Young Hollywood legend Brett Ratner is certainly a man who wears many hats. Director, author, host, boyfriend and friend to all of show business. So surely when you hire the great Ratner to direct your TV commercial, you understand that you don't get all of Brett Ratner.

The folks at Slashfilm have dug up a couple critical pieces of Ratnerology. First they discovered the newly released Playboy-themed Guitar Hero commercial:

A masterpiece of the Guitar Hero/Risky Business re-staging genre to be sure.

Thinking no doubt of future generations whose historians who will win doctorates studying this landmark piece of advertising, the Guitar Hero team has also placed online a series of outtakes from the ad, providing some glimpses into the artistry of Brett Ratner.

Most striking of all, as Slashfilm notes, is the moment which occurs 57 seconds into the video, where, as the camera rolls and the Playmate Guitar Army marches past him, Ratner appears to be sitting in his director's chair talking on a cell phone. As Playmates cluster around, he lowers the phone, gives them an annoyed look and issues some sort of very important directorial command, no doubt asking the to take their little TV commercial somewhere else while he's on a very important call. The faces of the Playmates, surely awed by his power telephoning, are not visible.

Later in the clips, Ratner turns his attention to the shoot for a moment and see more clearly what makes the director of Rush Hour 3 a giant of our age when like De Mille descended he issues the order "Rock out girls!" calls "Action!" and after Hef croaks out the line, "I love variety," throws aloft his hands in victory, grinning broadly and declaring with all the accumulated wisdom of his years, "That was great."

And it was.

Police sources in Jenkins' native Canada, where authorities believe he fled after murdering Fiore, say that the 32-year old took his own life in a British Columbia hotel room.

"We were able to determine that it was Ryan Jenkins," said Sgt. Duncan Pound of the RCMP's Federal Border Integrity Program, during an early evening news conference. "At this point it would be speculation as to how long he had been there."

The find came just hours after RCMP said Jenkins was in Canada...

Honestly, we feel a bit cheated on this one: not only are we firm believers that murderers should feel justice's swift kick, but the brutality of this crime - Fiore's body was found in a suitcase sans teeth and fingers and was identified via her breast implants - only enhanced our thirst for a relatively happy ending, not a hanging.

Fiore was married to Ryan Alexander Jenkins, a contestant on the VH1 reality show, Megan Wants A Millionaire. His bio appears to have been removed by the network, but Steve Huff at True Crime Report caught a screengrab of it earlier before they did. In it, the Canadian investment banker boasts that he "has left many amazing women in his life primarily because he wanted more women," and that "the only time he cheated on his ex was when he wanted to break up with her."





The show is currently airing on VH1 and TMZ reported tonight that Jenkins was among its "final contestants." The gossip site also says that Jenkins met Fiore while she was stripping in Las Vegas after he was booted from the show, and that they married two days later.

Fiore, who recently moved to LA from Vegas with Jenkins, was last seen Friday night, some reports say at a poker tournament in San Diego, while others say at her home in Hollywood. Her remains were discovered by a homeless man digging through the trash for plastic cans at around 7am on Saturday morning. Fiore's mother said that her daughter was employed by Playboy as a representative and a coordinator for something called "Girls of Golf."

Jenkins' publicist says that he will cooperate fully with police investigating the murder, even though authorities believe he may be attempting to flee to Canada, his home country. Authorities also say that it was Jenkins who reported Fiore missing on Saturday morning. He then disappeared completely.

Pic via Jasmine Fiore's Modeling Portfolio

Image via Splash

A tipster tells us that more layoffs are coming down at Viacom today: "They are cleaning house at VH1/MTV Linked Group right now. Like more than half the people involved with the website and the video just got laid off. HR is making appointments to call every freelancer this afternoon." Skeery. If you have more info, email us.
UPDATE: Another tipster adds: "Freelancers are being called in because when they hit their 9 mon point they have to leave. They can come back 3 mon later and be considered a new hire. They're trying to get rid of the perma-lancer thing that went down Dec. 07 but still not hire anyone as staff."

