\"Speed The Plow\" Sales Plummet Post-Piven
NEW YORK — Business tumbled last week for the Broadway revival of "Speed-the-Plow," now without the services of Jeremy Piven who abruptly quit the show after saying he was suffering from mercury poisoning.The David Mamet comedy grossed $326,559, down nearly $160,000 from the previous week, according to figures released Monday by the Broadway League, the industry's trade organization. The show played to about 50 percent capacity at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre.Piven was replaced by his understudy, Jorda

Broadway Audiences Prefer Their Casts Mercury-Poisoned [Sushigate]
Though we understood why Jeremy Piven's ditched Speed-the-Plow co-stars reamed him onstage Sunday, we couldn't fathom what it was that had made Elisabeth Moss allegedly start "sobbing." Then, we saw the Piven-less box office:The David Mamet comedy grossed $326,559, down nearly $160,000 from the previous week, according to figures released Monday by the Broadway League, the industry's trade organization. The show played to about 50 percent capacity at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre.Piven was replaced by his und

Jeremy Piven: Scarfing Down Criticism
, 43, says that he's sick from mercury poisoning. Sick as a...fish if you will. Piven claims that his huge sushi consumption led to his illness, which is what he blames for pulling out of the Broadway production of David Mamet 's Speed-the-Plow . Some don't buy it. His co-stars had choice words for him at the time (playwright Mamet diagnosed that Piven "wants to be a thermometer"), and investors in the production are reportedly calling for an investigation into the legitimacy of Piven's c

Jeremy Piven’s friends try to discourage him….
After picking up his third successive acting award for his role in TV hit Entourage, Jeremy took a camcorder into one of the star-studded Los Angeles after parties - where he told celebrity pals about his forthcoming role in David Mamet play Speed-The-Plow. In a staged skit, which appears on Will Ferrell’s website Funnyordie.com, Laura Dern, Mary Steenburgen, Jamie Foxx and Seth Meyers all warn Jeremy Piven against taking to the stage. When he tells Laura Dern and Mary Steenburgen he came from the theat

Jeremy Piven Makes Up With \"Speed-the-Plow\" Costar, Talks Poisoning At Globes
Jeremy Piven talked about his mercury poisoning and claimed to have made up with at least one of his "Speed-the-Plow" costars. At a Golden Globes afterparty Piven talked to Fox News about the uproar that happened when he dropped out of the Broadway play last month and his health leading up to it: "I was so sick for most of the run of the show. Some days I would sleep right until the time I had to go to the theater. I didn't know what was wrong with me. I was exhausted. Finally, I went to a doctor at Greenwi

Emily Blunt And John Krasinski Are Truly Adorable [Dirt Bag (After Dark)]
Emily Blunt and John Krasinski: totally sitting in a tree, kissing and whatevs. Perez suggests "Bluntinski" as their celeb couple nickname, but we feel we can do better! How about Krunt? Or EmJo? [Perez]Jim Carrey wanted to clear up the comments he made the other day on Larry King about Prozac's lack of long-term efficacy. "There are a lot of different ways to skin a cat," Carrey tells People, "It's important to think on our own…There is drug company money that goes into the educational system. I'm saying

‘Following’ Chris Nolan at LACMA
I had not seen Christopher Nolan’s directorial debut “Following” in six or seven years, which made for the perfect excuse to drop 20 bucks on a ticket to tonight’s Slamdance screening and Q&A over at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The film holds up as a wonderful, if slightly obscure excerpt from that sensational year of cinema: 1999.  It contains the seeds of a director’s fascination with broken narrative storytelling, borrows humbly from genre particulars already

Was Jeremy Piven Actually Stricken With Insufferable-Diva-Poisoning? [Sushigate]
Aside from Fisher Stevens, everyone knows that Jeremy Piven's play-quitting sushi defense is bogus (but delicious!). However, E! is now alleging that Piven never actually quit—he was fired.That's according to E!'s Ted Casablanca...wait! Don't click away! A productive intern has made the usually incomprehensible gossip guru semi-intelligible—just look:"He was fired," says an integral player in the David Mamet play, about the banal evils of Hollywood. Yep, according to our pivotal insider, J.P. go

