Naomi Watts Boots Nicole Off Top Spot

Actress Naomi Watts is top of BRW's Young Rich List this
year having been paid $19M for two movies this year which include J.Edgar which opened to poor takings in the US.

Nicole Kidman took a paltry $18.6M by comparison but both ladies beat Russell Crowe and Hugh Jackman despite Jackman's box office record breaking run on Broadway. Last year's winners-ACDC received only $9M compared to their whopping $131M takings during their world tour in 2010.

 

And Aussie dinosaurs are still winner Walking With Dinosaurs-the Arena Spectacular took $62M while the radio announcer who many says has dinosaur like views Kyle Sandilands made $3M despite losing millions of dollars in sponsors after his recent outbursts.

Why George Clooney is in Sydney

George with Renee Brack yesterday

Hollywood actor George Clooney gave a talk yesterday at a Darling Harbour conference for a reputed fee of $600,000 and today he revealed the reason shortly before he departed Australia.

Clooney has his own satellite positioned over the Sudan with which he attempts to track war lords and criminals. Maintaining the satellite costs around $2M a year and his speaking fees pay for that. The satellite is used to postion where those criminals are to aid the safe delivery of food and medical supplies to the Sudanese.

Clooney has been a long time activist attempting to ease famine in the Sudan and has visited the region several times. It's said he also donated his fees from two films to the cause.

Kevin Spacey, Madame Arcati : An Obesession With Penises

Kevin Spacey’s Richard III closed last night after a triumphant  run at the Lyric Theatre with Spacey receiving standing ovations. After the final performance Spacey shared champagne with billionaire Paul Ramsay who had forked out a $200,000 donation to the Kevin Spacey Foundation for a pair of tickets and another 100 grand for a game of tennis with the actor.

One theatre patron who wasn’t too taken with Spacey’s acting or the Sam Mendes production was former NSW premier Bob Carr who walked out of the play at interval and ripped into the Hollywood star's performance on his blog Thought Lines. 

Another who is probably not on Spacey’s Christmas card list is the famous British blogger Madame Arcati who has finally hung up her bicycle clips. Madame announced a week ago that her four year run was at an end.

Arcati has delighted, amused and horrified readers in equal doses but it was when she ignited a family feud amongst the Spacey family that her readership went through the roof.

Madame interviewed Spacey’s brother Randy Fowler in 2008. Randy had written a book Spacey’s Brother: Out of the Closet  in which he revealed that as a child he was regularly raped by his father who was was obsessed with pornography, was anti-Semitic and a member of the American Nazi Party.

Then Randy’s ex-wife Stephanie Mastini contacted Aracti bemoaning Spacey's superiority complex and claimed Randy was being ignored by his famous sibling.

Randy

Stephanie

Over the next two years matters degenerated into a family squabble with Stephanie’s sister Francine Mastini entering the fray calling her sibling Madame Batshit.

Finally Randy Fowler returned fire blaming Madame Arcati for all the fuss and accused all and sundry of trying to out his Oscar winning brother as gay.

There had already been much snickering about Spacey-who is the current artistic director of the Old Vic Theatre in London-after he was mugged in a London park at 4.30am by a young man who stole his mobile phone. (The incident brought back memories of the legendary BBC correspondent Sir Robin Day who had  been similarly mugged in Holland Park Walk whilst taking a constitutional walk. Day said at the time he had no idea the Walk was a gay beat even though he had lived nearby for 20 years.)

Soon Randy's ghost writer Jack Ewing chipped in and not to be left out, Spacey's biographer 

Randy Tamblyn had a few words to say as well.

The outcome was a rash of twitter bannings by Spacey with Madame Arcati and Stephanie being consigned to the sin bin where they have probably been joined by Bob Carr.

The penises ?. The man who is reputedly the mastermind behind the Madame Aracti blog  Victor Olliver has fled to the gentler world of Astrology and has become resident star gazer for the famous publication The Lady, Britain's oldest published magazine. 

Editor of The Lady, Rachel Johnson (sister of London's Lord Mayor Boris Johnson) has just resigned with dreadful timing to join the PR fixers Bell Pottinger.

