“Beverly Hillbillies” star Max Baer Jr. is madder than ever now that he has seen how director Ron Howard portrays his late prizefighter father as a sadistic lout in “Cinderella Man.”
Howard has said he wanted the audience to view Max Baer Sr. through the eyes of hero Jimmy Braddock’s terrified family.
“That’s dishonest,” says Baer. “As bright as Ronny is, it shows his lack of ability.”
Baer is more tolerant of “Cinderella” star Russell Crowe.
Asked about Crowe’s arrest last week for throwing a telephone at a hotel desk clerk, Baer told the New York Daily News: “He’s a great actor. So he was arrested.”
Baer admits to some less-than-gentlemanly behavior in his own past. “I slapped (‘Dallas’ star) Victoria Principal on Sunset Boulevard back in 1970. She deserved it.”
Still, he wouldn’t mind mixing it up a little with Crowe. “He’s got 30 years on me, but I’d box him three three-minute rounds,” crowed the man who played Jethro Bodine. “I’m 6-4 and do 300-400 crunches a day!”
Steven Spielberg says the days when movie audiences sympathize with a lovable alien such as E.T. may be over.
“It seemed like the time was right for me as a filmmaker to let the audience experience an alien that is a little less pleasant than E.T.,” Spielberg said Monday at a post-premiere news conference in Tokyo for his new film, “War of the Worlds.” “Today, in the shadow of 9/11, I think the film has found a place in society,” said Spielberg, who directed 1982’s “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” and 1977’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” He noted the panic-causing radio play of H.G. Wells’ alien invasion novel was produced in the late 1930s, when many feared the rise of Naziism in Germany, while the 1953 movie, “The War of the Worlds,” was made during the Cold War.
Country music star Randy Travis and his wife will serve on a newly established New Mexico Music Commission, designed to promote and showcase the state’s music industry.
Travis and his wife, Elizabeth, who also is his manager, were among 24 people appointed to the commission by Gov. Bill Richardson last week. Travis has a home in Santa Fe.
Also named to the commission was singer Tony Orlando, who had the hit 1970s song, “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree.”
It wasn’t the best weekend for Christina Aguilera on the publicity front.
First, Time magazine reported that U.S. interrogators used the former Mouseketeer’s music to soften up an al-Qaeda suspect for questioning at Guantanamo, Cuba. And Aguilera apparently had such a good time the other night at the birthday party for club owner Mark Birnbaum and DJ Sky Nellor that she had to be carried out of New York nightspot Aer.
“By 3:45 a.m., she couldn”t walk on her own,” a source told the New York Daily News. “She had one arm around her fiancé, Jordan Bratman, and the other around a blond assistant.” Aguilera’s PR rep responded: “That’s not very nice.”
