By George Larrimore and Shelly Aguilar
WAITING FOR BECKHAM: A dizzying morning around here with everbody on phone and e-mail trying to find out when Posh and David and the Boys would finally arrive from London. Lots of flight numbers, departure times, arrival times (a lot of them wrong) plus a stream of video and stills coming in but it was late morning before we got what seemed to be The Word that they would roll in around 7:00 tonight. Great sign at a fast food restaurant in the airport: Beckham Burgers!
FRESH FACES: This story cuts both ways for us; it’s great to have two fresh, good-looking, stars who may or may not be able to knock Lindsay/Britney/Paris/Nicole off the front pages. That would be a relief to us, and to our audience we suspect. But “hot, new” anything, even people, becomes an obsession and acting on obsession ends up not feeling good. By the way, we keep asking if Becks can be a movie star. The answer we get is “have you heard him talk?”
PRESENTING, BECKS! The Galaxy people (that’s the L.A. soccer team, in case you forgot) are practically drooling to show off Their New Star tomorrow. Lot of media trying to get in and to get a shot of him/get a question in. One thing that strikes us funny; have you seen the new team uniforms? Mid-chest on the jersey is the word ‘Herbalife’ ( The company sells nutrition supplements through independent dealers ) and while we have no problem with sponsorships it’s a little hard to imagine the Herbalife Dodgers or the Herbalife Lakers. We’re trying to find out how big a ticket sale bump all this Beckham publicity is bringing the the Herbalife Galaxy.
GAY DEBATE: Talked to the people at LOGO network today about their upcoming (Aug. 9th) debate. Being called the Gay Debate since gay people are their primary audience. Hillary Clinton/Barack Obama/John Edwards have all accepted their invitation to talk about gay marriage, legal rights and other issues. LOGO says they invited the Republicans to take part but nobody from that side has agreed to appear yet. We watched the Right-leaning shows like O’Reilly last night to see how it would play but Bill restrained himself. We predict this will turn into an interesting story yet, and maybe a good debate.
GORE HEAT: Ex-VP and full-time Visionary Al Gore is taking some heat for the Live Earth event he was all over last weekend. Appears a lot of other candidates think he’s still got Presidential Ambitions and they think he got a lot of Unfair and Free Exposure to malleable young voters.
BIG WEDNESDAY: The latest Harry Potter movie (‘HP and the Order of the Phoenix) is hauling in fans by the fish net full, here and around the globe. Warner Bros. now claims the Biggest Wednesday Opening ever. (note to studios: the Biggest Tuesday Opening Ever In An Odd-Numbered Month is still available) It’s showing on 9,000 screens just in the U.S. But over 50% of the grosses for the previous five HP movies have come from overseas, especially Japan.
RELEASE THIS: Our favorite News Release today; Sands Digital Media (Michael Sands) sent us a release to say that Michael’s client Kristy Swanson has received a letter from Marcia O’Brien (the ex of Kristy’s current lover) demanding that Kristy demand that “media image consultant Michael Sands cease and desist any and all media in Kristy’s assault case.” (Kristy and Marcia got into some kind of spat during a child hand-over that resulted in Kristy being briefly detained.) In other words Media Image Consultant Michael Sands sent out a New Release about… Media Image Consultant Michael Sands.
Give us the news straight.. we can handle it.. [email protected]
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