Socketside heard Cruise was the buyer of an $18 million mansion in the ritzy Sea Cliff neighborhood. NBC Bay Area soon pointed out that, if that's true, Cruise's neighbors would be Robin Williams, Cheech Marin and the guitarist from Metallica. It's like the Bay Area's very own stunted little fog-swept Beverly Hills. But many locals will remember that the Church of Scientology was on the hunt for "apparent expansion" space starting in 2006, nosing around the once countercultural North Beach neighborhood.

So is Cruise, the alleged inspirer of Scientology beat-downs, spearheading a renewed expansion campaign by the cult to which he belongs? Maybe, or maybe said SF mansion is just being bought by another local tech exec like Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, per a SocketSite update:

Another reader quickly notes the mailing address for the purchasing LLC ("Tawaraya") is that of "a high-end accounting firm in Walnut Creek" which happens to advise Larry Ellison (amongst others). And The Real Estalker adds, "Tawaraya is a super posh and searingly expensive, 300-year old ryokan–which is essentially a Japanese bed and breakfast sort of place–located in Kyoto" which is rather Ellison-esque.

Oh great, more Larry Ellison dick waving. Don't we at least deserve some fresh megalomaniac mansion owners, out here?

Trying to sell real estate in this economy is going to be rough for our three flamboyant barons, Josh Flagg, Madison Hildebrand and Chad Rogers so Million Dollar Listing just went from a real estate porn show to a "people with shitty jobs show." It is in some very good company, but do these mini-real estate tycoons have the crappiest jobs on the tube?

Million Dollar Listing
Position: Realtor to the stars!
Dangers: Not making any money in this shitty economy, losing your car, having people make fun of you, starving to death.
Payout: In the five to six figures, if they can make a deal.
Perks: Going through rich people's medicine cabinets.
Risk/Reward Index: We'd do it, if we didn't have such a stable media job.

Deadliest Catch
Position: Crab fisherman.
Dangers: Um, death! By freezing in the rain, falling overboard, dealing with surly captains, or random crustacean uprising.
Payout: In the mid five figures, for only a few weeks of work.
Perks: Free crab!
Risk/Reward Index: We'll use imitation crab in our California rolls, thank you.

Position: Former action star, Louisiana police deputy.
Dangers: We haven't seen the show yet (it starts in December) but we assume dealing with shirtless meth fiends running from the law while dealing with Above the Law jokes.
Payout: We're guessing in the low five figures for the police gig. We're not sure what being washed up pays.
Perks: A comeback!
Risk/Reward Index: Totally worth it (for the viewers).

Ace of Cakes
Position: Baker
Dangers: Cavities, fatness, the torture of touching all those delectable sweets and not being able to have any, living in Baltimore.
Payout: Low.
Perks: Three words: Five Second Rule.
Risk/Reward Index: Pretty good, if you don't mind being poor.

Sunset Tan
Position: Tanning Assistant.
Dangers: Being too stupid to say "melanoma" or know what one is, other people's cellulite.
Payout: Minimum wage.
Perks: Not any really.
Risk/Reward Index: At least you get free McCafés at McDonalds.

Flipping Out
Position: Jeff Lewis' assistant.
Dangers: Your insane OCD boss you needles you more than a heroin addicts arm.
Payout: Probably low. Jeff keeps whining about how he has no money.
Perks: You get to work with a funny maid and meet Andy Cohen at the reunion show!
Risk/Reward Index: After mental health bills, it's cost prohibitive to work here.

The Weinsteins are behaving like people on the brink of bankruptcy. They laid off 11% of their staff late last year. They overplayed their hand with Project Runway, stupidly trying to wring more money out of the show by taking it to Lifetime in violation of its contract with NBC, resulting in costly litigation and a multimillion-dollar settlement. They apparently lost the rights to produce a sequel to Sin City for lack of cash. According to Nikki Finke, they can scarcely afford the $30 million or so required to release Quentin Tarantino's Ingourious Basterds in August—they haven't released a film since February, and Finke says they've pushed back the release dates of most of its 2009 slate in order to "hoard cash" for Basterds and Halloween II, which also comes out in August. Tarantino, Finke says, has been gaming out the worst-case scenario: What happens if the Weinstein's can't come up with the cash to release it?

All of which explains why the Weinstein Co. recently hired Miller Buckfire & Co., a consulting firm that specializes in distressed companies and bankruptcies, to restructure debt and help the company raise capital. The move is a tangible and indisputable indication of the money troubles that the Weinsteins previously dismissed as baseless rumor, but they're still gamely trying to spin it is routine: "As a matter of practice we have always worked with financial institutions to explore our options with respect to equity and possible investments and it is something we will continue to do."

In that light, Bob's attempt to sell his Beresford apartment—complete with a "terraced master bedroom" and a "gargantuan coatroom"—looks like desperation. He wants $34 million for it, a 70% premium on what he paid for it five years ago. But that makes sense, since the real estate market has been on a real tear since then. For Bob, it's a significant downsizing: He bought a $15 million brownstone on W. 70th St. last month, so if successful, the deal would liberate nearly $20 million in cash—which could go quite a long way toward helping release Basterds.