Jeremy Piven Exposed To Toxic Sherri Shepherd-Levels During Escape From New York [Sushigate]
newVideoPlayer("/sherri_piven.flv", 506, 423,""); Sherri Shepherd's got an entry for Hollywood PrivacyWatch! On a plane over the holidays, she realized that the "short," fedora-clad man she'd been bothering was none other than the famously mercury-addled Jeremy Piven.Shepherd recounted the story today to her cohosts on The View—including a bored, openly contemptuous Barbara Walters. As Shepherd tells it, she upgraded with her miles, landing her and her hyper three-year-old son Jeffrey in a seat right

Jeremy Piven Willing to Contract Any Disease That Will Get Him Off Broadway [Excuses]
Hollywood community, Jeremy Piven is very disappointed in you. Why have you refrained from rallying around the actor as he suffers so dearly from mononucleosis... er, we mean "self-inflicted sushi poisoning"?According to TMZ, Piven's sushi excuse (which we suppose should warn us off spicy tuna forever but only makes us hungrier every time we type it) was only the latest malady Piven claimed to have in order to get out of performing David Mamet's Speed-the-Plow on Broadway. And who leaked this information to

Jeremy Piven Has a Note From His Doctor. Big Freaking Deal.
Could Jeremy Piven possibly be a bigger douche-nozzle? Reports are swirling around the Broadway scene that Piven is bailing on his commitment to appear in David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow, claiming that his doctor says he has — get this — mercury poisoning. I didn’t believe him at first, until I learned that one of the symptoms of mercury poisoning is a complete inability to act. Now I think he’s probably had it his whole life. Over at Dlisted, Michael K isn’t buying i

The 10 Craziest Defamer Feuds of the Year [Defamer Top Ten]
It's that time of year, when a young website's thoughts turn to listicles! Please come on an incredible journey with us as we recount the most insane, star-on-star fights Hollywood had to offer in 2008: newVideoPlayer("/mkdave_def.flv", 506, 423,""); Baldwin vs. Garcia: In which 30 Rock star Alec Baldwin belittled his Thursday night brethren, mocking NBC for running hourlong episodes of My Name is Earl when the show is "done" and "cooked." In response, Earl creator Greg Garcia told Defamer that Baldwin was

Links for the Day (January 13th, 2009)
1. A hearty blogosphere welcome to the new indieWIRE.["From iW editor Eugene Hernandez: We have spent over a year developing the new indieWIRE, but it's actually taken us twelve years to get here. We've not only re-designed iW, but completely re-imagined it."]***2."Everlasting Moments: Close, Closer": Martha Polk on Jan Troell's Everlasting Moments. From her sight What is This Light. ["I report with overwhelming gratitude that Everlasting Moments is a film about what it means to be a woman, what it means to

Entertainment Weekly counts down the best & worst in 2008 TV
10 Best TV Shows of 2008: Ken Tucker's PicksEW's critic ranks ''Mad Men,''''Fringe,'' and a trio of late-night shows among the year's best. Plus: His picks for the five worst shows of the past 12 monthsTHE BEST:10. IN TREATMENT (HBO)Therapist Gabriel Byrne invited all manner of troubled folks to spill their guts on his sofa, and if some drove you up the wall (Melissa George's overly biting nympho), others could pierce your heart with their tender help­lessness; for me and many other fans, it was Mia Wasiko

I love David Mamet!!!
(photo from WireImage)As we know Jeremy Piven was forced to drop out the Broadway show Speed-The-Plow because he very elevated amount of mercury in his system from eating sushi two times a day and taking Chinese herbs. Well the show's producer David Mamet's response to Variety about him leaving show is classic and seems to really spell out how he feels about losing his male lead. "I talked to Jeremy on the phone, and he told me that he discovered that he had a very high level of mercury. S

Haley Joel Osment, on Leave From NYU, to Hit Broadway
It's official: American Buffalo has the weirdest cast ever. Michael Riedel reports this morning that Haley Joel Osment, now all grown up, will play the drugged-out young con man Bobby, joining John Leguizamo and Cedric the Entertainer in the late-seventies Mamet classic. This raises the Broadway revival of Buffalo from an interesting show to a must-see possible train wreck; this is Osment's stage debut, and it's not like the guy's been exercising his chops on film — he's taking the semester off from N