Some freelancers were given a 3 mon extension on their contract but they can only be given it once before HR gives them the axe.


An analyst thinks the New York Times Co. could raise $1.2 billion by selling the Boston Globe, Worcester Telegram & Gazette, its new headquarters building, and its stake in the Red Sox. On one hand it would mean taking a huge loss on those assets, but on the other hand $1.2 billion is not that bad, considering that it's more than the market cap of the NYT Co.

Keith Kelly confirms our rumor from yesterday about Newsweek closing its London bureau. He also says that Newsweek staffers are pissed they had to read about their magazine's big redesign in a New York Times story. Which is understandable. Is that how the Historical Jesus would act?


Five large NY/ NJ newspapers including the New York Daily News and the Newark Star-Ledger are all going to share content with each other, probably so that some of them can lay off some reporters.

Playboy had an atrocious fourth quarter, losing $145 million, and now says that it's "open" to discussion of selling its flagship magazine. They should really have to change the company name if they do that.

Yes, someone would: Hugh Hefner's main Girl Next Door, Holly Madison, who has finally tired of her post as Playboy's "Playmate Editor," an arduous gig that involved lip gloss selection and the expert Photoshopping of pubic hair mounds. Sadly, the thrill of such tasks is gone, says Madison on her Celebrity Myspace:

So it's out on the gossip sites that I quit my job at Playboy, which is true. I quit for several reasons: 1. I moved to Vegas and that job doesn't pay enough to make a commute worthwhile ( I never cared about the salary when I got the job-I made my money doing Girls Next Door and I just did the job because I loved it.) 2. After two years of it, I no longer found it challenging. It got to be routine, which was sad for me, since I was initially so passionate about the job and the creative aspects involved. 3. It was awkward. Not that anyone tried to make it awkward or didn't treat me fairly . . . it just was.

It annoys me when people call the job fake as if it was just a set up for the show. If I had wanted a fake career for Girls Next Door I would have stuck with the jewelry line because that required very little of my time. I spent way more than full time directing shoots, editing, making mock layouts and approving retouching.

So as you can imagine, when one is trying to move on with their life, it isn't beneficial to spend so much time on something that doesn't pay much and sadly enough is no longer rewarding to you.

Will Hef fill the hole (uh...we're letting that one go) with new paramours Kristina and Karissa Shannon, who will bring their unique talents of face-kicking and semi-incest to the ceremonial position? We hope so—there's no Playboy pictorial that couldn't be livened up with broken beer bottles, a concussion, and a bloody smock from Wing House.

• Annoying!!!! [Myspace]

Like a rebellious wild child turned much less fun football wife, Wilkinson is renouncing her former lifestyle ("Now I'm totally against [Hefner's] way of life") in a tell-all to Us Weekly. And what better way to do it then let the air out of the sexy, polygamous balloon by admitting that when she wanted to get laid, it wasn't with any of the magazine founders, fellow Girls, teenage sons, or strangely aggressive peacocks on the grounds of Hef's Holmby Hills estate?

"I had to have sex every now and then, so I had to kind of sneak it," Hugh Hefner's 23-year-old ex tells Us Weekly.

The buxom blonde says "of course" she and the Playboy founder were intimate, but notes she often only saw him once a day - in passing.

"Besides the nights we went out, I only saw Hef, like, once a day walking through the halls to his office. There were never solo dates," she said.

"The most we kind of say to each other is, 'I love you,' 'Love you too,' 'I hope you have a good day,' 'Did you have a good day?'" [...]

"Bridget told me that she's been faithful all these years, and I was like, 'How the hell can you do that?' I had to have [sex] so I could feel my age, like a healthy human being."

We're sad to learn of Wilkinson's unconscionable betrayal; after all, what could be sexier than retiring to Hef's four-poster bed at night (after a flinty Holly narrows her eyes in the bedroom hallway and growls, "Your turn") to find the 82-year-old Playboy founder splayed out in an uncomfortably hiked up kimono, tongue lolling? "Kendra, I want to put my hand on your breast," he would say, limply. "Will you lift my hand and do that?"

