's stupidest piece of information;" "gratuitous... a coarse reductionist version of the... organic movement;" "[a] shockingly incoherent thing;" "ill-informed... erroneous." Or this, after Powell panned raw foodism in the Times: "Julie Powell... needs to stop huffing dust from the crypt of Erma Bombeck."

The prevailing "Slow Food" ideology of the culinary world is that the process of nourishment should be devolved — from massive centralized farms and feedlots and factories to local growers and aritsans and ultimately home gardens; from nutritionists and other food scientists to cultural and family traditions. And ultimately, we're supposed to replace slapdash restaurants with careful preparation in small, individual kitchens.

The irony is that here we have in Julie Powell the ultimate manifestation of these principles, an amateur who dived fearlessly into home preparations, devolving not only food but, via her blog, media as well, taking both cooking and communication into her own hands. And yet the foodie priesthood seems on the verge of ex-communicating her over these very traits. Sorry, guys, but Julie Powell is literally the embodiment of an organic movement. Buy some Milk Duds (TM), splash some fake butter on your Popcorn, pop open a Diet Coke (TM) and enjoy the film.

As the co-founder of Napster, Parker (pictured) was overshadowed by Sean Fanning, who actually wrote the wildly-popular music-sharing software. Sorkin reportedly brings Parker to the fore, giving him credit for lighting a fire under Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and accelerating the company's growth.

ScriptShadow's Carson Reeves:

And don't get me started on Sean Parker - a character that can become

iconic if the film is made. The brash techy rock star revels in his own

ego, and is a key player in why Facebook is on our computers today

(Parker ended up selling his portion of the company for - I believe - a

couple hundred million dollars).

Zuckerberg, meanwhile, looks comparatively pathetic. In what Reeves calls a "heartbreaking scene," he sits alone ("not one true friend") in a dark room and "friends" the girl who dumped him right before he started Facebook. The movie nevertheless bops along as something of a comedy, thanks to Sorkin's "crazy unknown voodoo screenwriting tricks" and, apparently, jokes involving Facebook use.

Zuckerberg, whose flacks have been trashing the unreleased book on which Sorkin's script is based, may yet discover there are worse things than being depicted having sex in bathroom stalls.

(Pic: Sean Parker, by Andrew Mager)

We hear the New York Times' Brad Stone has been calling around frantically, trying to get hold of a galley himself and spoil Fortune's exclusive. And he may well succeed; the writer outed the author of the anonymous Fake Steve Jobs blog last year with help from his sources in the publishing industry. Mezrich's book is due out July 14.

The media scramble for galleys of Accidental Billionaires just goes to show Facebook remains something of an "it" company in Silicon Valley, even as it grows out of its startup phase and gropes for revenue.

It also proves that respected media outlets have no trouble taking seriously a project created by a busted, fabricating author and adapted for film by would-be crack smuggler, about a money-losing company.

Nor do we, obviously. We'd love to get our hands on said galleys, if only to fact-check them the way we did with Mezrich's comical book proposal. If you can help, please get in touch.

Agents from Beverly Hills' United Talent Agency and literary shop Fletcher & Co. are shopping a book and film deal built around a Facebook update from Lisa Hamilton Day (pictured), a book exec at Dreamworks. Here it is verbatim, as published in an update last week:

"Lisa Hamilton Day's Pomeranian raided Chinese takeout bag overnight, opened and ate a fortune cookie. Her fortune: You have strong spiritual powers, and you should develop them."

This could become "a tween series about Charlotte, the Pomeranian, who uses her newfound superpowers to save her owner's home after said owner loses her job," per Publisher's Weekly. Laugh all you want, but Beverly Hills Chihuahua grossed $145 million.

[Publishers Weekly]

(Pic via)

Ed Wyatt, we hear, didn't show up at the party. So, uh, everything is fine now. Forget this little "Party At Sony Exec's House" ever happened. Just forget it. Unless you were there, in which case, email us.
[The whole story]

Now, to the untrained eye this may appear to be that ancient, hibernating specimen called a "conflict of interest." When we called up Steinhauer to ask if she thought it was, she said, "Jamie Lynton [wife of Michael] is one of my oldest friends" and asked semi-rhetorically, "Do I cover the movie beat?"

