It has been an amazing week in entertainment journalism. There are plenty of weeks where tons of fascinating things happen and we all watch (like that time Katie Holmes divorced Tom Cruise and pop culture aficionados did nothing but hit refresh for days).
More rarely, there are articles written that detail the inner-workings of celebrity or some behind the scenes aspect of entertainment that are must-reads because they are well written, timely or revealing. This week has been filled with those types of articles and I thought I’d do a link round-up for posterity.
-  Here Is What Happens When You Cast Lindsay Lohan in Your Movie from the New York Times: “Schrader goes over some ground rules; no trailers on set and one contractually obligated, four-way sex scene. Oh, another thing, Schrader adds: he will not try to sleep with her. This was probably a more relevant point in 1982, but no matter. Lohan stands up and says goodbye, telling everyone how excited she is to be working with them. She leaves the restaurant, followed by her mother and the mysterious man with the presents.”
- Miss Millennium: Beyoncé from GQ: “Anytime [Beyoncé] wants to remind herself of all that work—or almost anything else that’s ever happened in her life—all she has to do is walk down the hall. There, across from the narrow conference room in which you are interviewing her, is another long, narrow room that contains the official Beyoncé archive, a temperature-controlled digital-storage facility that contains virtually every existing photograph of her, starting with the very first frames taken of Destiny’s Child, the ’90s girl group she once fronted; every interview she’s ever done; every video of every show she’s ever performed; every diary entry she’s ever recorded while looking into the unblinking eye of her laptop.”
- Scientology’s Seduction of Tom Cruise from The Hollywood Reporter: “[Marty]Â Rathbun assigned [Tommy] Davis to sit with [Tom] Cruise in the parking lot of a Home Depot in Hollywood while the star was doing his Tone Scale drills — guessing the emotional state of random people coming out of the store.” <–I don’t even know what that means but it’s fascinating!
- Also? Justin Timberlake declared he cares more about music than anybody else in the world, which makes me wonder (when taken with Beyonce’s interview where she says she’s worked harder than anybody in the music business to get where she is) if there is some sort of correlation of fame and an exaggerated sense of self. But that can’t be true! Ha!