[Photo Credit: AP]

• Hugh Hefner's Playboy lifestyle isn't what it seems, says Kendra Wilkinson [NYDN]

In fact, it's only the pedigree elsewhere on the credit roll — Brian Grazer is producing, Robert Donwey Jr. is a front-runner to star — that seems to reassure Hefner in the face of a B-Rat incursion on his life story:

"It's going to be a very curious change of pace for him . . . but I believe in Brian," Hefner said. "The one thing I would want the film to be is something other than a light comedy, to have something to say and express something about the change in social sexual values. You know, Brian made a comment that I was the only man who had made love to over a thousand women and they all still liked him. And I do take some pride, in fact, that I remain friends with the majority of former wives and girlfriends. I am a romantic."

This can't be reassuring to Ratner, who would hate to have wasted his last year and a half of attempts to convince Hefner that he, too, is a romantic with male-slut sensitivity befitting his legendary subject. The law of averages suggests that the whole girl-ashamed-to-be-seen-with-the-Rat thing is bound to happen on occasion, just as eventually Ratner would have it in him to make a watchable, rewarding non-sequel. You're in good hands, Hef. Just keep an eye on them around the mansion.

• Playboy founder Hugh Hefner's first true love was movies [LAT]

Given the assertion that all the Bunnies get to have to sleep with Hef and get their own sex toys, we figured there was no better place to start that the Bunnies from the 70s we determined seemed most likely to choke the life out of Hef with a sex toy.

The Suspects
Star Stowe, Miss February 1977
While Stowe, in her profile, claims that she admires Hugh Hefner and thinks a great date would be "creeping around old spooky places and getting the hell scared out of you," she admits that one of her turnoffs is "When guys come on too strong and get grabby." That can't have boded well for Hef. Her dream was to become "the most radical, bisexual rock star there ever could be... [with] that pirate butch attitude."

Debra Jo Fondren, Miss September 1977
Despite the obvious guilt-by-association that comes from having a using two first names, Fondren gets less scary when you learn that she's into "bareback riding" — but she prefers "gentle" men and hates "Pushy people, opinionated people, loud people, being rushed, being told what to do," so she doesn't exactly sound right for The Mansion. She does however admit to being a fan of "trap and skeet shooting," which indicates that if she were to off Hef, she probably wouldn't do it with a sex toy.

Ashley Cox, Miss December 1977
Ashley Cox is nominated because of the fact that her picture scared me a little: She looks decidedly unhappy and freaked out to be naked. Also, her name is Cox.

Christina Smith, Miss March 1978
Christina Smith doesn't look freaked as much as she looks sort of annoyed and possibly pissed off, which, for someone with the lofty ambition of modeling in TV commercials, seems sort of out of place. While her turnoffs included "husbands" — which probably impressed Hef — and "'high class' people" — which probably did the same — but who knows how she would have felt once she's bedded him and found out that he wasn't the "decent" man of whom she was dreaming.

Kathryn Morrison, Miss May 1978
If anyone of this crew looks more like she'd shove a sex toy down Hef's throat just to watch him die, it's definitely Kathryn Morrison. She's also not so keen on "Liars and people who think and act like they know everything," which you gotta think Hef isn't the world's most honest lover.

Dorothy Mays, Miss July 1979
With dreams of glory ranging from opening up a men's salon in Maryland to having her own farm, Dorothy Mays is a little bit all over the map, as her sexy-but-I-will-cut-you pose indicates. Her turnoffs include "Jealousy, materialistic people, poor organization," which described Hef to a T, so it's safe to say that didn't end well.

The Weapons
The criteria for this category included objects that can be inserted into the mouth far enough to block respiration if the nose is similarly plugged and could or would be used by women. Thus, we did not include monster dildos or male masturbatory aids. If you know of ways those could be used to choke people, please never tell us.

Ben Wa Balls
Definitely a choking hazard for toddlers, Hef additionally seems like the type of guy who would gladly lick them clean and, if one didn't keep hold of the string, there'd be trouble.