The Times' Hollywood coverage is run by its culture desk, while Steinhauer answers to the national desk. "I don't have anything to do with the cultural coverage," she said. But that's where her husband, New York Times Hollywood reporter Ed Wyatt works; Steinhauer pointed out that her husband covers TV, not movies, so this shouldn't conflict him.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.Well! This is one of those cases where only extremely smart people can understand that this is fine. For example, Sony Pictures also makes television shows, which, we've established is what Ed Wyatt, Jennifer Steinhauer's husband, covers. He just wrote a story about Sony Pictures on March 23, in which Michael Lynton was quoted. Maybe it would be better if his wife—who also happens to be the NYT's L.A. bureau chief (we're being repetitive on purpose)—did not allow the head of Sony Pictures to host her book parties?

Of course, the NYT is far more expert in this issue than we are! Bernie Weinraub, their old Hollywood correspondent, is married to Amy Pascal— who heads Sony's movie studio. Before he retired in 2005, he also claimed to only cover television. So they know what they're doing here.

It may be that Sony Pictures executives are so inherently interesting, and honest, that NYT staffers based in LA naturally gravitate towards them. Which, okay then! Anybody can have any friends they want. But you can't have any job you want, always. The Times has already been embarrassed by its staffers' speaking fees this week. Sometimes it's better to have an abundance of caution, rather than no caution.

Jaxson has been a publicist for the likes of that one girl from The Cheetah Club for Girls or whatever, plus he attempted a gossip site called J.J.'s Dirt that, well, never went anywhere. He and his mother used to be professional talk-show guests (discussing Jaxson's deadbeat dad), which prompted Jaxson's fame-hunger and pushed him toward the gossip industry. Mostly he's popped up on Jacksonville, FL local news broadcasts and rehashed celebrity news that everyone already knew as if he'd just scooped it. Perhaps sensing the tidal change away from the scuzzy pink celebrity trashing of yesteryear, Jaxson has shifted his efforts toward a wiser and self-reflecting view of show business.

Because the memoir has worked so well for esteemed figures like Tori Spelling and Chelsea Handler, Jaxson is sending out a proposal for a book sadly titled Don't You Know Who I Am Yet???, a look back at his rollercoaster life and career. In the very-rough drafts of chapters he sent to us, Jaxson issues ruminative ruminations on his troubled childhood:

It was ... my obsession with the happiest hours of my life, the Rosie O'Donnell Show that kept me desiring fame, as I thought it would be my escape to always be financially secure and finally make a life of my own with friends that could last a lifetime. This is when I realized how it may be possible for me to finally meet my father on a talk show while aquiring that 15 minutes of fame I had always desired.

Then he moves on to hissy, non-scandal celebrity outings and partying stories:

Bungalow 8 was the place I met Ms. Mary-Kate Olsen. I was extremely disappointed in finding out that the Mary-Kate I was meeting was cocained up and completely wasted on booze. It was sad really. Really sad. It was during NYC Fashion Week that I was there with celebrities, Kim Kardashian, Chudney Ross, Evan Ross and Cuba Gooding JR.

Finally he urges the reader that he is d-u-n done with all that drama. Because he's been in it, man. He's been in the shit. But now he's seen the light.

Chapter 10: The 16th Minute
(Life beyond fame; making a difference; maturity)
The sucidial moments, the emptiness, the feeling of being lost, development of sever anxiety and the multiple turn of events that made an impact on my life to write this book and begin a new chapter and focus on my life.

Unfortunately for Jaxson, even on the off chance that some tiny publisher does mimeograph a few copies of this thing and distribute it at rest homes, it'd still be a few years too late. That gum bubble has burst, leaving everyone, but some more than others, looking pretty sticky.

The highfaulutin' publishing set will be thrilled to learn the director's claims to fame include the critically groundbeaking Rush Hour franchise and of course X-Men: The Last Stand ("You bent X-Men over," raved one critic), plus just generally minting money for Hollywood studios, and eclipsing Stephen Spielberg by all the metric$$$ that count (without the burden of having to truck heavy Oscar statuettes around constantly).

Defamer's own Mark Lisanti praised Ratner, variously, as a "fauxteur," "superhack," "sequel whore" and a "hacky mutant director."