But the Observer is skeptical that Bob can get what he wants for it:

And it's more than anything in the building has ever sold for: The mega-investor Bill Ackman spent $26 million, a relative pittance, on his new duplex one floor up; Jerry Seinfeld spent just $4.35 million on Isaac Stern's duplex last decade.

One broker who has seen the apartment complained that it faces south, which means its views of Central Park aren't ideal. "You do see the park when you're that high. But, obviously, the coveted view is east."

Not everyone gets a prime-time real-estate infomercial courtesy of ABC and hosted by Elizabeth Vargas (left, with Spelling) — but the 56,500-sq. ft. megamegamansion in Los Angeles's Holmby Hills neighborhood is not just any house. Spelling doesn't even know how many bathrooms it has, she told 20/20. Or how many rooms, period. Even her real-estate agent, Sally Forster Jones, doesn't know:

While some published reports put the tally of rooms in the mansion at well past 100, Jones couldn't provide an exact count.

Spelling says she doesn't know either.

"You're really asking the wrong person," Spelling jokes. "There's a lot. (The house) has evolved and I actually haven't gone around and counted."

Spelling also says she hasn't read actress daughter Tori Spelling's memoir because friends told her it was "hurtful." So much for getting a mother-daughter jacket blurb for Stories from Candyland!

Spelling mère has been trying to sell the mansion since her husband's death in 2006 — at first secretly, now quite openly. She needs to move the product off the shelf, having bought a 17,000-sq. ft, $47 million condo in downtown Los Angeles. (Downsizing!) But here's the question: Who's going to take the PR hit of spending nine digits on a house in this age of populist outrage?

Here's a collection of stills from a video tour of the Spelling mansion:

(Photo of Vargas and Spelling by Ron Tom/ABC News)

The NYT today reveals that Leibovitz took out more than $15 million in loans from Art Capital Group—essentially a very high class pawn shop specializing in art.

Last fall, Annie Leibovitz, the photographer, borrowed $5 million from a company called Art Capital Group. In December, she borrowed $10.5 million more from the same firm. As collateral, among other items, she used town houses she owns in Greenwich Village, a country house, and something else: the rights to all of her photographs.

In addition to the lawsuit for more than $700k from unpaid vendors, Leibovitz reportedly used the cash to pay back taxes and finance "a lengthy, costly and litigious renovation on the three adjoining town houses." Why one would pawn their town houses in order to raise money to renovate them, I do not know.

Obviously, a $2 million per year income is no savior from hard times. And hey, Julian Schnabel also pawned some real estate with the same firm to help finance his goddamn monstrosity of a pink, constantly-discounted celebrity condo building, Palazzo Chupi. Pawn shops prey on the rich just as they do the poor. Fairness!

[NYT. By bullshit trend specialist Allen Salkin, but with actual value! Good story Allen. Pic via]

Moreover, this is the fabled pump where some of Hollywood's most influential service-station attendants got their starts before moving on to Chevron, 76, Mobil and elsewhere. The opportunity to own a piece of history proved too irresistible for the building's buyers, whose previous attempt to buy an old agency headquarters fell through when CAA insisted on moving its 96-Octane Baby Mulcher and Stem-Cell Refinery to the Death Star in 2006. If this isn't the definition of a win-win situation, then we don't know what is.

• This Photo is Awesome For Two Reasons [Bus Your Own Tray]

Good question, and one that's partially answered in a fascinating advertisement published this week in the Los Angeles MLS Open House Guide. There, broker Alex Davis made a last-minute, full-page appeal on McMahon's behalf, laying out the dire scenario along with some of the speed bumps he and McMahon had struck along the way: "Lowball offers" of $4.6 million, flaky speculators, and the last of the bank's deadline extensions. But finally the pitch comes down to selling McMahon himself: "[Y]ou will be the hero of a man who's been the hero of so many others if you could help bring this deal to fruition." Ah — so that's what Trump was after. Read the full ad after the jump.

• Donald Trump to buy Ed McMahon's house [LAT]

• MLS Open House Guide [MLS via LAT]

We have other questions as well — including an open Defamer inquiry into the identity of an unusually sexy bedside photo subject. Help us figure it out after the jump.

Upon closer inspection, and in keeping with the home's general theme of despot-chic, we are all but certain that the mystery man pictured in Emmerich's guest room is none other than Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But we've never seen him looking so... hot. We're open to other suggestions (one immediate suggestion around HQ was Bronson Pinchot, which, frankly, we'd prefer) and decor commentary as well. We don't even know if 2012 could squander the Emmerich goodwill we're feeling right now.