The magazine's publisher Julia Budworth once accused Johnson of being "obsessed with penises".

Live In Person : George Clooney !

Quite how the list of guest speakers at Mondays' gala event in Sydney-Global Leadership Forum will enlighten those shelling out between $880 and $1100 with is any one's guess but the line-up is fairly glitzy.

Home maker expert Martha Stewart will be talking about 'building a global brand' and the promoters are claiming she "had more influence on how Americans, eat, entertain, and decorate their homes and gardens than any one person in our history" while Hip Hop entrepreneur Russell Simmons will be spruiking his latest book Super Rich: A Guide to Having it All. Perhaps the 99percenters on Wall Street should grab a copy.

One speaker who should be interesting is Nobel Peace prize winner Muhammad Yunus who started Grameen Bank in Bangladesh in 1983 to help poor people escape from poverty by providing loans on terms suitable to them. Maybe the big four Australian banks who make multi billion dollar profits each year but were just dragged kicking and screaming to pass on the half percent interest rate drop in the past few days will take note.

But the biggest draw card commanding a reputed fee of $500,000 must be heart throb movie star George Clooney -live in person as the website says-who arrives this morning. He will talk on human rights and saving the planet, and those on it.
                                                                                               
Let's hope this conference is more successful than the last event the Shuttle attended, former British PM Tony Blair's speech at Darling Harbour earlier this year When Blair arrived surrounded by a dozen body guards and Federal Police he was greeted by just 4 media reps and a half empty room.

The only other Ra Ra event the Shuttle has attended was one many years ago hosted by advertising guru Siimon Reynolds and real estate genius John McGrath. We ended up standing on our chair shouting slogans along with the other eager bright eyed punters. But it was 8 am in the morning and after 2 glasses of champagne-the bribe we accepted to be there.

Tickets for the Global Leadership Forum Unwrapping Genius are still on sale here

Sydney : Know Thyself

Maybe it says a lot about Sydneysiders- the fact that they know little of the man the city is named after.

 Lord Sydney, Tommy Townshend was the British Home Secretary when two fledgling towns were named in his honour, Sydney in Nova Scotia in 1785 and the NSW colony’s capital Sydney Town in 1788.

Viscount Sydney

But its Thomas Townshend’s enlightened policies that the country owes much to and which make today’s ‘law and order’ exponents look decidedly narrow minded as Lord Sydney’s biographer, barrister and former politician Andrew Tink admitted today.

 On 702 ABC with Richard Glover Tink said many of the policies he raged about when he was Opposition Attorney General for many years were far to the right of Townshend’s ideals

Lord Sydney was determined that the convict colony should be an example of penal reform and the first governor Arthur Phillip was ordered to ensure once convicts had served their sentence they were to be re-admitted back into society with the rights enjoyed by ordinary citizens and encouraged to pursue an honest career. Where possible convicts could work whilst serving their sentence and paid suitable wages. There was to be no slave labour in the new colony. Such ideals survive now only in Scandinavian countries.

When he declared the colony should have civil courts, much to the chagrin of his cabinet colleagues in London who pondered who would actually access them, Townshend declared prisoners of course. In fact the first case was a serving convict who successfully sued the captain of the ship that had transported him for losing his luggage.

Andrew Tink

When Townshend was ennobled he took his title from a favourite uncle Algernon Sidney (family squabbles forced the change in spelling) who was executed by Charles II for treason for republican sympathies.

 Lord Sydney has been largely over looked by historians. Manning Clark claimed he was irrelevant and mediocre but the truth is somewhat different.

While remaining loyal to the Crown Sydney sympathised with the American colonialists during the War of Independence and it was he who eventually negotiated peace with the new American republicans and managed to retain the Canadian colonies for loyalists to settle in. His influence on all three countries was substantial but largely forgotten, especially in the Australian city named after him which has continued somewhat with Townsend’s egalitarian ideals.

It’s taken Andrew Tink 7 years to find a publisher but after the success of his award winning biography of the great explorer William Charles Wentworth Ascension Press have now published Lord Sydney, The Life and Times of Tommy Townshend.Click here for more details.