Now Ratner's launched a new book imprint, Rat Press. It seems to be transferring Ratner's reputation for cutting originality from cinema to publishing. The Los Angeles Times described the director's three new film books as follows:

Jim... originally published in 1971... feels pretty dated...

Robert Evans in Conversation with Lawrence Grobel doesn't break any new ground...

Grobel's Brando conversations... are for the most part culled from his voluminous 1978 Playboy sessions...

With any luck this guardian angel of the printed word will start a newspaper, too.

Publisher's Weekly has a review of her latest, Queen Takes King, and they liked it well enough, though its characters are "celluloid" and totally unbelievable. It tells the tale of an aging ballet dancer who divorces a real estate mogul and oh gosh how are they going to figure out how to still be rich without each other.

After 25 years of marriage-most of it squandered on unspoken disappointment, stifled grief and wasted affection-ex-ballerina Cynthia Power and real estate tycoon hubby Jackson are headed for divorce. At the same time, Jackson's latest condo project is teetering and Carolyn's ballet board is in turmoil. Though lesbian daughter Vivienne counsels Cynthia to "think three moves ahead," Jackson, torn between his ambitious and reckless lover and imperious father, is staying in the game by sheer grit.

So let's see if we can unpack this dense allegory. The ballet dancer—free, creative, supported by chic lesbo daughter—is the saintly Levangie, right? And the gritty one with the reckless relationship is the insane-haired Grazer? Phew. Maybe the ballet dancer demands seven thousand dollars a month for "fine art," too. Or, maybe, because of creative license and stuff, it's like six thousand instead.

We're sure that divorces send both gentlemen and ladies, both rich and poor, reeling—it's the end of an error, after all—but if Levangie continues to insist to solely mine the shallow depths of rich divorcée ennui, we might start thinking she's some sort of opportunist.

Either way, we encourage you to pick up the tome, which drops in June, lest the poor Levangie be forced to scrape by on her $1 million-a-month divorce settlement. The poor dear.

Today Condoleezza Rice signed a three-book deal worth $2.5 million. Okay, maybe a bit more than you want to hear from Condi, but she was Secretary of State and all that, and presumably saw George Bush drunk and naked dozens of times, so she could conceivably sell a few books.

Earlier this month, Diane Keaton got a book deal reported to be worth more than $2 million. Does she have that many fans, really? I don't know, I doubt it, but maybe, who knows? She was in some good movies!

But this?

The comedian Kathy Griffin is writing a memoir, and according to three sources with knowledge of the deal, her literary agent at Endeavor, former Dutton editor-in-chief Trena Keating, sold it at auction last week to an editor at Random House's Ballantine imprint for more than $2 million.

Unless this is titled "Knocking the Dicks Out of My Mouth: 100 Celebrities I Have Slept With Who Would Do Anything For That Fact to Remain Secret," by Kathy Griffin, we fear that the book industry may be losing its grip on reality. [NYO]

1. J.J. Abrams, Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman and Damon Lindelof. These four guys, between them, pretty much created half the most influential works in the genre right now. On television, Abrams and Lindelof's Lost has shown how to make science fiction into watercooler-talk material. Abrams, Orci and Kurtzman's new show, Fringe, has only been on for a few months but feels like a genre classic already. Abrams is also responsible for the ground-breaking (and camera-shaking) Cloverfield.
Up next: The foursome is responsible for bringing Star Trek back from franchise purgatory. And Orci and Kurtzman have co-written Transformers 2.

2. Will Smith, star of I Am Legend and Hancock. It's hard to think of an actor who can make a project into a hit more easily than Smith, right now. Just imagine Hancock without Smith's legendary affability behind it, and you've got a mighty dud.
Up next: Sequels/prequels to both Hancock and Legend are being bandied about.

3. Jeff Robinov, president of Warner Bros. He championed the idea of giving indie director Chris Nolan the reigns of the Batman films. He's been a key figure in getting movies like Watchmen on the screen. (And he killed the Wonder Woman movie, reportedly because he doesn't think women can carry action movies. But this is the "power list," not the "people we agree with" list.)
Up next: He's in charge of the umpteenth big-screen reinvention of Superman.

