NBC is staying mum about the new season of 'The Apprentice,' but Hollyscoop.com has learned exclusively that 'Girls Gone Wild' creator Joe Francis has been added to the lineup.

"I’m doing celebrity apprentice," Francis told Hollyscoop backstage at the Randy Jackson Presents: America's Best Dance Crew.

Earlier this week Donald Trump told Ryan Seacrest that he's been getting calls from stars that want to revive their career. So far it's rumored that Khloe Kardashian, Joan and Melissa Rivers, and Dennis Rodman are going to join Donald's hit show.

Can Francis hope to out-lech last season's contestant Gene Simmons, or will a jailhouse conversion have made him the next Stephen Baldwin? One thing's for sure: we can't wait to see Francis flash those baby teeth at Joan Rivers and Kim Kardashian, convincing them to romp together on a leather couch in a sapphic matchup that's most assuredly of legal age.

• Joe Francis To Join Celebrity Apprentice [Hollyscoop]

• Donald Trump Has To Hire People To Be Impressed With Him [Videogum]

· Grateful that NBC is bringing back their The Apprentice for another marginally rated, but still lucrative, season, Donald Trump and producer Mark Burnett are giving the network a cut of the product-whoring fees derived from the show's many brand-promoting challenges. [THR]
· Edward Norton will play identical twins ("one an Ivy League classics professo rand the other a hedonistic pot-smoking career criminal," naturally) in Tim Blake Nelson's comedy thriller Leaves of Grass. [Variety]

"No, I never offered Rosie a chance to be on 'Celebrity Apprentice, '" Trump told Access Hollywood in an exclusive interview.

"It's a good idea," he continued, "because I would fire her fat a**. She would definitely not last more than one show . . . I would love to fire Rose, but I don't want her on the show."

Mulling the idea over for a moment, the redness in Trump's flushed face began to fade, and he absently twirled a lock of his magnificent head of hair as he continued, "You know what, though? Firing her...mmm...that could work. Like, really work. It's crazy to say it, right? But, but...I could bend her over the boardroom's table, grab the new dismissal paddle we'll be using this season, and really go to Trumptown on that ample bottom of hers. Ammm-ple. Just lingers on the tongue, ample. Weird. You think she'd like that? She probably would. She's sick. A sick little piggy. And then right when she thinks I'm going to fire her, you know what? I stop! I bring her back for another show. Take that, Rosie. Fatfatfat. The paddling won't be so fun the second time, I promise you that. Or the third."

• Donald Trump On Rosie: 'I Would Fire Her Fat A**' [AH]M
• Previously: Basking In Feud Afterglow, Trump Tries To Leave $2 Mil On Rosie's Dresser [Defamer]

The offer, I'm told, came through producer Mark Burnett's office.

Needless to say, O'Donnell turned Trump down flat.

"I wouldn't do it for $200 million," Rosie was said to have responded.

Trump, naturally, denies making the offer, probably to save face; we suspect that all his obsessive talk of what Kelli Carpenter sees in Rosie's besnouted mug and fleshy embrace lit a curious inferno in Trump's loins, now cruelly doused by Ro's latest cold rejection. But buck up, Don — it's for the best. Sure, she got people watching that moribund morning chatfest again, but we can't remember the last time anything good came from espousing the mantra, "What's good enough for The View is good enough for me."

• Donald Trump Offered Rosie $2 Million To Go On 'The Apprentice' [FOXNews.com]

Capping a round of unparalleled media saturation that began with his Miss USA pardon, then quickly segued into his well-documented musings on Rosie O'Donnell's unbecoming height-weight ratio, the underwhelming premiere of Apprentice: L.A., and his conspicuous, NBC-underwritten presence at last night's Golden Globes, comes the cherry on top of Donald Trump's overexposure sundae: a star on the Walk of Fame.

"It really has been a special moment in my life," Trump said in a live TV broadcast of the event on sunsplashed Hollywood Boulevard. [...]

Trump's baby son, Barron, almost managed to steal the show as his dad held him at the podium.

"He's strong, he's smart, he's tough, he's vicious, he's violent — all of the ingredients you need to be an entrepreneur, and most importantly, hopefully he's smart because smart is really the ingredient," Trump said.

Trump then handed his Pit Baby back to his Slovenian succubus bride, and proceeded to whip away the tarp hiding a scale model of his plans for his newly acquired real estate. The 45-story Trump Star Tower will unquestionably be the greatest, most outstanding high-rise L.A. has ever seen, making up for in verticality what it lacks in square footage (slightly less than four per floor), with spectacular city views of the Hollywood Basin and a rooftop deck floored with the original star, and characteristically featuring Trump's name in gold letters polished to a gleaming sheen.