Butt Plug
Gross, I know, but I've seen enough anal-to-oral sex porn to know that some people get off on sucking dick that has only recently been removed from someone else's asshole. I guarantee Hef has tried this at least once and, given a little pressure and a wide enough plug, you could definitely choke someone with a butt plug.
Anal Beads
If you can shove them up your ass, you can shove them down someone's throat. Enough said.

Bullet Vibrator
Pretty much everything I said about Ben Wa balls, but with the addition of mechanical vibration which would have to hurt the back of your throat.

Jiggly Dildo
Plug someone's nose and face fuck them with this ("Oh, how do you like it, Hef? Huh? Can't talk, huh? Not so much fun, huh?") and you'll have a dead face-fuckee.

Ball Gag
It is designed to gag you. If it was just a little too small and fell off the harness, it could do some damage.

The Sites
Since Hef doesn't seem to fuck anywhere but his own place, it seems like he'd have to be killed there. The most likely locations were be: the Grotto, the Library, his bedroom, his bathroom, the Playmate's room, and the left wing of the game house (which reportedly consists entirely of a padded floor and a television)

The Verdict
Well, that's up to you! Was it Debra Jo in the grotto with a dildo? Ashley Cox in the library with the anal beads? Kathryn Morrison in the game house with the ben wa balls? Play your own game of Clue in the comments!

Barging into the House of Bunny! [Extra]

Related: Naked Ambition [Radar]
Star Stowe [Playboy]
Debra Jo Fondren [Playboy]
Ashley Cox [Playboy]
Christina Smith [Playboy]
Kathryn Morrison [Playboy]
Dorothy Mays [Playboy]
The Playboy Mansion [Wikipedia]

While giving Extra's Mario Lopez a tour of the Playboy Mansion, Hefner talked about his near-fatal sex toy swallowing in the late seventies (!), then moved on to more star-studded subjects:

As for other celebrities Hefner would like to pose for Playboy, he says, "Either Angelina Jolie or Scarlett Johansson," he says. Lopez brought along Jennifer Aniston's nearly nude GQ magazine cover to show Hefner who comments, "This looks like the cover of Playboy. I'm much impressed by Jennifer. Is it just me or is Jennifer Aniston getting hotter?...Never seen her in this light before."

A canny Aniston made sure to set John Mayer's DVR to record the quasi-endorsement, happy that her attempt to transform a press tour for a PG-rated dogcom into an elongated, NSFW public burlesque had gone exactly as hoped. Still, can the star keep her cache of black spray paint undiscovered until "The UNCOOL Case of Benjamin Button" gets its widest rollout?

• Hugh Hefner: "I Almost Swallowed A Sex Toy" [HuffPo]

Meet Marston (on the left) and Cooper (sitting) who have had their pleasure sensors dulled by growing up on the grounds of Hef's Holmby Hills estate, where their birthday cakes always had naked ladies inside and they were taught eighth grade algebra by a roaming peacock. The brothers tell their father's magazine how it's shaped their worldview:

"I'm not going to have multiple girlfriends — not at the same time," 18-year-old Marston Hefner says in the January issue of Playboy. "I can't imagine that."

His brother, 17-year-old Cooper Hefner, begs to differ.

"I can imagine doing that. I don't think it's an odd thing to do," he says. "You date around to try to find a connection with some girl." [...]

Cooper also says growing up in the Playboy mansion is overrated.

"They don’t get it when you say, 'There's nothing to do there,'" he says. "But when you live here and come here every single day, you see the same things.

"Anybody else would be like, 'Let's go see monkeys!' But I don't want to see monkeys," he goes on. "I'd rather go bowling than play with monkeys."

Hugh Hefner, Defamer is calling you out: you are a terrible, irresponsible parent. How dare you let your sons grow up in an environment that has robbed them of the fun and natural discovery every teenage boy eventually goes through. We are speaking, of course, of watching monkeys, imitating their monkey sounds, and encouraging monkeys to throw their feces at other monkeys. Marston and Cooper, you grew up too fast, and for that, we are truly sorry.

