Tom Cruise will be bringing his special brand of crazy to United Artists, parent company MGM announced Thursday. Cruise and his longtime producing partner, Paula Wagner, have taken a “substantial minority stake” in the company, where Wagner will serve as CEO and Cruise will have the authority to greenlight and star in the big-screen adaptations of every L. Ron Hubbard novel John Travolta missed.

“You’ve got the studios accusing talent of driving up the cost of doing business and the talent accusing the studios of being political bureaucracies,” says MGM chairman and CEO Harry Sloan. “We think if we can create a talent-friendly studio, owned by artists, then we can come up with a new financial model.”

Cruise was booted in August from his former home at Paramount, after Viacom crypt-keeper Sumner Redstone insisted Cruise’s off-screen antics were hurting the bottom line on his movies. His arrival at UA marks a return to the artist-run business model on which the studio was originally founded.

A lucky garbage man finds 200 nude photos of Marcia Cross in her garbage and is planning to sell them to the highest bidder. Cross has hired a lawyer to get them back. Note to Marcia: a shredder would have been cheaper. [Hollywood Rag]

Mischa Barton and her boyfriend, Whitestarr frontman Cisco Adler, may be calling it quits. [Pop on the Pop]

Viacom Overlord Sumner Redstone puts his dentures back in for long enough to give us a few more soundbytes on why he kicked Tom Cruise to the curb. [Yeeeah!]

Courtney Love reveals that she was pursuaded to enter rehab through the efforts of none other than drunk driver extraordinaire Mel Gibson. The Kabbalah thing she picked up elsewhere. [Hollyscoop]

Brad Pitt learns of his half-naked appearance on a Vanity Fair cover along with the rest of the nation. [TMZ]

Tom and Katie’s rep have now confirmed that their wedding will be November 18th in Italy. I’m glad for Katie since she already got brainwashed and knocked up in the course of a year while waiting in vain for her big wedding. They have been engaged since June 2005, so this wedding has been “in the works” for some time. I wish them well even though I find Tom Cruise super creepy.

I wonder if the guests will dress as aliens? Seriously if anyone knows what a Scientology wedding entails please shoot me an email.

Katie Holmes’ Catholic parents have threatened to boycott her wedding to Tom Cruise if it’s held in the Scientologist tradition. They also object to the Rob Thomas mask he insists she wear throughout the ceremony.

Yes, folks, it’s that time of year again! A male prostitute claims to have had a gay dalliance with Tom Cruise! And someone is using it to try to sell a book! Hollywood Interrupted was “leaked” a chapter. In it, “Big Red” talks about his sexual misadventures with Tom Cruise during the filming of Eyes Wide Shut, as well as his rendezvous with other big name stars. It’s definitely not a PG read, and it’s not in line to win either a Pulitzer or a spelling bee, but please, please try to hang in there until Red deftly compares anal intercourse with Garth Brooks to “fucking a whale.” Because, you know, how funny is that?

From Moby’s blog. I’ve noted the spelling errors. I post this mostly because I agree, and because it echoes almost eerily the sentiments I expressed when Brad and Angelina stuck their kid on the cover of People. I’ve corrected the spelling mostly because I don’t really like Moby, either, and because nothing’s funnier to me than a moral high ground expressed fearlessly and spelled incorrectly. So without further ado:

are you kidding me?
putting your fucking CHILD on the cover of vanity fair?
are they out of their minds?
using a child as a p.r prop???
argh. question: what is more important, your ability to shepherd a child through life and give it a healthy foundation for the hardships of existence, or usingit to get a vanity fair cover?
using children as p.r props does disgust me, i have to admit.
in the grand scheme of things fame pales in comparison to family and child-rearing.
i don’t know tom cruise and katie holmes, but i really cannot for a second fathom the mindset of parents who would sell pictures of their children and use their children to get better press coverage.
i’m sorry, i try not to be too judgemental judgmental, but it’s gross.
shouldn’t children have to be cogniscent cognizant of what’s actually going on before they’re being used by their parents to be on the cover of magazines?
not to sound too old fashioned, but if parenthood and infancy are not sacred in our culture, what is?
it just seems fucking grotesque to me, to use your newborn to get press coverage.
ugh.
moby

HELLO SEPTEMBER 12.

I love you.

• I think our nation’s club owners have figured out that turning away Paris Hilton is a surefire way to get their club’s name in all the papers. I’m totally okay with that, Rose Bar at Ian Schrager’s Gramercy Park Hotel.
• I don’t know at what point Tom Cruise stopped being hot, but it totally happened.
• Britney Spears got that baby out, a healthy baby boy born just before 2 am on September 12. After cutting the umbilical cord, the doctors pierced the baby’s ear and tattooed his upper arm.
• I don’t know if the bigger news is that Jude and Sienna are dating again, or that Us Weekly’s blog totally said “f-buddies.”
• Justin Timberlake’s avant-garde masterpiece, FutureSex/LoveSounds, drops today. You know you’ve really pushed the boundaries of contemporary soundscape when the whole album is available on MTV’s The Leak.
• Eva Longoria takes a pre-emptive strike against her imminent irrelevance; it’s not that she won’t have options after Desperate Housewives runs its threadbare course, it’s just that she doesn’t want to do any of them.

• Orlando Bloom decides he can’t see Kate Bosworth anymore. No, really, he can’t actually see her anymore.
• It’s official: Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes found a baby to adopt! Katie Couric kicked off her CBS career with the pics. From the looks of the kid, some 15-year-old prostitute in Cambodia is a real big fan of Scientology these days.
• It’s not that Victoria Beckham is pregnant, it’s just that her husband doesn’t speak Spanish.
• When a lot of rich people have invested a lot of money in you, you don’t have to go to jail for petty things like using heroin and selling cocaine to teenagers in rehab. Isn’t that right, Pete Doherty?
• Jessica Simpson denies she’s dating John Mayer on the View today. So if we could just get a moratorium on all “Is Jessica Simpson’s Body a Wonderland?” headlines for awhile, that’d be great, mmkay?