A Letter From Hugh Jackman

..written to a sixteen year old Hugh Jackman....

See more at Dear Me : A Letetr to My Sixteen Yearl Old Self with JK Rowling, Alice Cooper, Stephen King, Danni Minogue with donations going to Doctors Without Borders.

Bob Carr Savages Kevin Spacey

The critics have loved his performance but former NSW premier turned art critic Bob Carr has walked out of Kevin Spacey’s Richard 11 during interval.

Writing on his Thoughtlines website Carr says:

Bob Carr loonpond.blogspot.com

“If you like Shakespeare, don’t see this. If you liked Kevin Spacey in American Beauty (1999) don’t see this. If you like the fun of Shakespeare’s villain Richard, Duke of Gloucester, don’t see it.”

Ouch!. But there’s more: "Spacey plays the cheapest and most obvious laughs, as if entertaining a school-age audience “The crude over-acting by him and his colleagues was reflected in too many shouted lines. Words are lost in the upper registers. Resonance and enunciation are thrown away and Shakespeare’s words go missing”

Wagner enthusiast Carr wasn’t too keen on Derek Jacobi’s Lear either despite the production receiving high praise from The Guardian and UK Telegraph.

" I, however, found it distinctly unmoving."

Even the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Antony and Cleopatra comes in for a pasting from Bob

" With inadequate voices (that is, inadequate for these roles) from Kathryn Hunter and Darrell D’Silva I found myself consulting the paperback text on my knee when I could."

And in the comments section our Bob  rips into those who disagree.

Derek Jacobi in Lear

Brendan W says " I do so love the implication that by enjoying the Spacey version of Richard III that I am somehow dumb….Of the two plays I saw this past weekend (Gross Und Klein and Richard III) I only enjoyed one, but was treated to spectacular, albeit very different, performances on both occasion"

Bob puts Brendan in his place: " You have seen TWO professionally-performed Shakespeare and declare that one was the “definitive”? When you have gone to the UK and seen productions by the RSC and The National Theatre come back and engage."

Bob is a famous Civil War enthusiast which possibly explains his support for the disastrous Iraq war but he once managed to wangle a forward for his book out of Gore Vidal, an anti-Iraq invasion exponent.

He was premier for 10 years before suddenly resigning in 2005 and fleeing to the sheltered workshop for those with political contacts –the Macquarie Bank also known as the Millionaires Factory. 

                

Many said he was the ‘best premier the Conservatives never had” who stuffed Sydney’s public transport, slashed legal aid and injury compensation and engaged in an unholy alliance with News Ltd tabloids on phony Law & Order auctions, eventually making it difficult for many to get bail which filled the jails.

Bob  fled with perfect timing as three successive Labor premiers tried to hold together the shambles left behind only to be turfed from office in a massive landslide to the Coalition last March.

Currently he’s lecturing the State and Federal Labour Parties on how to succeed but it's nice to know his lavish state pension and merchant bank sinecure keep him theatre tickets.

Recently Bob poured scorn on  the Occupy Movement saying the “greedy incompetents on Wall Street” will be tamed by “parliamentary politics”.

The Macquarie Bank is one of the largest and most successful private banks on the planet with extensive dealings on Wall Street. The CEO received a $33M payment last year. With Carr at the Macquarie the amount of government contracts worth billions that flowed into Macquarie while Labor was still in power may have been pure co-incidence.

Maybe Bob's role in the Millionaire's Factory is to 'tame' them We live in hope.

Bullied Teen Controversy Spins Out of Control

It's another classic example of the power of the net that has seen Justin Beiber, Cody Simpson and Christian The Lion shoot to stardom after their youtube videos went haywire.

Jonah today

Jonah 4 months ago

This youtube video appeared quietly about 4 months ago. It's young US teen Jonah Mowry talking about his experiences as a bullied gay lad in school.
He prefaced it with a message that he felt suicidal. It's a real tearjerker and thousands of followers linked to it and pretty soon Jonah had over 2 milliion hits and tens of thousands of 'likes' compared to a few hundred 'dislikes'.