[Photos: NYT]

• A London Home to Shock the Neighbors [NYT]

We still can’t figure out why, but the tiny former child stars-turned-designers Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen remain terribly convinced that they are very important. So important, in fact, that they treat their various Manhattan apartments like Bel Air mansions and generally shit all over their neighbors. As one next-door resident put it, “you’d think the President was living here.” Sure, if Dubya got decked out in shiny skirts and pounds of jewelry before partying til the wee hours and coming home soaked in vintage wine and memories night after night (which, by all means, he might). More on what kinds of trouble the little rascals are rousing in their downtown party casa after the jump.

Having abandoned their expansive penthouse on the West Side after presumably just getting kinda bored with it, the Olsens have since moved into a rental in the Village with three floors and unfortunately, some irritable neighbors neighbors: "They certainly keep late hours...I was jogging early one morning, and they were piling out of their gas guzzlers in their little club outfits." We suppose that might be annoying to some, though we'd probably just take notes on their outfits and mimic them at some point. And all this anti-Olsen attitude in their hood means they can't even stake their muscle men all over the street without one resident complaining: "The bodyguards in their SUVs are always getting in the way of our alternate-side parking routine," yammered one. Well where does he suggest they put their bodyguards? Inside the same apartment? That's just unsanitary.

• TWIN PEEK [NY Post]

• Michael Jackson's Neverland Foreclosed; Auction Date Set [foxnews.com]
• Michael Jackson seeks to keep Neverland Ranch [cnn.com]

Construction on the granite memorial jutting out of the 1,820-foot Cahuenga Peak (artist's rendering above) is to begin immediately, but it's projected it will take at least three years before the final chisels are made into Peter Chernin's nostrils, Bob Iger's hairline, and Moonves's sparkling, four-foot teeth by the migrant Asian quarry workers and moonlighting WGA members hired to complete the dangerous task. Upon completion, however, we'll have an enduring and highly visible (15 miles on a clear day!) reminder of the troika of great captains of Hollywood industry who ushered a Golden Era of peace into a strife-fraught zone.

• Land above famed Hollywood sign up for sale [Reuters]
• Previously: The Strike Is Over! Look Busy! [Defamer]

Jeff Lewis is a very scary man, and he isn't scary solely because he treats his employees like dust mites or consults a psychic to assist him in the running of his business or sends his cat, Monkey, to an acupuncturist. No, Jeff Lewis, a Los Angeles real estate speculator, evokes a chill because he is so leveraged, a man balancing multiple mortgages like bricks on a noodle.

Mr. Lewis's houses look like the generically upscale ones found in House Beautiful. He doesn't possess style; he copies it. What he does have, by his own admission, is obsessive-compulsive disorder, and the show's producers, to their credit, do not treat his O.C.D. as if it were a winning asset, the key to whatever success he has had. Like many sufferers of the disorder, Mr. Lewis ignores the real mayhem right there in front of him, so fixated is he on the idea, say, that all the bottles of water in his refrigerator be stocked so that the labels always face him. This is a task dispatched to one of three assistants, from whom he demands formal, written apologies when they behave insubordinately.

For years now, the comic detective series "Monk" has equated O.C.D. with intuitive brilliance. We've long required a corrective interpretation, and "Flipping Out" is it. Mr. Lewis isn't a genius of anything. He's just a delusional jerk.

In a town with one of the highest densities of non-genius-level delusional jerks on the planet, Lewis hardly stands out. And if the best Flipping Out has to offer us in the way of abuse is the occasional chewing out of an underling and some handwritten mea culpas, we'd prefer that Bravo somehow gets its cameras into a major talent agency to document the excruciating burns suffered when an OCD-afflicted agent tosses scorching latte after latte into the face of his assistant, unable to stop until he gets it just right.

• A Los Angeles Speculator Sold on Himself [NY Times]

Our tipster reveals:

1. This guy loves his Scientology. Nearly every room had a plaque of affirmations (or whatever they call them), books on the subject, etc.

2. This guy loves himself. A good 25% of the pop art in the house are drawings and photos and sketches of himself. Oh, and all the mail comes to his inside "joke" names of "D. Punch." Clever self-reference.

3. This guy loves his surveillance. Forget exterior cameras (par for the course in celeb-owned Hollywood Hills houses), there are 17 INTERIOR cameras, planted club-style (in those smoked glass orbs) in EVERY room. Danny can watch the comings and goings all over the house from the control grid in his Master closet/safe room.

While the property's OT-friendly, video surveillance, and Mastersoncentric features may not be the highest ranked items on your home buyer's wish-lists, they nevertheless are attractive amenities to help ease the sting of its $1.59 million asking price. If nothing else, they will provide an excellent conversation starter, leading first time guests to inevitably ask who the giant, smiling guy with the afro and mutton chops is on the dining room's sponge-painted fresco.

• A Look Inside Danny Masterson's Home [CurbedLA]

The Dakota board loves Cruise, he wowed 'em. Plus, he's a hero to the Wall Street worthies on the board —Top Gun, Jerry McGuire, Mission: Impossible, etc — they love that crap.

Earlier:Point/Counterpoint: Tom Cruise IS Moving Into The Dakota