Celebs versus the Law
Soundgarden guitarist Kim Thayil was arrested in North Carolina for slapping a young woman in a hotel lobby. She was with a group of fans who were trying to snap Thayil's picture. He was released on $2,500 bail . . . Robert Downey, Jr. , was back in handcuffs for the third time this month after he violated the conditions of his bail by leaving a Southern California drug-recovery center . . . Hootie & the Blowfish were sued by their original manager, Henry Neuman, who alleged that the band shut him out of its deal with Atlantic Records. Hootie insists that Neuman's $150-million suit is "meritless" . . . Pearl Jam announced plans for a thirty-one-date tour through North America and Europe this fall to promo their new album, No Code. It will be the Seattle band's first concert tour in more than two years . . . Independence Day continued to dominate the box office , taking in $21.3 million over the weekend. The big surprise, however, was the poor showing of four new films. Combined box-office totals for The Frighteners , Fled , Multiplicity , and Kazaam were less than ID4's take . . . Joe Klein resigned his post as political commentator for CBS under pressure from the network. Klein shocked his CBS bosses by revealing that he was indeed the anonymous writer of the bestseller Primary Colors, after formerly denying it on a CBS news program. Klein's
weekly Newsweek column has also been suspended . . . Less than two months after Jim Carrey reportedly told a British newspaper, "I'm not going to commit to anything other than casual [relationships]," he proposed to girlfriend Lauren Holly during a nighttime stroll in San Francisco's Presidio. She accepted, but no date has been set . . . Thanks to Shirley MacLaine 's impassioned plea, the Ratings Appeals Board changed the rating on her upcoming Terms of Endearment sequel, Evening Star, from R to PG-13 . . . Frank Zappa's four kids--Moon Unit, Dweezil, and the rest--will co-star with Alan Thicke in Anarchy TV, an independent movie about a right-wing televangelist who tries to shut down a public-access TV show run by a group of anarchists . . . Michael Keaton , who stars opposite Andie MacDowell and three Keaton clones in the current box-office flop Multiplicity, agreed to star opposite house pets in the Warner Bros. comedy It's a Dog's Life . . . John Singleton is planning a remake of the blaxploitation classic Shaft, and Oliver Stone is scouting locations for a modern-day version of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre . . . Warner Bros. is preparing a movie based on baseball pitcher Dwight Gooden's life. The film will track Gooden's rise as a teenage phenom with the New York Mets, his spiral into drug and alcohol abuse, and his current comeback . . .
CBS extended David Letterman 's contract through the year 2002 . . . The September issue of Playboy will reveal more of Uma Thurman than the shapely actress would like, courtesy of several photos snapped while Uma was nude sunbathing on a beach in the Caribbean last January . . . MTV's Rock the Vote campaign has established a phone voter-registration program that can be reached by dialing 1-800-REGISTER . . . Daniel Benzali will star with Wesley Snipes in Executive Privilege, a Warner Bros. thriller about a detective (Snipes) who investigates a murder at the White House. Benzali, the former Murder One attorney, will play a Secret Service boss . . . Malik Yoba and Michael DeLorenzo, stars of Fox's New York Undercover, took note of the threatened holdout by members of the Friends cast and demanded a three-fold salary increase in their own salaries--to $75,000 per episode. Universal Television, which produces the 76th-ranked show, filed a $1.2-million breach-of-contract lawsuit against the actors, who have since returned to work . . . Chuck Norris , fifty-six, and girlfriend Monica Hall, twenty-six, called off their scheduled August nuptials, but insist they're still planning to take the plunge . . . Steven Spielberg received a $1-million federal grant so that he can continue work on his project to document stories of Nazi Holocaust survivors. The Spielberg team has already archived 17,000 interviews . . . Rapper Nas tops the SoundScan album sales chart with It Was Written . . . In an attempt to show local youth the dangers of heroin, police in Quebec invited more than seven hundred "punks and skinheads" to the local premiere of Danny Boyle's Trainspotting , a film which has been widely criticized for glamorizing heroin use
. . . Murphy Brown got a new boss. Lili Tomlin will join the F.Y.I. team as the new executive producer of the TV-show-within-a-show . . . John Travolta finally explained why he left the set of Roman Polanski's The Double in Paris last month. Among other things, Polanski insisted that Travolta appear nude in one scene. "I have never acted naked in my whole career," said the actor, "and it's not now, that I'm fat, that I'm going to start."
From wire services and Mr. Showbiz's own sources
Carrey & Tomlin Photos: © 1996 Archive Photos
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