Entertainment Briefs March 1, 2010
Ebert gets 'voice' grandkids recognize
CHICAGO - Film critic Roger Ebert says computer programmers have captured his voice from movie commentary tracks so he can type what he wants to say and listeners hear a voice that sounds like him.
Ebert lost his ability to speak after surgery for cancer. He writes in Sunday's Chicago Sun-Times that a Scottish company has helped him regain a voice his grandchildren can recognize.Ebert recorded commentaries for DVD movies before he lost his voice. A Scottish company called CereProc (SAYR'-uh-prok) blended digital recordings of Ebert speaking to make his text-to-audio voice.
Ebert writes that the voice will be heard predicting Oscar winners on a segment of "The Oprah Winfrey Show" airing Tuesday.He says he may be able to use the voice for radio and Webcasts.
Coleman suffers seizure on 'The Insider' set
LOS ANGELES - Gary Coleman suffered a seizure on the set of "The Insider" Friday and received immediate treatment from Dr. Drew Pinsky, who happened to be on set as well."The Insider" says on its Web site that Coleman was transported to a local hospital in stable condition.
A publicist for "The Insider" declined to say what the former child star was doing on the entertainment program and referred inquiries to the show's Web site.Coleman walked off "The Insider" during a visit to the show earlier this month. He was being interviewed about his arrest in Utah last year on domestic violence charges when he blew up, telling the attorney questioning him to "drown herself in the ocean" before he stormed off the set.
Coleman was briefly hospitalized last month after suffering a seizure. He has had two failed kidney transplants and been plagued by various health problems.The 42-year-old actor is best known for his stint on TV's "Diff'rent Strokes," which aired from 1978-86. Pinsky is a medical doctor and addiction specialist who stars on VH1's "Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew."
Baldwin ready for Oscar co-host gig
NEW YORK - As a kind of warm-up to his upcoming gig as Academy Awards co-host, Alec Baldwin appeared at the Time Warner Center for a personal and wide-ranging conversation.But he did have one Oscar forecast: Expect wardrobe changes for himself and co-host Steve Martin.
"It's a very metrosexualized kind of a show now," Baldwin joked.The Wednesday evening event, presented by Fordham Law School, came shortly before the anticipated March 7 ceremony. Though sold out and crammed, the audience was a mere 500, far less than the 1 billion who supposedly watch the Oscars worldwide.
Baldwin, star of the NBC sitcom "30 Rock," was skeptical of how such a number could be deduced but marveled at the effective promotion."You could be a gas station attendant in New Mexico: 'The Oscars? They got a billion people watching the Oscars - a billion, ya know,"' Baldwin said.
Though he's under orders not to discuss his preferences for the various awards, he said he's been beset by questions: "Everywhere I go, people say, 'So who do you like in the Oscars?"'While the Academy Awards will be a button-down event beamed around the world, the talk Wednesday was more intimate. The event, moderated by professor and novelist Thane Rosenbaum, was ostensibly about Baldwin's history playing lawyers in films and his various work as an activist.
Baldwin, 51, spoke passionately and at length about numerous issues, including nuclear power and family law.
He has blogged about nuclear power on the Huffington Post. In 2008, he published the book "A Promise to Ourselves," in which he described divorce and custody proceedings as a system fostering a child's alienation from a parent.The book was largely a result of his difficult experience in his divorce from actress Kim Basinger, finalized in 2002. The custody battle over their 14-year-old daughter, Ireland, has for years been covered in the tabloids.
On Feb. 11, Baldwin was taken to a New York hospital after Ireland called 911 saying he had threatened to take pills during an argument on the telephone. Baldwin's spokesman Matthew Hiltzik said that it was a misunderstanding and that he took no alcohol or pills and was quickly released from the hospital.Baldwin made a related jab at the evening's host, Time Warner. He called the corporation, whose holdings include film and TV companies and numerous news organizations, "one of the most egregious culprits" of tabloid journalism.
"At one end of the hallway, you have actors and actresses who are performing jobs that they're contracted to do, and at the other end of the hallway you have a tabloid journalism enterprise, which is trying to report all the dirt on those people," he said.A Time Warner spokesman didn't immediately return a telephone message or an e-mail sent by The Associated Press on Wednesday night to his after-hours address.
Before splitting last year, Time Warner was merged with AOL, which co-produced the celebrity news site TMZ.com. TMZ released the famous voice mail recording in which Baldwin berated his daughter.Baldwin's political bent and detailed knowledge of particular issues have frequently brought him questions about whether he might one day pursue public office. On Wednesday, he said "maybe."
"If I did that, it would be a whole other chapter in my life," he said.Baldwin, who comes from a family of actors, also said he considered entering law school before turning to acting. When Rosenbaum asked if his brothers would have followed him into law had he become a lawyer, Baldwin joked: "God, no. I would be representing them."