Lunching with The Cerrones

The happy looking group above all attended jeweler Nic Cerrone's now legendary Mother's Day lunch. Nic(left) is one of the countries most amiable purveyors of gorgeous gems and has happy customers world-wide.
He's also logged up a raft of international awards for his designs.
Most visiting stars including Barbra Streisand drop by his store (she also dined with Nic and family at their Hunters Hill mansion.)
Weekends for the Cerrones are spent at their Bowral retreat when they aren't hosting the well heeled. Amongst his recent creations was a $200,000 engagement ring for Lara Bingle during her doomed romance with cricket captain Michael Clarke. Perhaps he can whip one up for actor Sam Worthington !

Sunburnt Superstar

 Tropfest 2013 was held for the last time yesterday in The Domain. In it's 21st year founder John Polson announced a change of venue- Centennial Park and date- December.
100,000 viewer turned up for the evening of short films and this year's judges included a sunburnt Sam Worthington, Magda Szubanski , Richard Roxburgh and Rebecca Gibney

 Nicholas Clifford's We've All Been There  won first prize while second prize went to the only documentary, Better Than Sinatra.

Indiana Evans

Josh Thomas

Magda Szubanski

Richard Roxburgh and Silvia Colloca

Kate Miller Heidke

Rebecca Gibney

Fairfax : Stating the Bleeding Obvious or Taking The Piss

 The Fairfax family were once the proud owners of titles like the Sydney Morning Herald first published in 1831 and the Melbourne Age established in 1854 and once regarded as one of the greatest broadsheets on the planet.
The Fairfax family have long departed (making hundreds of millions of dollars in the process) and the Fairfax empire has been stumbling along badly ever since. The last remaining family member John B.Fairfax sold his shares for $189M in 2011.
 Reputedly the editor who spent time and money trying to convince Fairfax board members to embrace digital was booted only to be snapped up by The Guardian in the UK which now slightly lags behind the Mail Online as the most popular newspaper website in the world.

Tomorrow's Sydney Morning Herald will feature a piece titled Most powerful players in Australian film, basically a list of household names who command power and big money in the Australian film industry. the real heavy hitters with surprising results it trumps !

Well not quite. Sam Worthington, Chris Hemsworth, Geoffrey Rush, Mia Kasalwoska, Rose Byrne, Hugh Jackman, Emile Sherman etc etc are unlikely to surprise anyone. And who is one of their sources ?

Rose Byrne

A photo agency called Jamie Fawcett Photo News run by Jamie Fawcett the photographer bankrupted by Fairfax during a court case in which Nicole Kidman appeared as a witness.
A Shuttle reader sent us an email a week ago with 2 screen shots which we cannot display for legal reasons.
The Sydney Morning Herald had published a story about the arrest of a union official. We had already read the tale the night before on a website called Independent Australia which has been miles ahead of both News Ltd and Fairfax on the same story. In the first screen shot the SMH claimed it had "exposed the embezzlement" of union funds by the official as well as claiming something similar about a Member of Parliament.

By Mid-day the word 'allegedly' had finally been inserted before the damaging claims. Did Fairfax inform their readers of their mistake and apologise as  their code of conduct requires ?. Most certainly not. 

The editor of Independent Australia, David Donavon has ripped into Fairfax over their incorrect claim in their Brisbane Times that a woman had yelled at Prime Minister Julia Gillard during a Queensland community meeting that she was 'white trash', duly reported by the BT and picked up around the country by various news outlets.
What the woman actually said which is clearly audible on BT's own website is that "we are not white trash" referring to herself and her son.

The Sun

And the Brisbane Time's reaction when asked to correct the lie : total denial it had ever happened.

Sydney Morning Herald

Fairfax share price is plunging almost weekly despite it owning a reputed $5B in assets. Staff are being made redundant at a great rate with 29 fired a fortnight ago in Melbourne.
A month ago the Shuttle ran into a former Fairfax editor, now publisher of on-line magazines. Asked to comment on the anouncment that Fairfax will go digital in 9 years he scoffed. "5 at the most and possibly 3" was his reply. 

On Thursday the Shuttle attended the opening of the French brasserie style Aranas Bar in The Rocks owned by the same people as the nearby Lowenbrau beer cellar. We had forgotten it was Oktoberfestt and had to pick our way past a blaring oompah band and some thigh slapping chaps in lederhosen (we are assured they are of German descent). It was a reasonably staid affair with good food and copious amounts of Veuve Clicquot but the Shuttle didn't visit the Gents or we may have witnessed the bizarre urinals that became a feature the following day in the media.

Gina Rinehart

What we did notice is that the venerable Sydney Morning Herald produced a piece that was almost a carbon copy of Britain's infamous The Sun newspaper which 20 years ago would have been it's ideological opposite, quoting the same sources, feminist Ann Summers and former Parliamentarian Meredith Burgmann.

Will readers sign up to a digital version of Fairfax Newspaper to read this stuff ?. And more importantly, why is the world's richest woman Gina Rinehart snapping up Fairfax shares as they plunge. Is it to put it out of it's misery?.
                                  

avoid Los Angeles this week..