Then the blogger Perez Hilton chipped in and pretty soon Jonah had thousands of twitter followers  and was becoming a media star. The US ABC network interviewed him and singer Ricky Martin tweeted “one big rib breaking hug :0) ! Stay strong buddy! You are 1 courageous young man!!!”.

An appearance on Ellen de Generes was surely soon to follow.

Now Jonah has a new video up were he appears to be fairly flippant about his previous claims and says he has 'thousands' of people at school who like him. The backlash is only just beginning as the video responses are posted on youtube giving young Jonah a roasting and claiming him to be a fake. What do think ?


and a response to Jonah :

Speaking Up For The Voiceless

Ondine Sherman & Sarah Ferguson

When the ABC TV's  Four Corners program screened A Bloody Business in March this year the political and public backlash was deafening. The images of the cruel treatment Australian cattle received in Indonesian abattoirs generated overwhelming public outcry and the temporary suspension of the trade with Indonesia.

The reaction was just what the organisation Voiceless, the animal protection institute would expect as they attempt to get the message across of how unethically animals are treated by humans. But Voiceless don't preach, they just present the evidence and allow you to decide.

Sadly the evidence overwhelmingly proves that we humans are unnecessarily cruel to other life forms that we share the planet with. And it doesn't have to be that way.

Gemma Davis & Jessica Gomez

Voiceless is the brainchild of the well known Sydney family of Shermans and in particularly Ondine Sherman who discovered at an early age, that the meat she was eating came from an animal,. She turned Vegan and gradually the entire family, dad Brian, mother Jean and brother Emile Sherman followed suit. (Everyone knows Emile Sherman now-ever since he stepped up to the stage at the 2011 Academy Awards to accept an Oscar for his production of The King's Speech.)

Caroline & Emile Sherman

In their third year, the  Voiceless Awards are handed out to those who  have advanced the cause to end animal suffering, overseen by a judging panel chaired by Nobel Prize Laureate J M Coetze.

This year at the Blue Hotel in Woolloomooloo the reporter on A Bloody Business Sarah Ferguson and producer Michael Doyle won $5,000 in the broadcast category of the Voiceless Media Prize. Other winners: Christine Jackman for her article, The claws come out  in the Weekend Australian Magazine, broadcaster Caro Meldrum-Hanna for “Bad Egg” which aired on 7.30 NSW about the Australian Egg Corporation on its proposal to allow 20,000 hens per hectare and Cheryl Balfour for a series of articles about the Eden Park kangaroo cull published in the Whittlesea Leader between December 2010 and October 2011.
A Bloody Business can be viewed here (VIEWER WARNING: Contains images which
may distress some viewers)
 The Voiceless website is here and contains a lot of evidence and information on cruelty to animals. 

Kevin Spacey Wins Big Time

Paul Ramsay

He's received rave reviews for his Richard III at the Lyric Theatre and  now actor Kevin Spacey has won over billionaire Paul Ramsay who parted with $200,000 for a pair of tickets for the closing night next Sunday with champagne after with Spacey. Ramsay also bid $100,000 at auction to play tennis for an hour with the Hollywood star.

Ramsay was at a Spacey's charity dinner at Justin Hemmes' Est Restaurant last week which raised $350,000 for the Kevin Spacey Foundation that supports young actors, directors, producers and writers in film and theatre.

Bachelor Ramsay, worth $1.5Billion with his nursing home empire and Prime Media which operates regional TV stations was a close friend of the late Johnny Baker who died last year.
When the pair met about 30 years ago Bakes said to Ramsay "I've got the contacts and you have the cash,we should travel together". 

Lady Sonia & Baker

And so they did every year with Ramsay funding lavish holidays around the world whenever Baker wasn't also accompanying the late Kerry Packer who loved to take Bakes on his private jet to keep him amused. Paul was also a pal of Lady Sonia McMahon who died shortly after Baker and he felt the loss of both friends deeply. Perhaps he has now formed a new bond with Spacey. They do have mutual interests.
Host of the dinner Justin Hemmes parted with $21,000 for harbour cruise for 20 and to play ping pong with Spacey

Next week : our exclusive on the London blogger who started  a Spacey Family Feud !

