Sixteen year-old aspiring country singer Courtney Stodden has married actor Doug Hutchinson, 51, whom you may recall played the weasely Percy Wetmore in The Green Mile. The happy couple plans a champagne toast to their nuptials in five years when the bride reaches drinking age.
The Associated Press reports: Matt Dillon, the mythical marshal of Dodge City, stood tall — all 6 feet, 6 inches of him — on "Gunsmoke" from 1955 to 1975. He outlasted dozens of other Western heroes while making history on TV's longest-running dramatic series, a record that held until NBC's "Law & Order" tied the CBS Western's record in 2010. Through all those gunslinging years, James Arness, who died Friday, kept Marshal Dillon righteous, peace-seeking and, most of all, believable.I was never a fan of Gunsmoke, but I do fondly recall Arness for playing the monster in The Thing From Another World.
Now that the long run of Verizon's "Can You Hear Me Now?" campaign is over, actor Paul Marcarelli has come out and is talking about the anti-gay abuse he endured while playing the character known as Test Man. Marcarelli has a home in Guilford, Connecticut, and five summers ago, kids in an SUV began driving past at night, yelling, “Can you hear me now?” Later, says Marcarelli, “they started screaming ‘faggot’ up at my house. It got progressively more profane as the years went by.” One night, it happened while some friends were over, and he decided to call the police. “As soon as I hung up the phone,” he says, “I realized that in order for them to do anything about it, it would have to become a report that would go into a police log.” Worried about the publicity—and the questions that might ensue if it came out that the actor playing Test Man was gay—he declined to file a report.Marcarelli has produced and written a film titled The Green, which "centers on how a small town slowly turns against a gay couple when one of the men, a schoolteacher, gets ensnared in scandal." His movie is currently being pitched to film festivals.
"Acting is kind of gay. It makes you soft. You got all these people combing your hair and putting a coat over your shoulders when you're cold. I don't want a coat over my shoulders! I'm a tough-ass [individual]! Vancouver strikes me as a San Francisco-kind of place. And I don't want [individuals] getting ideas about me. I feel in my heart I'm the toughest [individual] on the planet. And I don't want nothing changing my train of thought. If you don't believe that when we step inside the octagon, it shows." - UFC fighter Quinton "Rampage" Jackson, who is playing the role created by Mr. T. in the movie remake of The A Team. The movie was filmed in Vancouver.
Famed actor and director Dennis Hopper died at his Los Angeles home today of prostate cancer at the age of 74. Hopper had been ill with the disease since last September.In a wildly varied career spanning more than 50 years, Hopper appeared alongside his mentor James Dean in "Rebel Without a Cause" and "Giant" in the 1950s and played maniacs in such films as "Apocalypse Now," "Blue Velvet" and "Speed." He received two Oscar nominations -- for writing "Easy Rider" (with co-star Peter Fonda and Terry Southern), and for a rare heartwarming turn as an alcoholic high-school basketball coach in the 1986 drama "Hoosiers." "Easy Rider," regarded is one of the greatest films of American cinema, helped usher in a new era in which the old Hollywood guard was forced to cede power to young filmmakers such as Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese.Below, my favorite Dennis Hopper scene.
"I'd heard that a lot of professional actors were gay. Acting seemed like a chance for me to meet like-minded people. You know, at that time same-sex love in Britain got you into prison. Homosexuality was being completely hushed up. Gay teachers, politicians or firemen - that was something unthinkable. When I was young I thought I was the only gay Brit. That's why I was glad to find people like me in the actors guild." - Sir Ian McKellen, revealing that he went into acting to meet men.
"An actor's personal life should not be a factor in their believability in a role," said Jarrett Barrios, president of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. "That would be tantamount to audiences not buying Ashton Kutcher and Katherine Heigl as lovers in their upcoming film 'Killers' because the two are happily married to different people in real life." GLAAD spokesman Rich Ferraro said the magazine has not offered the apology sought by the group, but that the topic was discussed with Barrios and Dustin Lance Black, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of "Milk," during a Q&A with Newsweek on Wednesday. He said he believed that discussion would be published in the next issue.Numerous openly gay actors and their supporters have publicly blasted Newsweek and Setoodeh since the story was published.
Some Hollywood stars blasted the magazine and writer Ramin Setoodeh for an April 26 story that said it was OK for straight actors to play gay roles, but "it's rare for someone to pull off the trick in reverse." In the story, Setoodeh criticized Sean Hayes' latest leading-man performance on Broadway, writing that the openly gay actor "comes off as wooden and insincere, like he's trying to hide something, which of course he is." Ryan Murphy, creator of the hit Fox series "Glee," called for a boycott of the magazine until it apologizes to its gay readers, Hayes and "and other brave out actors who were cruelly singled out in this damaging, needlessly cruel and mind-blowingly bigoted piece."
