No Stopping The Creep Of Hollywood Gossip

Sun Herald

Sunday June 10, 2007

Mia Freedman Mia Freedman is the creative services director at Channel Nine and an editorial consultant for ACP Magazines.

I HAD a fight with a friend this week. And I'm not proud to admit it was about Britney Spears. My friend thinks Britney can make a comeback. I think she's a lost cause.

"But she's the most Googled person in the world," she claims.

"That's just because people are looking for her vagina," I counter. "She's over."

You'd think two grown women would have more worthy things to debate, but on this occasion you'd be wrong.

Look, I haven't written about Britney, Lindsay, Paris or their fellow passengers on the Young Hollywood Train Wreck for months because, frankly, I got a bit obsessed with their idiocy last year and wrote about them far too much. So I've been doing my own kind of rehab. But in an article about Lindsay's return to actual rehab this week, I learnt that relapse is often part of the recovery process. Which, like, totally lets me off the hook with today's column.

Young Hollywood appears to be imploding. Well, not ALL of young Hollywood. At the time of going to press, Dakota Fanning and Suri Cruise still appear to be sober and without criminal charges pending. But the rest of them?

Stuffed.

It's top news for parents of impressionable young girls: lifestyles of the rich and famous 20-somethings are looking less aspirational and more . . . well . . . drinking before breakfast. And not in a freshly squeezed juice kinda way.

In case you have a life, a brain or used to be Amish, you may have missed several scintillating developments in Hollywood these past few weeks. I've not missed a minute so I'll give you the abbreviated version. Paris Hilton went to jail. Then she got out of jail. Then I lost track. Mischa Barton went to hospital. Lindsay Lohan went back to rehab via hospital. Jail possibly afterwards. And Nicole Richie went to hell in a hand basket after an email was leaked, inviting friends to a party where "There will be a scale at the front door. No girl over 100 pounds (45.4 kilograms) will be allowed in. Start starving yourself now!" She's due to be sentenced to jail herself shortly, for multiple DUI convictions, before or after which she'll undoubtedly squeeze in rehab and hospital, not necessarily in that order.

I suspect you don't even need to be a gossip tragic to know many of these things because they're routinely headline news items. Twenty-year-olds getting wasted and crashing their cars are apparently more interesting than the Iraq war, the drought and IR laws.

To test my suspicions about the cultural creep of celebrity trivia, I decided to do a quick inter-generational test.

First up, I emailed my parents. Classic baby boomers. "What can you tell me about Paris, Britney and Lindsay Lohan?" I asked. My father was surprisingly knowledgeable. "Paris drives a Bentley. Stupid car for her - she should be driven in limos. Would have kept her out of trouble. By the way, she isn't really the heiress to the Hilton fortune, neither is her father, I don't think. So she has to work. Britney I'm also not very familiar with. Not my musical genre. I think Lindsay is the sidekick?"

My mother was equally impressive. "Paris and Lindsay making a career of being bad girls. Paris about to go to jail for driving without a licence or DUI or both. Lindsay checking back into rehab - drugs? Alcohol? Did she have a car accident? Or was that Nicole Richie? She's the super skinny one.

"Britney I know less about. She shaves her head. And goes out with no pants on. And recently got divorced. And has a child. Is she also back in rehab? Sad, bad role models for young girls. It's a shame about Lindsay Lohan - she's a good actress. I saw her in A Prairie Home Companion."

Right, then. It seems like my ability to absorb celebrity guff could be an inherited genetic trait. Or maybe it's just because I give mum my gossip mags after I'm finished with them and they eventually make their way to the bathroom, where my dad picks them up.

Next, I phoned my grandfather, a switched-on former doctor, now in his 80s. "Grandpa, do you know who Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan are?" I asked.

"Yes, I know their names but I know nothing whatsoever about them," he replied happily.

"Do you know what they do?"

"Well, they're apparently celebrities but I don't know what they contribute to the world. And I actively try not to know because I believe they don't contribute much."

"So, how do you even know their names?"

"From reading your column. I also see them mentioned in the newspaper sometimes but I deliberately avoid reading it."

"So do you know about anything that's happened to them lately?"

"No idea!" he declared triumphantly.

I decided to spare my 97-year-old grandmother-in-law a phone call on the same subject because her hearing isn't great on the phone and I can safely assume she thinks Paris is a city in Europe. If only.

Oops, I really am rich

WHO wants to be a billion-heiress? Not formerSeinfeld actor Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who has been trying to wriggle out of her inclusion on Forbes magazine's list of Hottest Billionaire Heiresses.The Forbes list states that Julia's dad, William Louis-Dreyfus, is a businessman worth $3.4 billion. Julia initially tried to deny her heiress status, telling a reporter "I wish I was a billionaire but I'm actually not". Later, when asked what her father did, she admitted: "He does stuff that I don't understand with grains and energy and selling commodities. That goes in one ear and out the other."

Stone cold truth

SHARON Stone's did-she-or-didn't-she scene in Basic Instinct, where she possibly flashes her lady garden during a police interrogation, has been voted the most paused video moment by readers of a British newspaper. Compared with the material on the internet today and the stars who see knickers as an unnecessary wardrobe item, that scene is almost quaint. It certainly helped catapult an average movie into iconic pop culture status. Admit it. You rented it. You paused.

© 2007 Sun Herald

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