• Hugh Hefner's Sons Split on Having "Multiple Girlfriends" [Us]

In it, Hefner engages in a vigorous oral exploration of one of his guests (one of his bar-brawling twins?) while nearly smothering another couch-dweller to death (her sister?) in the process. According to the Oh No They Didn't contributor, whose friend is a Playboy model and took the photos, Hefner "'just grabs girls faces and kisses them, he's such a bitch' and 'he really is an old pervert' and that he smokes pot all the time and that 'all his girlfriends really do fuck him.'" Go, Hef!

Below is a group photo, in which one model's attempt at using her cleavage as a human billboard doesn't go quite as planned. Still, we encourage all forms of out-of-the-bustier commerce during these trying times.

• GROSS OLD MAN POST [Oh No They Didn't]

Adams points out that Playboy magazine, with its "pictures of scantily clad, identikit blondes" (complete, if memory serves, with unnaturally round, high, shiny breasts, landing strip pubes, and weird occupational costumes), is now behind the times. Where once it interviewed Bob Dylan and Jean-Paul Sartre, it now lands such luminaries as Pete Wentz and Kevin Connolly. And at just 132 pages, it's a lightweight. Vogue could kick sand on it at the beach.

Attractive, much-younger women have long been willing to play by Hef's rules — including a 9 p.m. curfew, and monogamy for them but not for him — because of what former girlfriend Izabella St. James calls "the glamour and glitz and the attraction of Hef and this life in Hollywood." If the glitz fades, will Hugh still be able to fill his revolving bed? Will someone else (Dov Charney? Joe Francis?) rise up to fill his slippers? Or is his whole breed, the celebrity pornography-polygamist, now passe?

We hope so, but Joan Smith, writing in today's Guardian, fears otherwise. She sees The House Bunny, with its portrayals of a fatherly Hef and fun Bunny shopping sprees, as a sign that women have accepted "the bunny girl image" as something "benign, and even cool." Other evidence includes the Playboy logo on pencil cases, jewelry, and slippers. To girls who want to dress like Bunnies (like teenage Dodai!), Smith offers a reminder of Bunny life in the 60s. Women at Playboy clubs of that era had to conform to a variety of stringent male-imposed standards, like wearing the right shade of lipstick and spouting the right amount of small talk — all for very little pay. Young women may want to take up the mantle of Hef themselves — Female Chauvinist Pigs-style — but Smith warns that the Playboy magnate is little more than "an 82-year-old polygynist whose chief claim to fame is dressing up adult women as rabbits" and "young women shouldn't fall for it."

Is the party over for Playboy? [Independent]
The problem with Playboy [Guardian]

It seems that San Diego native Wilkinson still hasn't forgiven Brady for beating her beloved Chargers in the AFC championship, and she'd rather go naked (a simple proposition!) then wear the number of the noted Gisele diddler. Lucky for Wilkinson, then, that the Chargers won't be playing the Philadelphia Eagles, where her rumored secret fiance Hank Baskett is a wide receiver. Meanwhile, we await the sports affiliations of brand-new Girls Next Door Karissa and Kristina Shannon, though we do hear that the twins are no strangers to "unnecessary roughness." [E!]

"If Holly says it's over, I guess it's over," Hefner told the AP on Wednesday, adding that Madison is still living in the Mansion despite her recent confession that she's ready to settle down and start a family. Hef also acknowledged telling Madison six months ago that he wanted none of that, apparently triggering an internal crisis about which even he was unaware:

"The fact that she was depressed after that, I didn't know at all. That was a revelation in the last days and weeks. Quite frankly, we thought when the time came, we would make a combined statement and we expected that combined statement would be somewhere in the weeks and months ahead."

Of course, anyone who's seen The House Bunny can corroborate this and vouch for Hef's despair; nobody leaves the Mansion without saying goodbye, lest the 82-year-old's sad voice turn up on the other end of her phone at the most inopportune time — like, in the middle of a date with Colin Hanks or something. Awkward! Moreover, this is why some of us choose to avoid The Girls Next Door — how have we missed out on the drama of this dissolution since April? Step it up, E! Man cannot live by Kendra's Olive Garden controversies alone.

