The world was in danger of never hearing Elmo’s high-pitched laugh again (which really wasn’t a bad thing) when his puppeteer Kevin Clash was accused of pulling a Rob Lowe by getting it on with a 16-year-old boy eight years ago. Right before Sesame Street was about to make its debut on the National Sex Offender Registry, Kevin’s accuser took it all back and said that he was legal when he humped on Elmo’s voice. That was that until The Smoking Gun named names and showed faces.
TSG says that the dude who tried to smear Elmo’s good name is 24-year-old wannabe model/actor type Sheldon Stephens of Pennsylvania. The holidays at the Stephens house is going to be real fun this year, because one of Sheldon’s family members gave his ass up to TSG. The family member said that they don’t know how Sheldon met Kevin, but he lived in NYC for a little bit and has always attracted “high-powered men.” High-powered men?! Bitch, Kevin Clash is the voice of Elmo and he might have the power to tell you that today’s episode is brought to you by the letter A, but that’s about it. Bitch is acting like Sheldon got it on with the Director of the CIA or something.
Yesterday, TMZ hinted that Kevin’s lawyer and Sheldon’s lawyer
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Full Story »It’s been a roller coaster of a week for Kevin Clash. On Monday, the voice of Elmo and the subject of the hit Sundance documentary Being Elmo, took a leave of absence from Sesame Street in the wake of allegations that he’d had a sexual relationship with a 16-year-old teen.
One day later, Clash’s unidentified accuser, who’s now 23, recanted his claim, clearing Clash’s name. But can the beloved voice of Elmo bounce back from the controversy?
Clash, 52, began his career with Sesame Street in 1983 and earned Daytime Emmys for his voice work as Elmo, the iconic Sesame Street muppet. By 2012 ,he had worked his way up the ranks to Muppet Captain and was co-executive producer of Elmo’s World. Being Elmo, directed by Constance Marks, was based on Clash’s 2006 autobiography My Life as a Furry Red Monster: What Being Elmo Has Taught Me About Life, Love and Laughing Out Loud.
When Being Elmo hit Sundance last year, Clash became a festival darling, and his name synonymous with the famous Sesame Street character he helped create and popularize. But when the accusation of relations with a minor went public on Monday, Cash’s name became connected to the kind of controversy that is anathema to a place like Sesame Street, even though, as he rightly pointed out in his defense, the allegations were not true. In situations like these, perception has a way of eclipsing reality.
INTERVIEW: Kevin Clash, the Man Behind Elmo, on Jim Henson, Puppetry, and Jason Segel’s The Muppets
“I had a relationship with [the accuser],” Clash told TMZ yesterday. “It was between two consenting adults and I am deeply saddened that he is trying to make it into something it was not.” The Sesame…
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Also in Wednesday morning’s round-up of news briefs, film critic/festival programmer Scott Foundas joins the Village Voice’s publications; Gerard Butler eyes a WWII-era drama; and Bryan Singer is confirmed for X-Men.
Scott Foundas Joins Village Voice As Principal Film Writer
Foundas served as Associate Program Director at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Prior to that he was the film editor at the Village Voice’s sister paper, LA Weekly. Foundas’ features and reviews will appear in all of the Voice Media Group’s publications, including: Village Voice (New York), LA Weekly (Los Angeles), Westword (Denver), New Times (Phoenix), Houston Press, Dallas Observer, Riverfront Times (St. Louis), New Times (Miami), City Pages (Minneapolis), New Times (Broward), SF Weekly (San Francisco), Seattle Weekly, and OC Weekly (Orange County). He will begin December 3rd.
Around the ‘net…
Paul Giamatti, Billy Bob Thornton and Jacki Weaver Join JFK Drama Parkland
The drama centers on the chaotic events that occurred at Parkland Hospital in Dallas on the day that JFK was assassinated Tom Hanks is producing, Collider reports.
Gerard Butler Joins Dynamo
The story is based on the landmark soccer game that took place between an occupied Ukrainian soccer team and their Nazi occupiers during WWII. Butler will play Nikolai Trusevich, the all-star goalie who served as a leader for the team and inspired the war-ravaged city of Kiev. Dynamo will shoot in 2013 in Europe, Deadline reports.
Josh Duhamel Eyes Hilary Swank, Emmy Rossum in You’re Not You
Duhamel is in negotiations to star in the drama, which tells the story of a self-absorbed college student who undergoes a life change when she begins a part-time job taking care of a woman (Swank) who has Lou Gehrig’s disease. George C. Wolfe (Nights…
Now that’s what you call good publicity! Tom Hanks of all people dropped an F-bomb on Good Morning America this morning (video below!), shocking GMA host Elizabeth Vargas and putting the epic, arty Cloud Atlas on the map with those four little letters. Well done!
If I had to wager I’d place Hanks as one of Hollywood’s top three most beloved stars, so I’m 99% sure our glorious nation of moralistic, upstanding, non-swearing citizens forgave him on the spot when he subsequently cranked up that Hanks charm and apologized “to the kids of America that are watching this right now.” Yes, all of those GMA-watching youngsters, Tom.
To be fair Vargas pressed Hanks into doing his Cloud Atlas Cockney accent, which makes his Cloud Atlas pidgin English accent sound like Shakespeare. Hanks even protested a bit, explaining that his British wanker voice consists pretty much only of foul language. But no matter: LIZ VARGAS WANTED THE VOICE!
If you ask me, Hanks’s f***in’ slip up was a great happy accident, the perfect stunt for getting the masses interested in the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer’s massively ambitious film. “Tom Hanks plays multiple characters? And he swears?? Sign me up, honey!” Etc. etc.