[Photo: Getty Images]

• Donald Trump gets a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame [USAToday/AP]

• The Apprentice 6 Tour Bus Challenge [YouTube via FBLA]

"It's the way I look. He can't resist. I love when people say you're fat like you don't know," O'Donnell joked Monday on ABC's "The View." "... It's always the first comment of someone who disagrees with you if you happen to be on the plus side." [...]

"The guy, he's obsessed with me, obviously," she said. [...]

O'Donnell said she went shopping recently and "all of these plus-size women" with "tears in their eyes" approached her with words of support.

"He wounded millions of women by saying that I was fat, you know?"

O'Donnell also described how Trump calling her a "fat pig" has upset her young children, who have expressed concern that a man with a "dump truck" (not a Heathers-inspired fat lesbian insult, but a 7-year-old's misinterpretation of the name Donald Trump) was going "take all [Rosie's] money away." Donald, meanwhile, has already managed to issue his swat back, downplaying the "fat pig" comment as a mere sliver of the larger Rosie-insult pie, and taking a shot at O'Donnell-defender Barbara Walters while he was at it. From an Extra press release:

"Rosie, as usual, is misquoting me. I used the word "slob", I used the word "degenerate" and I used the words "not very smart." The word "fat" played a very small role, if any, in my description of her."

In reaction to Barbara Walters saying that Trump is lying about remarks she made during a phone conversation they had last week, Trump responds, "Barbara lied, as she knows very well. She will have to live with herself. She admits to phoning me. Isn't it obvious to everybody that if she phoned me, she had to be saying what I've stated, not what she claims to have said. This reminds me very much of the Star Jones fiasco and Barbara's supposed statements about her."

Actually, that's not so obvious to us. What is obvious, however, is that no one has ever attacked Queen Ant Barbara Walters without quickly finding her razor-sharp mandibles buried deep inside them and sucking out their nourishing life fluids moments before tossing the empty husks aside. With the ratings for last night's Apprentice premiere down significantly from even last season's all-time series low (could Mark Burnett have somehow miscalculated the public's appetite for watching hot chicks in hiked skirt suits getting wet n' sudsy at a WeHo car wash?), and Trump finding himself named a co-defendant in a 49-year-old rejected Apprentice applicant's motion calling for all other potential victims of the series' alleged ageist casting practices to join him in a class-action lawsuit, it would appear as if O'Donnell has won this round. Or, as she might put it, "Ching chong. Donald Trump. Ching chong ching chong chong, bite me. Ching chong."

• ICYMI: Rosie O'Donnell Responds to Trump, Gets Perm [BWE]
• Rosie O'Donnell: Trump Is 'Obsessed With Me' [Fox/AP]
• Rosie Discusses Kids' Reaction to Trump Slam [People]
• Donald Trump Sued for Age Discrimination [People]
• [ExtraTV]

· Tonight on ET and The Insider: Discover the context for the quotes that have been amusingly edited together to make James Brown's widow sound like a lunatic!
· Tonight on Ken Levine's Lost House 24: "6 pm - 7 pm: Kate gets caught in another hanging net. Locke shoots Boone. House correctly diagnoses a gunshot wound... but only after removing Boone's liver. Jack learns that Claire is really his daughter. Ten minutes later she's of course kidnapped."
Chud.com calls out Variety for the paper's uncredited discovery of box office smash Zyzzx Road.
Fishbowl L.A.'s Kate Coe interest in how the LAT underplayed the story of a Halloween hate crime in Long Beach spills over into the L.A. Weekly, and then back onto Fishbowl.
· NBC.com is streaming the first 20 minutes of the new, L.A.-based season of The Apprentice; note that The Donald's infamous combover (the greatest combover in the world!) cannot be stirred even by driving in a convertible with the top down. Impressive.

Eye has greenlit production on approximately 13 episodes of the untitled project, which begins casting shortly with an eye on a summer 2007 premiere. Details of the project are being kept under wraps.

What is known is that the action in the skein will take place on both land and at sea, suggesting the presence of ships and islands as central characters in the unscripted drama.

It's also expected the skein will incorporate traditional reality elements such as competitions and elimination ceremonies. (Perhaps losers will have to walk the plank?)

Not yet addressed are the details of the casting process, so it remains to be seen if Burnett will attempt another controversial and headline-grabbing gimmick in the vein of the quickly abandoned racial segregation of teams on this season of Survivor. Burnett is nothing if not a consummate showman, however, with an acute sense of how to best lure eyeballs to TV screens, so we wouldn't be a bit surprised if he divvied up his latest contestants into Team Hook-Hand and Team Peg-Leg, then justified the insensitive feat of handicapped exploitation by describing it as a social experiment intended to see which amputee groups fared best when removed from society and denied modern prosthetics.

• Pirates pegged for CBS [Variety]

Also, did anyone else notice something...monochromatic about the cast? The Crunk and Disorderly blog did, and they say it better than we ever could: "Martha Stewart does not care about black people."

