NEW YORK (Billboard) - The rap triumvirate of Eminem, Dr. Dre and 50
Cent soared 77 places to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart
on Thursday, setting a new first-week record for download sales.
"Crack a Bottle" sold 418,000 downloads, surpassing the prior record
of 335,000 downloads shifted last October by T.I.'s "Live Your Life"
featuring Rihanna.
Eminem, Dr. Dre and 50 Cent, each with highly anticipated albums on
the way, previously collaborated on "Encore," which peaked at No. 25 on
the Hot 100 in January 2005.
NASHVILLE (Billboard) - If anyone had any doubt that touring is
where the money is in today's music business, a look at Billboard's top
moneymakers of 2008 should hammer the point home.
Regardless of genre, retail sales or radio play, each of the 20 acts
on the moneymakers list toured last year. For almost all of them,
touring generated the most revenue. And in a year when recorded-music
sales declined yet again, many earned more at the box office than ever
before.
Madonna was No. 1 on the list with $242.2 million. She had the
50th-best-selling album i
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Nothing serves Hollywood better than a world on the brink.
Look at the year in film. War and a full-blown
recession haven't stopped moviegoers from plunking down $10 a ticket.
Brisk business over the Christmas weekend pushed 2008 ticket sales to
$9.5 billion — within striking distance of the record set last year of
$9.6 billion.
Of course, rising ticket prices means that attendance remains relatively flat, and it could dip slightly from last year.
A pretty blond Ohio woman used as a decoy for Jamie Lynn Spears in a ham-handed switcheroo to fool paparazzi wants Los Angeles airport police to pay for duping her, too.
Adessa Eskridge, 27, has filed a claim seeking more than $100,000 from the city over the bungled hoax at LAX in September, her Houston-based lawyer Chuck Vernon said.
He
said a group of six to eight uniformed cops plucked Eskridge from Jamie
Lynn's fli
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Actress checks into Promises Treatment Center for undisclosed addiction
Only a couple of months after telling People magazine that
her party days were behind her and that she's merely a "social
drinker," actress Tara
Reid has checked into Promises Treatment Center in Malibu,
Calif.
Reid, 33, checked herself in on Tuesday (Dec. 9) for an undisclosed
addiction.
No freshman network show is recognized, but HBO's 'In Treatment' and 'True Blood' get nods.
By Matea Gold
Reporting from New York -- A raft of familiar names in the television
industry were nominated for Golden Globes on Thursday, underscoring the
difficulty new shows have had gaining traction this season.
Among
the series nominated for the awards, which recognize the best
programming in 2008, there was not a single freshman show that debuted
on broadcast television this fall. The Hollywood Foreign Press Assn.
ignored "The Mentalist," the one significant hit of the season, as well
as programs like "Fringe" and "Life on Mars" that were launched with
high expectations.
Instead of crowning hot new shows, the
organization focused largely on returning programs such as "House," "30
Rock" and "Brothers & Sisters." The actors singled out for
recognition included many past nominees such as Tony Shalhoub, Sally
Field, Kyra Sedgwick, Alec Baldwin and Steve
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Keanu Reeves admits to being a big science
fiction fan, so when offered the chance to play an alien for new movie
"The Day the Earth Stood Still," Reeves said he jumped at it.
But before his fans think the "Matrix" star has signed on for just
another big-budget space flick that is long on action but has little to
say, Reeves wants them to know this remake of a 1951 cult classic
speaks to today's audiences.
The movie is released in U.S. theaters on Friday.
"It's about the world we live in and the destructive nature of man,
so it gives you a lot to think about," Reeves told Reuters. "It's very
timely."
Growing up in the 1970s, the Canadian-born Reeves, 44, said he loved
the "Stars Wars" movies and read books like "1984" and
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Chris Baker, Travis Barker's assistant, died after a September plane crash.
The
widow of Chris Baker, Travis Barker's assistant who was killed in a
September plane crash, has slapped a tire and aviation company with a
wrongful death lawsuit.
Otilia Villar Baker and her son Sebastian claim that the pilots
"negligently decided to abort and/or reject the takeoff," TMZ.com
reports, meaning that they knew the tires were faulty but went ahead
with the flight anyway.
L.A. County Superior Courts will rule on the suit, which asserts
that Baker suffered "severe pre and post-im
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Tom Cruise, publicly maligned for
over-the-top behavior in two TV interviews, has admitted to People
magazine he could have "handled things better" and even joked about his
couch-jumping antics on Oprah Winfrey's talk show.
Cruise's admission comes three years after he leapt onto a couch on
Winfrey's daytime chat show in front of millions of viewers and
proclaimed his love for then-girlfriend Katie Holmes. In a separate
incident, Cruise got into a testy exchange over psychiatry with Matt
Lauer on "The Today Show."
"I think I could have handled things better," Cruise told the magazine in an interview for its December 22 issue.
Cruise called the incident on Winfrey's show, "My year of jumping
dangerously," in a comedic reference to "The Year of Living
Dangerously," a novel turned into a 1982 movie.