Was Jeremy Piven Fired?
Superinside Speed the Plow sources claim exclusively to the Awful Truth that Jeremy Piven's premature evacuation from the Broadway show had nada to do with overeating sushi. "He was fired," says an integral player in the David Mamet play, about the banal evils of Hollywood. Yep, according to our pivotal insider, J.P. got booted for diva-like behavior. Like what? Like showing up two minutes before showtime, being a general d-bag toward the cast and crew and sending his understudy on if he didn'

Redbelt (2008) DVD Review
Redbelt, the new film from playwright (Glengarry Glen Ross, American Buffalo) and occasional director David Mamet (House of Games- one the 80’s best movies, The Spanish Prisoner), is filled with scenes displaying either Honor (with a capital ‘H’) or Jiu-Jitsu…and sometimes even both. But that isn’t to say this is an action film in any sense as it’s mostly talky. Just thought I’d let you know right now in case the trailer or even the nifty box cover led you astray… If you’ve seen a Mamet

William H. Macy rescues Jeremy Piven
A day after Jeremy Piven abruptly announced his decision to pull out of David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow on Broadway because of an illness, chisme time has learned that Piven’s diet is to blame for his debilitatingly high levels of mercury. “He was eating sushi twice a day and taking some Chinese herbs,” Dr. Carlon Colker, Piven’s physician and the executive officer and medical director of Peak Wellness, said. “I tested his heavy metals and his mercury was amazi

New York Fall Theater Preview
Photo of Radiohead's Anger/Nation courtesy Radiohole. The Fringe, the Summer Play Festival, the Ice Factory—all that's behind us. With summer all but over, it's time for the big dogs of Broadway take center stage once again. Today the Times arts section is packed with ads and articles about the upcoming theater season, which critic Charles Isherwood has dubbed A Season of Men. That's mainly because there are two David Mamet plays set to open, Arthur Miller's All My Sons (with its gender-specific title)

EUR DVD REVIEW: Redbelt
*A mediocre movie like this is a major disappointment coming from David Mamet. The picture represents his first foray into the martial arts genre, although his character-driven script still boasts the basic trademarks for which the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright’s is known.       This means the screen is littered with an ensemble of street-savvy con artists delivering raw dialogue staccato-style, And among the actors are some familiar faces from the Mamet repertory company, i

I'm In Love With David Mamet
David Mamet on Dlisted. I didn't think this moment would ever happen, but I couldn't help it. After reading this shit about him on Page Six, I think I'm madly in love with him and need to become the next Mrs. David Mamet. In her memoir, playwright Nancy Balbirer wrote about how amazingly hot David Mamet was to his students at NYU. David cursed them out, threw them out of class and called Bill Cosby a whore. Swoooooooon. Here's a few quotes from Nancy's book. Page Six had to bleep out the good

Harold Pinter: Nobel-Winning Playwright Dies At 78
LONDON — Harold Pinter, praised as the most influential British playwright of his generation and a longtime voice of political protest, has died after a long battle with cancer. He was 78.Pinter, whose distinctive contribution to the stage was recognized with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, died on Wednesday, according to his second wife, Lady Antonia Fraser."Pinter restored theater to its basic elements: an enclosed space and unpredictable dialogue, where people are at the mercy of each other

Doctor defends Jeremy Piven
“Entourage” actor Jeremy Piven has been advised by his doctor that he needed to pull out of a Broadway run of David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow due to high levels of Mercury in his system recently.  This has been attributed by his combination of eating large amounts of sushi and some Chinese herbs.  Mamet found this funny [...]

Jeremy Piven's Fishy Situation
The 43-year-old Entourage actor had to abandon his starring role in David Mamet's Broadway play Speed-the-Plow on Wednesday due to alarmingly high levels of mercury in his system. Now Dr. Carlton Colker, the primary internist treating the actor, has revealed to ABC.com just how severe Piven's condition is. "This is a situation of mercury toxicity," says Colker, the medical director of Peak Wellness in Greenwich, Connecticut. "His level [of mercury] was quite high, almost six times the nor