4. James Cameron, director of Avatar. Cameron's 3-D space epic won't be out for another year, but it's already revolutionizing the way people think about movies. He's pioneered a whole new system of 3-D cameras, but also created new motion-capture techniques for his alien creatures. Even before the film comes out, everybody else is already playing catch-up. Meanwhile, Cameron discovered Sam Worthington, who stars in Avatar, and pimped him out as one of the leads in Terminator 4.
Up next: Avatar comes out next December.

5. Kevin Feige, President of Marvel Studios. Warner Bros. may have cornered the market on superheroes-as-serious-dramas, but Marvel owns the idea of a superhero movie universe, complete with crossovers and fan-friendly in-jokes. Between them, Iron Man and Incredible Hulk proved that the superhero punch-'em-up films can feel like pieces of a saga... and make tons of money.
Up next: Another Iron Man, plus Captain America, Avengers, Thor, Ant-Man...

6. Kanye West, rapper/singer. He helped bring a science fiction motif back to music with his Daft Punk collaborations and space-odyssey stage show. He's the reason for Beyonce's cyborg hand.
Up next: His new album, "808s and Heartbreaks," uses an "Autotune" to make his vocals sound more computery and spacey, and it's already the #1 record in the United States.

7. Christopher Nolan, director of The Dark Knight and The Prestige. The Dark Knight was the biggest movie of 2008, but it also showed that grotesque characters and people in funny costumes could be compelling and visceral.
Up next: Nobody knows. Hopefully, another Batman film, but maybe first another mindblowing non-franchise pic like Prestige.

8. Neal Stephenson, author of Anathem. We knew Stephenson's next book would be a hit, thanks to his huge following. But Anathem, with its story of a world where science and technology are separated and pure scientists live in "Maths," captured the imagination of mainstream critics. Suddenly, novels of ideas are cool again.
Up next: Nobody knows. Unless you do?

9. Andrew Stanton, director of Wall-E. Even before his lonely robot movie came out, it had already sparked a whole giant wave of science fiction animated movies. (It looks like exactly one of those movies, Monsters Vs. Aliens, will be good.) People are arguing over what was the best movie of 2008: Wall-E or Dark Knight.
Up next: He's supposed to be directing a live-action movie of John Carter of Mars.

10. Stephenie Meyer, author of Twilight and The Host. I'll be honest: I haven't read any of the Twilight books, or seen the movie. They don't sound like my cup of tea. But the Twilight movie was a huge success, one of the biggest book adaptations in ages. And Meyer's adult science fiction novel, The Host, was surprisingly good: the story of a love triangle between a woman, a man, and the symbiote that is trying to control the woman's body. The Host has been on the Times bestseller list for 29 weeks, outselling pretty much any other recent science fiction book by many orders of magnitude. I would happily go see a Host movie.
Up next: Probably more Twilight books, despite Meyer's vow to stop writing them. The Host also seems to be leading towards a sequel.

11. Guillermo Del Toro, director of Pan's Labyrinth and Hellboy 2. He's managed to bridge the gap between arthouse darling and mainstream monster-movie maker in a way almost nobody has done before. No wonder he's been tapped to take on the Hobbit movies.
Up next: Besides Hobbit, GDT is attached to 500 other movies, including Frankenstein, Jekyll, The Champions, Hellboy 3, etc. etc.

12. Bioware, maker of Mass Effect and Star Wars: Knights OF The Old Republic. With Mass Effect, BioWare helped recharge the genre of space-opera RPG, following the adventures of Commander Shepard, who encounters aliens and murderous artificial intelligences. This came on the heels of success of past games like Jade Empire and Star Wars: KTOR.
Up next: A new MMO, Star Wars: The Old Republic comes out next year.

13. Donna Langley, President of Production at Universal Pictures. When she was an independent producer, she produced The Cell, Austin Powers 2 and other science fiction films. And after she joined Universal, she shepherded Children Of Men to the screen, and she's worked hard to nail Del Toro down to make four movies for Universal, including Frankenstein — and she's been pushing the idea of a Hellboy TV series.
Up next: Her upcoming projects include Army Of Two, a scifi video-game movie.

14. Michael Chabon, author of The Yiddish Policemen's Union. Not only did his literary work of alternate history win Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards, but the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Adventures Of Kavalier And Clay has championed the literary worth of science fiction with his book Maps And Legends and his two anthologies of science fiction by literary authors.
Up next: Supposedly the Coen Brothers are filming Yiddish.