• HEFNER 'DOWN IN THE DUMPS' ABOUT MADISON SPLIT [AP]

Spade is a funny dude, but that can’t be it. Surely he must have a secret—something that draws the skirts to him like men’s bathrooms draw George Michael. Thankfully, Moehringer wasn’t afraid to do a little digging, and through exhaustive interviews with Spade and various ladies he’s flirted with, he may have actually hit upon the reason for all the chick-magnet-madness.

Spade’s platonic friend Courtney Cox Arquette explains it thusly: “He has good teeth.” But the most illuminating reason comes from David himself. When asked what advice he’d give a single guy, Spade says:

"Be normal and kind of have your shit together. And be consistent and reliable. Just not a flake. Really, the thing is, not to be a superflake. Don’t be an asshole. Don’t be supercocky. Don’t be a show-off. Everyone for some reason feels the need to show off.”

So that’s it? Just don’t be a dick? Admittedly that’s a hard thing to do in this town, but we still think Spade must have a dump truck full of Roofies stashed his house. Otherwise it just doesn’t add up.

[Photo Credit: Getty Images]

• The Don Juan of Our Time [Los Angeles Magazine]

Jason Statham: He was escorted recently by five security guards off the property after he refused to pose for pictures at the Midsummer's Night Dream Party. The last thing anyone heard him say was, "I'll be back to bulldoze the Grotto, you wankers!"
Ben Affleck: New to the neighborhood, he could have easily flown into a rage when Girl Next Door Bridget Marquardt rang their doorbell to ask Jennifer Garner if she could "spare a cub of lube."
Pauly Shore: Just 'cause.
Hector Jimenez: Disgruntled groundskeeper.
Anna Faris in a moustache disguise: Because she is starring in a movie about a Playboy Bunny, and this is tangentially related and therefore humorous. Also, she's a notorious road-rager.

Feel free to add more to the lineup in the comments, you Encyclopedia Browns and Nancy Drews, you!

• Man rams into Playboy Mansion gates — twice [MSNBC]

For instance, this week's episode begins with the girls gathering together for an impromptu table read of the script for House Bunny, the soon-to-be-released Anna Faris vehicle. After pouring through the script, not only do they find out that their appearance is limited to a single page (Page 78, if you must know), but they also bemoan the fact that they've been reduced to bantering about such silly topics as whipped cream drenched pillow fights. Don't worry, ladies; when Brett Ratner finally decides to get onboard with the project he was born to direct, there'll be plenty of time to sleep your way into a role playing someone other than yourself (so long as it's still a Bunny).

• The Girls Next Door [E!]

Ms. Wilkinson says that when she started praising the restaurant on television and on her very popular MySpace page, it never crossed her mind what the folks at Olive Garden might think. "I don't speak about it to get paid for it," she says. "I speak about it because I love it. I understand they're a family restaurant, but I think it can't hurt them to have a little spice." ...

The San Diego native says she made frequent trips to the restaurant during her childhood, developing a taste for the artichoke dip and the all-you-can-eat salad and breadsticks. She calls it "my soul food."

"I love the Olive Garden so much because I grew up going there," she says. "That used to be the place we would go for Mother's Day, for birthdays. My grandpa just died, and right after his funeral, we went to the Olive Garden."

First of all, nice synergy by the Journal to get the "very popular MySpace" plug in there for Uncle Rupe. Well done, gang. Meanwhile, Olive Garden associates all but declined comment: "I don't feel comfortable talking about this...because it is a complicated issue for the brand," said the EVP the chain's ad agency. And why wouldn't it be? Go ahead and see how far you get marketing Kendra's limited-time-only Chicken Condolence Fettucine Alfredo. "When you're here, you're too cheap for a memorial" won't win any converts, you know.

• When You're Here, You're Family — But What About a Playboy Model? [WSJ]