Is Skippy on the menu tonight ?

           LA must be thrilled with it all-'G'Day USA' kicks off today with "Come Walkabout in Beverly Hills'. No it ain't a guided tour of movie star homes but an Australian 'cultural' event at the The Paley Center for Media, where the general US public is invited to sample Aussie wines, take walkabout travelogues and view cultural performances. Presumably a didgerdoo player-that always dazzles the crowds and maybe a few indigenous kiddies dancing.

         Tonight is the gala black tie dinner at the Hollywood & Highland Grand Ballroom where invited guests include Bryan Brown and Rachel Ward, Nicole Kidman and hubby Keith and acting brothers Chris and Liam Hemsworth. Liam is currently dating Miley Cyrus and the pair just jetted out from Melbourne after a secret visit.

        Other guests have been invited to accept an inevitable award-Greg Norman for sport, Toni Collette for 'Excellence in FIlm and Television' and the USA's current TV heart-throb who has just been voted the most popular man on television, ex -Home and Away star Simon Baker whose series The Mentalist may be pulling small audiences in the UK but is the USA's current Number One show.

 

There is no way the organisers could get away with not inviting Olivia Newton John of course and Honorary Aussie John Travolta who literally parks a vintage Qantas Boeing 707 in his backyard

 And it would be impossible to get this one of the ground without Avatar star-Sam Worthington.  Oh, and needless to say Russell Crowe along with Rupert Murdoch and wife Wendi.

    

But where is our favourite lady Dame Edna ?. Sadly her manager Barry Humphries says she has other duties back home to perform which also means no diplomatic representation in the form of Minister for The Yartz, Sir Les Patterson.

Entertainment sounds fine-with boy band Human Nature -but celebrity chef Peter Evans who will be feeding the guests ominously specialises in Kangaroo recipes and may present his take on the prawn cocktail-'prawn and avocado stack'.

Tickets-at from $5000 to $10,000 each sold out weeks ago.  And yes, of course Hugh Jackman will be the MC !
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ps : an email arrives to inform us we forgot to mention another star guest at tonight's LA dinner-former Miss Universe winner Jennifer Hawkins who will be with her boyfriend, the handsome model Jake Wall who has become a gay pin-up in the USA. Very re-miss of us, particularly as Hawkins hit a few headlines around the world recently with her Marie Claire magazine "un-air brushed" photo shoot.

The cover was the concept of Marie Claire's brilliant editor Jackie Frank, daughter of Melbourne social scribe Lillian Frank.

         tSS accompanied Jennifer on her triumphant 2 week tour of Oz when she won the title. Having been up close and personal on numerous occasions and in back stage dressing-rooms with Jennifer we can assure there are few imperfections that need to be air-brushed. Yet another superb campaign by Frank who fronted interviews stating she couldn't understand all the fuss !.
     tSS's snap of Hawkin's unscripted wardrobe malfunction (above) during that tour also hit a few front page newspapers worldwide earning tSS enough for a recuperating rest in Bali after the hullaballoo died down.
       Hawkins has gone onto to become the most successful Miss Universe ever, earning up to $5M a year in endorsements. She recently told tSS she has been offered a role in a US TV series. More about that soon.

what a difference a year makes..

A year ago he was a happy-go-lucky young actor about town but now armed with a Hollywood publicist actor Sam Worthington has returned to Oz and is refusing all photograph opportunities as he rides the Avatar publicity circuit.

The December world-wide release of the James Cameron's 3D space epic is certain to catapult Worthington into instant international stardom and make Sam a new movie heart throb. Avatar is predicted to be the blockbuster's blockbuster. Here is an earlier Shuttle snap of Worthington-he hasn't changed much. He's still a nice chap.

Aussie US invasion continues

With Hugh Jackman having conquered both New York in the "Boy From Oz' and now Hollywood with his blockbuster Wolverine and actor Sam Worthingtom well on the road to become a new movie heartthrob in James Cameron's 3D epic Avatar, news comes of another Australian hitting the heights in New York.

26 year old Amelia Lester has appeared virtually overnight in the publishing world to take the helm as publishing editor of one of the world's most prestigious magazines-The New Yorker.

Little is known of Lester-well she's too young for one, but she has only been in New York for 4 years after graduating from Harvard. Lester did a stint at the Paris Review and then served as a fact checker for noted Yorker writers like Seymour Hersh and Jane Meyer as well as writing the occassional piece for the mag.

However she must have impressed hard-nosed David Remick of  Conde Nast. She will be one of the youngest editors on one the most respected US magazines with a highly coverted position.

## an eagle eyed Shuttler contacted me to illuminate me further on the very clever Amelia Lester.  Amelia was a student at the state run North Sydney Girl's High School as recently as  2001 and regarded as one of the brightest sparks. She also did a stint at Vogue before heading off to Harvard. She's certainly a great advert for the much derided state run schools.