15. Brian Michael Bendis and Joe Quesada, Marvel Comics. It's been obvious for a while now that the competition between Marvel and DC was a lop-sided one, but maybe 2008 is the year we call it a victory once and for all. Bendis, as writer, have been responsible for series like House of M, Secret Invasion, and New Avengers. And Quesada has helped make other series, like Civil War, into sales juggernauts. DC might have Grant Morrison, Geoff Johns and Neil Gaiman writing for it, but Marvel has the readership.
Up next: Yet another big status-quo-massaging event, Dark Reign.

16. Jennifer Jackson, agent with Donald Maass and Associates. Her name comes up more often than any other agent's, when you're talking book deals. And she's the top dealmaker of 2008, according to Publisher's Marketplace, with a dozen high-profile deals in the past year. Her clients include hot writers like Elizabeth Bear, Ken Scholes, Jay Lake and Mary Robinette Kowal.
Up next: She just sold Amanda Downum's The Drowned City to Orbit Books, in a three-book deal.

17. Will Wright, Spore creator. Wright's The Sims is the best selling computer game in history, and other titles like SimCity also remain huge and groundbreaking. But his build-a-lifeform game, Spore, has sparked new levels of creativity — and debate over whether it accurately reflects evolution.
Up next: We're not sure.

18. Brian Goldner, Hasbro CEO. Who could have imagined the toy tie-in movie would become a huge force in Hollywood again? Goldner, that's who. He helped make Transformers and G.I. Joe into summer blockbuster material.
Up next: More toy movies. Says the man himself: "If you remember Stretch Armstrong, there's an opportunity to tell this great backstory of who Stretch Armstrong is, and why he's so incredible and yet funny."

19. Jeff Walker, the independent movie publicist who brought Hollywood to Comic-Con. Hard as it is to believe, Comic-Con was once a comic convention. And now it's the place where Hollywood studios unveil their latest projects and shimmy for the approval of tens of thousands of die-hard fans. Walker helped engineer that transformation.
Up next: Comic-Con keeps getting huger and more unmanageable. Are the studios going to start skipping it, like Paramount did this year?

20. Weta Workshop. The New Zealand practical effects studio came to prominence working on Peter Jackson's Lord Of The Rings movies, and now it's the go-to place for science fiction epics, including The Day The Earth Stood Still, Fantastic 4: Rise Of The Silver Surfer, X-Men 3, I, Robot and many others, along with its sister company Weta Digital.
Up next: Weta was supposedly hard at work on Justice League, but no longer. Still on the slate are a mooted Halo film, Avatar, Tintin and the Hobbit films.

Some celebrity-penned tomes seem like they might actually contain worthwhile information: Celebrity Detox by Rosie O'Donnell, for instance, or How I Play Golf by Tiger Woods. But what about Naomi Campbell's Naomi? Victoria Beckham's That Extra Half An Inch? Or Tori Spelling's unfortunately titled sTORI Telling?

Kelly Osbourne and Miley Cyrus have definitely had life experiences that are not "average," but is there enough to fill a book? And who will buy their stories? (And who will ghostwrite???)

While I don't have any celebrity autobiographies (well, someone did give me Raising Kanye, by Donda West), I asked around and Megan owns Gracie by George Burns. Megan and Jessica both own Me, by Katherine Hepburn. Jessica says: "Also I read Drew Barrymore's sex and drug addled teen memoir when I was at camp in 1995. It was totally passed around like contraband." Maria used to have Beauty Inside And Out, by Tyra. Margaret admits: "I own Having It All by Erika Kane. Note this is not a book about Susan Lucci, but a celebrity autobiography written by the fictional character she plays on All My Children. I don't want to discuss why I own this. The shame runs too deep." Fess up: Do you own (or have you read) celebrity memoirs?

Why Are So Many New Memoirs 'Inspirational'? [Guardian]

"Additionally, the author doesn't really have the vocabulary she needs to write a frothy book like this. She frequently uses dated words like "bod," which makes it sound like she's mimicking a writing style that she doesn't completely understand. There are a few problems with the plausibility of her story as well. Why are these vastly different women friends in the first place? Why doesn't anyone in this hyper-fashionable world notice that Meghan's husband, Tom Ford, has the same name as a famous designer?"