(via Mediaite)
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Worlds collide in the raunchy comedy For A Good Time, Call…, the sweet and salty tale of two reluctant roommates (Ari Graynor and Lauren Anne Miller) tentatively building a friendship as they embark on a phone sex business venture together. It’s a long-awaited starring vehicle for Graynor and Miller and a warmly funny offering in the current wave of raunchy R-rated female-driven comedies – and For A Good Time, Call… also marks the anticipated debut of shorts filmmaker Jamie Travis (The Patterns Trilogy, The Saddest Boy in the World), who here earns the distinction of inspiring Justin Long’s performance in the film and getting to direct Kevin Smith jerking off in his feature debut.
All of the above may surprise those who’ve followed Travis’s work over the past decade, during which time the Toronto-based filmmaker burst onto the film festival scene with award-winning, impeccably-crafted short films (highly recommended and viewable here) that dealt effectively in nostalgic sensibilities, a Wes Anderson-like mise en scene, and a stylistic formalism largely absent from his fast-talking lady comedy.
But after years of searching for the right project, Travis fell for the script by real life friends Miller and Katie Anne Naylon and subsequently launched into his first feature on an incredibly packed 16-day shooting schedule. After premiering at Sundance and debuting in limited release this weekend, For a Good Time, Call… expands to additional cities on September 7. “I honestly don’t know how to direct a movie unless I love it,” Travis offered, looking back on the film. “I feel like that love needs to drive you, and without it what are you doing?”
I fell in love with your Patterns trilogy and your short films, so when I heard…
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While most of the Jackson family wrestles each other on a mountain of Michael Jackson’s fortune, we’ve all been wondering where the only Jackson we care about has been. Where was La Toya Jackson? Was Detective La Toya so deep under cover that the only way to contact her was to pass notes to Bubbles? Did crazy Randy Jackson kidnap La Toya too after realizing that she’s the crown jewel of the Jackson family and the executors of MJ’s estate would hand over everything to get her back? Has La Toya been oblivious to all of this foolery, because she’s been holed up in a German plastic surgeon’s office getting another pair of rubber testicles installed in her cheeks? The correct answer is: None of those!
TMZ says that La Toya has been missing in action, because she’s been too busy thinking with her brain unlike the others. La Toya is reading all the Jacksons and is telling them to turn down the crazy and stop fighting in public. TMZ’s source says that La Toya isn’t taking sides and is shaking her head at her brothers and sisters being fame whores by putting their family disputes in front of the cameras. La Toya has told all of them to handle this far away from the media.
Yes, La Toya is coming out of this as the sane one. You should probably hold on to something sturdy, because the sheer
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They say it is good to get a child a pet because its mortality will acclimate the youngster to the concept of death. Clearly Tim Burton never saw it that way.
Frankenweenie, the much beloved cult short that, ostensibly, got him fired from Disney in the 1980s, is back with a feature length 3D IMAX release from Disney this autumn. Yeah, there had to’ve been a li’l victory dance at Chez Burton on that one.
The studio’s marketing is revving up in earnest, announcing a Comic-Con panel and its world premiere at Austin’s genre-friendly Fantastic Fest’s opening night on September 20th.
The trailer offers two-and-a-half minutes of the expected Edward Gorey-by-way-of Brooklyn Renegade Craft Fair that, as I’m sure you are well aware, has no small share of its fans.
One of the more interesting things about the upcoming film will be doing a compare and contrast on the voice talent versus the short. Shelly Duvall is now Catherine O’Hara? But I love them both! Daniel Stern switched for Martin Short? Don’t make me choose! The great Paul Bartel was a voice in the original, but, alas, his death in 2000 makes it impossible for him to join this time. Unless… is there a way, you think, to resurrect idiosyncratic character actors?
The film, of course, looks terrific, though I’m curious to see if the Burton schtick is enough to get kids – normal kids – to overcome their natural disinclination for black & white. With the financial windfall Burton handed Disney with Alice in Wonderland (as Warner Bros. scratches its head over Dark Shadows) and the licensing juggernaut that is The Nightmare Before Christmas, I’m sure they were more than happy to throw the director a bone (zing!) on what was, I’m surmising, a not terribly expensive…
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Over at the fantastic retro cinema celebration series that is Trailers From Hell!, Joe Dante is currently running a Kickstarter to back the next batch of webisodes, which feature Dante and his “Grindhouse Gurus” — Eli Roth, Guillermo Del Toro, and John Landis, among others — dissecting their favorite genre fare of olde. And while a top pledge will get you all sorts of one-of-a-kind rewards ranging from lunch with Dante to the arachnid jaw from Starship Troopers, one prize in particular offers an opportunity so rare, someone had better jump on it, fast: A script reading by screenwriter Josh Olson.
For $5,000 or more, an enterprising Kickstarter backer will get their script read and receive feedback from the History of Violence scribe who famously declared in the Village Voice editorial “I Will Not Read Your Fucking Script” that he — well, you know.
“For a better understanding as to why Josh reading your script is so remarkable, we refer you to his legendary rant in The Village Voice ‘I Will Not Read Your #@$%^%! Script,’ adds the Kickstarter page.
Only one such prize is available for claiming, so hop to it! The Kickstarter campaign has 26 days to go… and presumably if the goal is not met, the Olson offer is off the table.
Below, watch Olson’s Trailers from Hell guest spot, in which he goes deep on The Conversation:
[Trailers from Hell Kickstarter]
Amanda Seyfried Reaches Jennifer Lawrence-Levels Of Honesty With Letterman Jokes, Voice Comments
By admin on December 12, 2012
Posted in Celebrities Exposed, Celebrities Gossip, Celebrity Blog, Celebrity Blogs, Celebrity Exposed, Celebrity Gossip, Celebrity Rumors, Celebrity Scandal, Celebrity Social | Tagged honesty, letterman, Reaches, voice, voice comments | Leave a response