Below is a video of Spacey talking about his foundation;

Elton John Sees Red

Elton at the Sydney Opera House

The grand old man of pop music Sir Elton John declared war on those who stigmatised AIDS on Thursday night as he threw a switch to bathe the Sydney Opera House in a brilliant red light to launch World AIDS Day.

"Fascists and idiots" he called them while calling on governments worldwide to increase funds to combat the disease now that there are over 34 million sufferers.

On Friday his husband David Furnish flew out to the USA for medical reasons leaving dad Elton behind with baby Zachary who has 2 full time nannies.

Tonight Elton will be appearing at the Hope Estate in the Hunter Valley.

********************
 Great Minds Think Alike # 1
 Further to our story below about the opening of the new Louis Vuitton boutique in George Street, Sydney Morning Herald columnist Andrew Hornery gives his own version of the event here.

Louis Vuitton Goes Down Market

The Shuttle had an invitation to last night’s “glittering VIP” opening party for Louis Vuitton’s magnificent new George Street emporium but had to turn it down due to a prior engagement.

“But how can you miss it” pleaded  a breathless PR operative “when we have an amazing list of top celebrities coming ?”

“like who ?”. 

“Lara Bingle , Erica Heynatz, Melissa Doyle, Miranda Kerr !”

“anyone we may not have run into last week ?”

“Cate Blanchett, she’s cutting the ribbon ?

“look we love Cate but she’s a tad over exposed in Sydney at present . Who else?”

“ Ronnie Wood from the Rolling Stones?”

“Love Ronnie but I'm seeing him at a private party this Sunday. We’ll send our photographer to get a few snaps"

“terrific, I’ll make sure he has a good spot on the black carpet”

“you mean a carpet with one of those boards with your name plastered all over it ?”

“Yes”

“No thanks. The whole idea is to have shots that are different to the paparazzi pics-you know maybe with the product inside the store and so on”.

Ronnie & Jo Woods at LV

And so it went and driving that night at 6.30pm over the Harbour Bridge our cynicism was confirmed. Opening anything on a Friday is verboten in this town mainly because you miss the Thursday deadline for Sunday’s society pages. 

But hearing  LVHM overlord Phillip Corne being interviewed on 2GB (nighttime audience-Long Bay Jail, nursing homes, the deranged etc) tell the befuddled listeners they could save for years to buy a Louis Vuitton piece which could be handed down through their family, or of the two South American peasants who saved a lifetime to purchase a LV suitcase (presumably with no money left to travel ) the madness of the modern world was confirmed.

They did get one thing right-using top party designer David Grant. A veteran of many Olympic Games events and the legendary Cointreau Balls, there is none better.

On Wednesday we had a long conversation with one of Australia’s top movie PRs who has promoted some of the biggest stars in the world and we both agreed about the new breed of publicists armed with a "communications degree” who can do everything but communicate.

The opening of Louis Vuitton was reminiscent of  the opening of the Martin Place Armani store a few years ago.

The Shuttle phoned the PR firm (new in town) to politely inform them we would be attending.

“Oh we can't have media inside” was the snooty reply “we have VIPs coming. You can stand outside the marquee” Miss Bossy Boots said.

“Who ?” we asked. 

“Lady Sonia McMahon, Boy George and Julian Clary”

“Well the reason I’m ringing is because Lady Sonia asked me to escort her” I replied “and Boy George told me today that Armani can ‘f"ck orf” unless they gave him a few outfits and Julian Clary will be in Brisbane. Well that's what he said at lunch two days ago".

We went with Sonia in the end and it was usual suspects (without Lara Bingle as she hadn’t become one yet). No Boy George and no Julian Clary.

                                               **************************

Cate with LV head honcho Philip Corne

Cutting the ribbon for the opening of a new store seemed an odd job for one of the world's top movie stars but Cate Blanchett had a good reason to last night (apart from the set of new LV luggage delivered to her a few days ago)

Now that Giorgio Armani has dropped out as a sponsor for the Sydney Theatre Company-step forward Louis Vuitton. And the brand comes with it's own champagne label, Moët & Chandon, perfect for those all important patron   parties.