The book begins a little like this:

"Natalie sat on her six-foot long magenta sofa surrounded by the latest issues of People, US and Glamour. Entertainment Tonight blared from the flat-screen TV in the darkened room. On the plush carpet the color of cotton candy, next to the freshly delivered pizza box, lay three new pairs of Jimmy Choos; gold open-toed stilettos, fuchsia silk pumps and calf-high brown suede boots..."(A good collection of FM shoes to add to her already expansive collection.)

If she was going to be hiding out she was going to do it armed with new loot, junk food, trashy magazines and television.

“Shit!” A dime-sized drop of marinara sauce dripped down Nat’s all-white cashmere Juicy’s. She dabbed at her top, brand new from Neiman’s not three hours old. A half dozen shopping bags lay tossed across the carpet. She’d had a very good day. Done over $8,000 damage – and that was just in an hour. Yoyo, her personal shopper at Neimans, was an overly hip Korean woman with purple streaks in her hair and the clout to get Natalie most anything she wanted to fit her size 2 bod. Yoyo had wanted her to buy a fox fur trimmed trench coat. “Armani’s for older women,” Natalie protested, which saved her another $9,000. Or rather saved Nick, her father. All personal credit card bills were sent directly to his business manager as part of Natalie’s allowance. A mere “pittance” she complained. She’d been trying to squeeze more money from her trust fund to no avail.

“If all the papers call me a trust fund baby,” she’d argue with Nick, “shouldn’t I have the spending power?”

“Baby, don’t I take care of you?” he’d say, still keeping the purse strings tight. He had changed in the past couple months. Sure he had bought her the condo in Westwood recently in addition to her annual new car, but all of a sudden he’d become tight with cash. Why wouldn’t he front her a few thousand? She didn’t understand this sudden change of heart.

“You’ll get all those millions soon enough,” Nick assured her. And she would, when she was thirty – six long years away.

Peeling off her top she revealed a new black lace La Perla push up. She didn’t mind not having much of a chest to push up. Nat knew she looked hot. Hot enough to regularly make the papers. Though this week she would rather they write about Lindsay or Jessica or Rosalee St. Cyr."

Whispers our publishing elf, "There are 408 more pages of the same." We're waiting for all those pages to print out.

However sad it is, it seems that the aforementioned influential scene of diet pills and pointless high school ambition best exhibited by Jesse's freak-out was not as fictional as our wee tween minds originally believed. According to Vulture's sources, Dustin and his ghostwriter (i.e.: mainly his ghostwriter) will reveal all kinds of details about the "sexual escapades among cast members, drug use, and hardcore partying" that went on after Mr. Belding shut down the lights each night. As insanely thrilled we are to go and purchase a retro wall SBTB wall calendar on which we shall X out each day until the book is released, there's still a tiny part of us that always hoped Zach and Kelly never actually did the deed after "Cut!" ended the day. Nor do we want to learn the inevitable truth that Slater was on steroids. Same goes for how many rails it took to keep Lisa Turtle from transferring to rival Valley High. Oh well, it can do anything more to ruin our childhood memories than The Phantom Menace did, right?

• SCREECH WRITES 'SAVED BY THE BELL' TELL-ALL [Vulture]

As a source told the Mail, Farrell and Forrest "have spent months trying to keep the relationship secret because they are falling madly in love...[Colin] has knocked the drinking on the head and is enjoying life in a completely different way. Emma has been a steadying influence." And judging by Emma's many interviews over the years, the reformed party beast is most likely spending his evenings watching Elizabeth Taylor movie marathons (Emma's idol!), surrounded by cats ("better than men!" says Emma), and plucking "giant flying cockroaches" from his girlfriend's face during her frequent crying fits (they "thrive" on her tears!). To be fair, Forrest might actually be ideal for the volatile Farrell. If anyone can tame his bad boy habits, it has to be the girl who counts Old Dirty Bastard (RIP) among her former paramours.

[Photo credits: X17, AP]

• SKINNY COLIN FARRELL HAS THE LOOK OF LOVE AS HE GOES PUBLIC WITH NEW BRITISH GIRLFRIEND [Daily Mail]