Last night, George Clooney cobbled together a phone bank whose average adjusted gross income was higher than Haiti’s combined gross national product in all of the 90’s. The celebrity-manned phone lines and musical performances by Madonna, Beyonce, Justin Timberlake, Taylor Swift, Chris Martin, Bono, Jay-Z, Rihanna and more,  pulled in over $16 Million dollars.

Did any of you dial-a-celeb and phone in a donation? If you missed your chance, you can still contribute by preordering  any of the songs performed last night  on iTunes.

I applaud the stars’ desire to contribute to a good cause, but groaned when Beyonce inserted “Haiti” into her song “Halo.” I can’t stand it when artists insert words from current events willy-nilly into already established hit songs for the purposes of “tribute”. Bastardizing one of your already established hit singles just seems like such a lazy way out. I cringed when Elton John did it with “Candle in the Wind”, and Beyonce sure as shit ain’t no Elton John.

More telethon clips featuring Robert Pattinson and his facial hair, Madonna, JT, Jennifer Hudson, Taylor Swift, and Xtina after the jump.

Editor’s Note: As of this morning, the news services have upgraded the amount of money raised by the telethon to an estimated $57 Million!!

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There’s no nice way for me to say this and I really don’t know or care about anything Twilight related, but K-Stew and R-Patz looked like death warmed over at the premiere of New Moon in NYC. Kristen’s dress is great and her skin is looking flawless, but both of them look worn down to bits. Their “people” should have just let them skip the event and take a nap because from the looks of it, they are in dire need of a Z session.

Time magazine published a fantastic article today about the Twilight books and movies. I think the most interesting part is about how Stephenie Meyer wound up writing the books:

The story begins with a dream. It wasn’t the Great American Dream–Stephenie Meyer, then a 29-year-old Mormon housewife living in Arizona, wasn’t sitting at home trying to figure out how to be the next mega-best-selling author. It was a different kind of dream.

On the morning of June 2, 2003, Meyer woke up with the fading afterimage of a vision in her head, of a young woman and a vampire, talking, in a meadow. She didn’t want to forget it, so she wrote it down. Then she kept on writing. Sometimes you have the dream, and sometimes the dream has you.

And how the publisher ended up acquiring it:

The woman who would publish meyer, Megan Tingley, was handed the manuscript in November 2003, right before she got on a cross-country flight to California. She wasn’t expecting great things. She’d never heard of Meyer. Nobody had. She wasn’t a vampire fan either.

But she spent the entire flight riveted by that 600-page bundle of paper. “I kept thinking, Well, she can’t possibly sustain this,” Tingley remembers. “The whole book is going to fall apart. She’s a first-time writer. I was with a colleague, and he was trying to sleep, and I kept pulling him awake and reading passages to him.”

Even though it was an early draft–back then Bella and her undead boyfriend Edward actually got married at the end–by the time she got off the plane, Tingley was desperate to buy it. But it was a Friday, and everyone was gone for the day. “So I just left a bunch of insane messages back at Little, Brown and with the agent and said, ‘Call me Monday. We have to talk!’” she says. “I pre-empted it on Monday from a street in San Francisco on my cell phone.”

But most of America will be talking about this little gem, from the original Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke:

By all accounts, the chemistry between the two leads was intense, maybe too intense. “After I cast him, I told Rob, Don’t even think about having a romance with her,” Hardwicke says. “She’s under 18. You will be arrested.” It was the beginning of the real-life are-they-aren’t-they, did-they-didn’t-they speculation that is now an ongoing subplot of the Twilight story. “I didn’t have a camera in the hotel room. I cannot say,” Hardwicke says. “But in terms of what Kristen told me directly, it didn’t happen on the first movie. Nothing crossed the line while on the first film. I think it took a long time for Kristen to realize, O.K., I’ve got to give this a go and really try to be with this person.”

Soooo, is this a confirmation or what? I mean, I guess I don’t need Catherine Hardwicke to confirm anything for me, I’ll just go ahead and state the obvious: These two people have had sexual intercourse. Duh. But are they a couple currently? Who knows, but this will for sure get people talking … even if Kristen won’t. Anyway. The whole article is fascinating — a highly recommended read.

Here are pics of our darling little Twilight kids at a fan event in Madrid today.

Okay, okay, it’s possible that he didn’t really mean that he struggled with mental illness, even though lots of media outlets are reporting it that way.

Robert Pattinson — I think his people are transitioning to “Rob Pattinson” now — has admitted in an interview in New magazine that he’s a bit all over the place when it comes to relationships. The actor said “You over-analyze everything — you analyze how if you say one thing, someone likes you, and if you say another, they don’t. You begin to experiment on people, which isn’t good for real life. I don’t think I’m very romantic any more — just manic depressive.”

Well people characterize themselves as bipolar or manic-depressive all the time (as well as crazy, psycho, schizo).  It’s a bad habit that our society has picked up (I’m certainly very guilty of it) to use mental illness terms in common speech.

I don’t know if Pattinson was being serious or not — he did say that he hasn’t been officially diagnosed — but he can pretty much assume that the “mental illness” label (as well as the Kristen Stewart’s boyfriend label) will be brought up at every single press junket and interview that he ever does for the rest of his career.

“I have very specific ideas about how I want to do my work and how I want to be perceived and when…and to the point of ridiculousness sometimes. I don’t listen to anyone else, that’s why I don’t have a publicist at all, I can’t stand it when someone is telling me how to do something. It’s maybe a mistake sometimes. I like being, meticulous and its difficult as an actor to have that control.”

- Twilight star Robert Pattinson sounding a little OCD yet remarkably down to earth while answering questions at the New Moon press junket in LA yesterday.

And in the boneheaded casting category, we have Robert Pattinson competing against Rupert Friend and Rupert Grint for a role as Prince Harry in a movie about his life.

Rupert Friend, 28, and Harry Potter star Rupert Grint, 21, will go head-to-head with R-Pattz to portray the prince on screen.

The movie, called The Spare, will cover the highs of lows of his royal experiences, including the death of his mother Princess Diana and his time spent on the front line of the Army in Afghanistan.

With the screenplay in the works, film bosses are searching for the perfect young star. Filming is set to begin next year in both the UK and the Middle East.

I’m sorry, but in what universe would Robert Pattinson make a good Prince Harry? The only reason to cast him would be to secure the swooning female moviegoer dollar, which is probably their primary aim with this flick.

For the sake of cinematography, I hope they cast Rupert Grint. Not only is he scads more believable, but personally, I’d like to see him get a chance to stretch his acting skills and prove whether or not he’s capable of more than the rubber-faced “schmacting” they make him do in the Potter flicks.

Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson were snapped cozying up at a Kings of Leon concert in Vancouver this weekend (yes, the rest of the cast was there, too).  Do these two look like a couple or do these two look like they’re too stoned to keep their heads up?  Personally, I think it could go either way.

Oh, and the last picture in the gallery is of the two of them kissing.  I guess …  For me, no matter how long I stared at it, I really couldn’t tell.  It was like those 3D posters from the ’90s that had the hidden picture in them.  I could never see the hidden picture.

Images via INFPhoto.com