Posts Tagged ‘E News’

Don’t expect to see Natalie Portman hawking lip gloss anytime soon.

Thursday, the actress, along with business partner Christine Aylward, launched a behind-the-scenes entertainment web portal called MakingOf, and spoke about the project at the Apple Store in New York City, as an element of the Tribeca Film Festival. During her address to fans, she all but promised a beauty campaign was not in her future (perhaps she’s still a bit burned by the failure of her shoe line).

“I don’t have a problem with making money, but I don’t believe in doing something you don’t believe in to make money, like a makeup campaign or something like that—the opportunities that young actors have all the time,” she says. “ is an exciting model to do something you really believe in and create something positive out of that…It’s possible to do something positive in the world that’s still entrepreneurial.”

That positive thing is a website aimed at all brands of film junkies and filled with interviews with filmmakers showing all angles of the industry—composers, costume designers, editors and more.

“The goal is really to be a comprehensive, centralized place for people who want to learn about film if it’s specific aspects like how they got that cool explosion in the Bond movie or the serious film student wondering what lens they used when they shot that midnight scene or whatever,” she explains to E! News. “We want to have that range and also cover departments that aren’t typically covered in entertainment news.”

The idea, she says, came to her “off-the-cuff” during a dinner with Aylward, whom she met on a film set in Madrid (presumably Goya’s Ghosts), and other friends. Months later, Aylward came back to it and they agreed to “really make this happen.”

On the site already, Jason Bateman offers advice on auditions, Billy Bob Thornton shares his insecurities, West Wing writer Aaron Sorkin explains how he picks a project, Ron Howard recalls his start and, of course, Portman offers her experience being a first-time director (she recently shot two shorts). However, the former Star Wars queen promises the site won’t be simply an ego booster for her.

“I’m not intending for it to be about me,” she says. “Obviously, I’m featured in an interview, but the goal is really for people who are interested in filmmaking to have access to all these different components. I’m not gonna make you guys get sick of me by being featured in every section.”

As for the technical aspects, the self-proclaimed “near-luddite” claims she’s not too tech-savvy. She tells E! News exclusively, “I’m not on the internet that much but I have a BlackBerry, so I definitely email nonstop all day long. But not that much time on the actual computer.

“And I’ve never Twittered before.”

HollywoodBunny Reports: Jay Leno is “doing great” and will return to ‘TONIGHT’ on Monday. And that’s no joke.

After being laid up in a hospital Thursday night and forced to cancel his first Tonight Show episodes since taking over from Johnny Carson, the late-night funnyman is home and ready to get back to work, his reps tell E! News.

“We are happy to say that Jay Leno is feeling much better and has been released from the hospital. He’s anxious to return to work on Monday,” said a spokeswoman for NBC.

Leno was discharged from Providence Saint Joseph Medical Center on Friday afternoon. His publicist, Dick Guttman, says doctors held Leno overnight for observation purely as a precautionary measure.

While Leno will likely mine his stint in sick bay for laughs when he returns to Tonight on Monday, he’ll spend the rest of the weekend resting up from whatever ailed him.

Guttman was unable to confirm reports that comedian had been struck by food poisoning or dehydration.

“I’m not sure that’s the case but whatever it was, it certainly was severe enough that he couldn’t do the show but it wasn’t symptomatic of anything major and he’ll be back on Monday,” the rep said.

Aside from Thursday and Friday’s Tonight Shows, Leno, who turns 59 next Tuesday, also canceled his two weekend standup gigs in Las Vegas.

Was Madonna just horsing around?

Despite her rep’s claim that a pesky paparazzi was to blame for Madonna’s weekend fall from a horse in the Hamptons, the officers who responded to the scene said the Material One made no mention of any shutterbug involvement.

“She was a vctim of a fall from a horse. We have no mention of the paparazzi,” Officer Chris Brenner, a spokesman for the Southampton Village Police Department, tells E! News. “We got a call that the subject fell off the horse and treated it as an aided case.

The call came in at 4:24 p.m. Saturday and, per standard operating procedure, Southampton’s finest showed up to assist emergency medical personnel.

“Above complainant was a victim of fall from horse. Unknown injury. Bridgehampton Fire Department/ambulance responded and transported to Southampton Hospital,” said Brenner, quoting the police report.

That directly contradicts the statement to E! News from longtime Madonna spinmeister Liz Rosenberg, who said a photographer “jumped out of the bushes to photograph the singer,” spooking the horse and causing the spill.

Romance may not be dead on The Hills, but friendship continues to run from them.

As E! News first revealed nearly two weeks ago, the wedding between Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt is still on for Saturday…but—SPOILER ALERT!—it won’t be going off without a hitch.

If The Hills is to be believed (when is it ever?), the bride will be disappointed when her former BFF, Lauren Conrad, is a no-show. Despite all the hugs and tears in recent episodes of the MTV hit, the leading lady isn’t picking out a dress to wear to the big ceremony.

When asked today if she planned to attend the nuptials, the reality starlet laughed. “Um, probably not,” she said, but admitted she was invited to the big Hills finale event.

If it still runs, why leave it out to rust?

In light of the green dust left swirling when Fast & Furious came roaring out of the gate with a record $72.5 million last weekend, Universal has confirmed to E! News that a sequel (or, technically, a fifthquel) is in the works.

The studio weighed in after Paul Walker, aka FBI Agent Brian O’Conner of F&Fs 1 and 2, said during a Friday-morning interview with MYfm’s Valentine that, “without question,” he and Vin Diesel are coming back for more.

“This was supposed to be it,” he said of their latest go-round. “There wasn’t supposed to be the open-ended closing like there was. When I first read the screenplay, I was like, ‘Man, look what they’re doing.’ But without question, with the way things opened up, Vin and I will be coming back, we’re making a fifth one, and we’re going to Brazil, that’s it.”

When asked how he ended up signing on for Fast & Furious, Walker basically said he owed it to the fans.

“Vin didn’t do the second one, and fans would always ask me, ‘Why didn’t Vin do the second one?’ I didn’t really have an answer for them,” he said. “And then I didn’t do the third one. And guys would come up to me on the street and be like, ‘Hey, why weren’t you in the third one?’ And when they ask the question, it’s kinda like they got that look…saying, ‘Don’t tell us you’re too good for us now.’

“When they started talking about making the fourth one, I was like, man, I don’t really have a choice now, because if I don’t do it I know I’m gonna be pissing people off, because this is the opportunity to come back and make the first true sequel.”

Valentine suggested the producers follow up The Fast and the Furious, 2 Fast 2 Furious, The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift and Fast & Furious with “Fast and Furious: Car Pool Lane.”

Surely he brings up a good point: The overall plot possibilities are endless…but how to further manipulate the original title?