• Buzz Notes [Crunktastical]
• The Apprentice: Martha Stewart [NBC.com]

It was this courtship of Wartenberg, investigators would later contend, that drove a desperate Acremant—who needed money to spend on his favorite Vegas stripper—to plot the 1995 robbery of two Oregon women. That attempted heist ended with Acremant killing the duo. He also murdered Scott George, a California friend, in a second botched 1995 robbery bid. Convicted in the slayings, Acremant has been sentenced to death in both California and Oregon, where he is currently imprisoned. According to Wartenberg, during Acremant's last Vegas visit, in December 1995, he pulled a handgun and stun gun on her as they were parked in a car. As she testified in August 2002 at Acremant's trial for the George killing, he was "panicking and freaking out, telling me that he, you know, he was very upset with me because I never loved him. I just used him for money." Wartenberg escaped unscathed, though she told jurors she was left "emotionally injured and scarred for life."

After being stuck in a car with a pistol and stun-gun wielding maniac, we're betting that the Apprentice Formerly Known as Ecstasy isn't going to be too intimidated by The Donald waving his Downsizing Pinky of Death at her across the boardroom table. We're picking Alla to go all the way.

• "Apprentice" Wannabe's X-Rated Past [The Smoking Gun]
• Apprentice Bio: Alla [NBC.com]
• Previously: The Donald Hand-Picks New Crop Of Apprentices [Defamer]

Of the 18 contestants, 17 were his picks, he said. "If I'm looking for somebody out of 18 people to work for me, how come somebody else is picking the 18 people?" he asked. "Doesn't make sense." [...]

"We have an ex-stripper who is tough as nails," he said. And then there is Jennifer Murphy. Mr. Trump, who claims a certain expertise in the area, described her as "one of the most beautiful women I've ever seen."

He said some of the show's producers advised him against selecting her: "They said she was too beautiful. I said, 'Excuse me, there is no such thing as too beautiful.' They said, 'Donald she's so beautiful, she's not credible.' I said, 'No. 1, she happens to be smart. No. 2, she's very beautiful - congratulations, she's going on the show.' There wasn't going to be another 'Apprentice' 3 thing where I end up with a cast where I have to pick people to work for me and I don't believe in them."

And if his belief in this incredibly beautiful Apprentice front-runner is shaken, say, by a distressing failure to participate in this season's special, off-camera "Hey, Are Those Real? Challenge," Trump still has that tough-as-nails ex-stripper to groom for that coveted position in his corporation. A good businessman always has a contingency plan.

• Trump Redevelops His Own Series [NY Times]
Previously: New Apprentice Has Windows! [Defamer]

"I have several windows," she said. "There's so many windows I have to turn up the air conditioning because there's so much sun."

In fact, sometimes the heat from the intense, direct sunlight triggers the cocoa butter sprinklers mounted in the ceiling, forcing the first the first female Apprentice to strip down to her underthings for hours at a time. After her initial three-month "orientation," Todd will be transferred to the Trump Brunei Hotel and Casino for a rigorous year as a greeter/harem bride, a position that will properly prepare her for the corporate life of the Trump Organization.

• Latest 'Apprentice' Starts Her Work [AP]

What "dream job of a lifetime" awaits young Kendra? The comely go-getter opted to spearhead the renovation of a 68,000 square foot mansion in Palm Beach, where Trump himself will immediately take up residence, supervising his new protege's work in nothing but a silk kimono, and occasionally requesting that the winner liberally apply cocoa butter to his exposed naughty bits. The summer sun in Florida is hell on The 'Lil Donald.

• Kendra is The Apprentice! [NBC.com]


• The Apprentice Finale: Robin’s Coming Out Party [Defamer]

Reality TV Magazine contacted Cuban to see if he would like to give a response to The Donald's most recent "killing" allegations. Cuban replied (and we quote), "He [Donald Trump] needs to step away from the Cialis. Those 4 hour erections have started to have an impact on his thinking."

Snap, indeed. As much as it pains us to do so, we're going to have to award this round to Trump. His show's still on the air, and he can creatively escalate the conflict by having his phalanx of mouth-breathing Apprentices haplessly design a signature Mark Cuban line of bunched-up panties for Victoria's Secret.

UPDATE: Perhaps we were a little hasty in giving this round to Trump. Cuban scores major comeback points after the jump:

Reality Blurred induced Cuban to reveal this nastier rejoinder, a part of which was deemed unprintable by the NY Post:

I basically laughed and told him I must be in Donald's head so much that he had gotten sick on himself from drinking the kool-aid, peeing in a cup and drinking it again. He keeps on talking about me in interviews when I don't give a shit what he says or does.

Trump has only one recourse to regain the upper hand: make George wear a Mark Cuban mask and repeatedly bugger him on the boardroom table during the live Apprentice finale.

• Mark Cuban Responds To Donald Trump’s Killing Comments [Reality TV Magazine]


• Previously: Mark Cuban Smacks Down The Donald