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Published: July 1, 2009
■ Drea de Matteo is moving to Wisteria Lane. Aime Wolfe, the publicist for ABC's Desperate Housewives, confirmed she will join the cast for the sixth season. Wolfe did not have further details, although EW.com quoted sources as saying that De Matteo will portray an Italian matriarch whose husband is a landscape designer. De Matteo recently got engaged to country singer Shooter Jennings, with whom she has an 18-month-old daughter, Alabama. De Matteo had a breakout role in The Sopranos as a mob girlfriend-turned-FBI informant.
■ George Clooney has lined up a new home for his production company. Clooney and producing partner Grant Heslov's Smoke House Pictures is in final negotiations on a two-year development and production deal with Sony Pictures, studio co-chairwoman Amy Pascal said. For many years, Clooney had been set up at Warner Bros. "I'm leaving a terrific company and a lot of dear friends. They're a class act," said Clooney, who called Sony a "perfect match" for Smoke House. While at Warner, Clooney won a supporting-actor Academy Award for Syriana and had a best-director nomination the same year for Good Night, and Good Luck, which Heslov produced.
■ Yoko Ono is the rightful copyright holder of rare, intimate footage showing John Lennon and his family in London in 1970, a federal judge has ruled. U.S. District Court Judge Rya W. Zobel last week refused to reinstate a copyright-infringement lawsuit filed by a World Wide Video LLC against Ono and the broker who sold her the tapes. World Wide Video LLC sued Ono in March 2008, accusing her of copyright infringement and of wrongfully interfering with its personal property. Ono countersued, saying she is the rightful owner. Ono wants to keep the material private. The 10 hours of footage was shot in February 1970 -- before the Beatles broke up -- and shows Lennon hunched over a piano, smoking marijuana and joking about putting LSD in President Richard Nixon's tea. It has never been shown publicly in its entirety.
■ David McKenzie of Federal Way, Wash., won the grand prize in San Jose State University's annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest with this: "Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin' off Nantucket Sound from the nor' east and the dogs are howlin' for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the ‘Ellie May,' a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin' and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests." The contest invites entrants to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels. It is named after Victorian writer Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton, who opened his 1830 novel Paul Clifford, with the much-quoted, "It was a dark and stormy night ..."
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