In memory of Heath Ledger, here’s a list of 79 more stars killed by drugs . . .

NEW YORK — Actor Heath Ledger was found dead Tuesday of a possible drug overdose in a Lower Manhattan apartment, the New York Police Department said.

— CNN.com

Possible drug overdose, possible suicide! Oh dear . . . another blow to the theory that being rich and/or famous is the ticket to happiness.

I think most famous actors — not all, obviously — are convinced that they can do things that nobody else can do, that they’re not cardboard people who are adored for no reason.

Tom Cruise, for example, I don’t think will ever commit suicide.

Oh well . . .

Welcome to EppsNet, where the writers are not on strike!

Striking writers are stupid. Pretend you’re a TV executive and your writers are on strike.

Oh dear! What will I do? I’ll have to show reruns and only get 90 percent of the dimbulb audience I’d get showing new episodes. Boo hoo hoo!

Television is the opiate of the masses, man! People will watch it no matter what’s on. They can’t live without it.

We’ve got TVs in restaurants, health clubs, cars, you name it. They’re ubiquitous!

The number of people like me — who think that if you want to eat dinner in front of a TV set you should stay the hell at home — is very small compared to the number of people who will not leave their homes if it means being separated from a television.

Hey scribes! People are going to turn off their flat-panel LCD high-def TVs — and do what? Read a book? Interact with their families?

Fat fucking chance!

Writers can stay on strike forever for all anybody cares.

That’s why TV shows are so stupid. They’re written by stupid people.

This just in

Stars Won’t Attend Golden Globe Awards

Golden Globe-nominated actors and presenters won’t attend the televised award show Jan. 13 because of the writers’ strike, the Screen Actors Guild announced Friday.

— People

Well then . . . that casts things in a whole new light! Actors will not attend the Golden Globes because they’d have to cross a picket line of angry wordsmiths and ink slingers.

OMG! I hope the earth doesn’t stop revolving on its axis and fling us all into space because actors are boycotting the Golden Globes telecast!

What are the Golden Globes anyway? Another excuse for actors to get together and suck each other’s dicks?

Rot in hell, thespians!

Mr. Penn, Mr. Spacey, Ms. Campbell — Thank you so much for coming to visit me. Muchas gracias!

Shortly after your visits, 80,000 Venezuelans will gather at the Central University to protest my attempts to expand my dictatorial rule. Eight of these people will be injured when masked gunmen open fire on them.

I of course will be shocked by this display of brutality — as shocked as I’ve been since Claude Rains discovered gambling at Rick’s Cafe.

The incident will no doubt raise questions in people’s minds as to whether you actually support the armed suppression of free speech, or whether you are just naive simpletons.

Regrettably, there will be a writers’ strike on at the time and you will therefore have nothing to say . . .

Tu amigo,

Hugo Chavez

From Scott Wolf Inside USC:

In 1926, MGM called USC and sent actress Greta Garbo down to pose for some publicity photos with the track team.

Garbo initially refused until MGM deducted $25 from her salary, which convinced her to head to campus and don a USC track singlet.

From a 1955 interview with Nelson Algren in The Paris Review:

INTERVIEWER: How about this movie, The Man with the Golden Arm?

ALGREN: Yeah.

INTERVIEWER: Did you have anything to do with the script?

ALGREN: No. No, I didn’t last long. I went out there for a thousand a week. and I worked Monday, and I got fired Wednesday. The guy that hired me was out of town Tuesday.

Few Americans either behind or in front of our cameras give evidence of any recognition or respect for themselves or one another as human beings, or have any desire to be themselves or to let others be themselves. On both ends of the camera you find very few people who are not essentially, instead, just promoters, little racketeers, interested in ‘the angle.’

— James Agee, October 12, 1946

Florence Lawrence: The First Movie Star

Interesting fact: Prior to 1910, movies did not list the names of the cast members! Actors were just nameless faces on the screen . . .

Continue reading HW’s True Hollywood Stories

Ignore the rumors. L.A. does have four seasons: earthquake season, fire season, riot season, and the most ravaging — pilot season. Network TV keeps groping to win over an America it despises — a viewing public it sees as a blurry, fat, brainless blob of uninsured, Hemi-powered, God-fearing Wal-Mart clerks.

— Peter Mehlman

And his hair was perfect!

Tom Cruise says wife number three has to be funny, honest

— AFP headline

As opposed to the rest of us, who would be looking for humorless liars , if we weren’t still hanging in there with our first wives.

I ask you — who is stupider: Tom Cruise or the people whose job it is to follow him around and write this crap down?

Here’s one of the weirdest ideas I’ve heard today . . .

Cinespia is screening the film Detour at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery:

Bring blankets, picnic dinner and cocktails for this special screening below and above the stars.

Continue reading Below and Above the Stars

Every once in a while, my wife is flipping channels and on comes one of these celebrity interviews . . .

Continue reading Celebrity Interviews Send Me Into a Homicidal Rage

It’s tough being ugly in Tinseltown . . .

Even when a movie — like Monster — requires an unattractive woman in the lead role, they cast a gorgeous woman and make her up to look ugly!

What is the point of that?!

Why not just cast an unattractive woman in the first place — like that Meredith girl from The Bachelorette, for example?

I was buying movie tickets with my 10-year-old boy when a woman with her 20-something daughter smiled at us and said, “When you get older, your kids will take you to the movies.”

Later, in the snack bar line, I asked him, “So are you going to take me to a movie when I get older?”

Continue reading EppsNet Goes to the Movies

Clara “Auntie Em” Blandick

Clara Blandick was born June 4, 1880, aboard an American ship in the harbor off Hong Kong.

She appeared in over 100 films, most notably as Auntie Em in The Wizard of Oz (1939).

In later years, she suffered from severe arthritis and failing eyesight.

Continue reading HW’s True Hollywood Stories

From a Dateline NBC interview with fitness guru Jack La Lanne, who will be honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on Sept. 26, his 88th birthday:

Keith Morrison: A lot of people, once they start to get older, have things like strokes and heart attacks, high blood pressure, arthritis, those kinds of diseases that are associated with age. Have you had a heart attack?

Jack La Lanne: I can’t afford to. It’d wreck my image. I can’t afford to die, man.

Continue reading Jack La Lanne at 88

With as much fun as we had doing this one, and with how much everyone enjoys these films, we should at least get together and talk about doing another one.

— Canadian funnyman Mike Myers on Austin Powers in Goldmember

Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don’t let this get around.

— Citizen Kane screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, wiring from Hollywood to Ben Hecht in New York

History doesn’t record how much fun was had “doing” Citizen Kane, but as film buffs are no doubt aware, there never was a sequel.

Director Ted Demme dies while participating in a celebrity basketball game.

I can’t think of any plausible reason for attending a celebrity basketball game other than watching some fat cokehead keel over.

Kudos, Ted!

Julia Phillips — producer (The Sting, Taxi Driver, Close Encounters of the Third Kind), author ( You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again), cocaine addict — dies of cancer in West Hollywood, Ca. She was 57.

Her book, a memoir of life in Tinseltown, made her an icon and a pariah simultaneously.

“I wasn’t a pariah because I was a drug-addicted . . . rotten person [but] because I lit them with a harsh fluorescent light and rendered them as contemptible as they truly are.”