Sony Pictures is not letting Moneyball, the Brad Pitt baseball flick, die. The studio announced today that Bennett Miller, who was nominated for a Best Director Academy Award for Capote, is in negotiations to helm the project that was dismantled after Steven Soderbergh exited the project in June 2009, a few weeks before production was to begin. Based on the bestselling book by Michael Lewis, Moneyball tells the story of Billy Beane, general manager of the low-ranked Oakland A’s, who defies baseball convention to recruit a new bench of players in extremely unorthodox ways. The screenplay is from Steve Zaillian (American Gangster) and Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing).
I just added photos of Brad at the premiere of Invictus! Enjoy! 
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Public Appearances > Events from 2009 > “Invictus” Los Angeles Premiere
Los Angeles authorities were called to Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt’s home on November 15 to respond to an alarm. Though sources claim the police were called after the couple had “their worst fight ever,” LAPD Sgt. Kyle Kirkman says the call was simply a false alarm by the burglary system.
“We went out and checked to make sure it’s a false alarm, and if it’s false, we leave. That’s basic protocol. That one was a real basic false alarm,” says Kirkman.
The alarm sounded off at 12:54. Officers spent less than 15 minutes at the couple’s home.
Jolie and Pitt have not commented. They were recently spotted at the premiere of Up in the Air starring their close friend George Clooney.
Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have been spotted enjoying a double date with George Clooney and his new squeeze Elisabetta Canalis.
The A-listers enjoyed a night out at an Italian restaurant in Beverly Hills following the premiere of George’s new movie Up In The Air.
An onlooker told Extra that Angie and Brad – who co-starred with George in the hit Ocean’s Eleven movies – looked “really happy” at the restaurant.
But the Hollywood couple, who have a brood of six children together, had an early night, saying their goodbyes after about an hour.
George began dating his Italian TV host girlfriend earlier this year. Earlier in the evening, he introduced her to his mother, a former beauty queen, when he took them both to his premiere.
In Up In The Air, he plays a happily unattached bachelor who travels the globe for his career.
What breakup rumors?
Usmagazine.com has obtained more details of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt ‘s affectionate night out in L.A. Monday.
See surprising old modeling photos of Angelina
The casually dressed couple greeted pal George Clooney, who hosted a late-night afterparty for the premiere of his film Up in the Air at Beverly Hills restaurant Dolce Vita.
Arriving at 12:15, the pair were the last to join the small party of 30 that also included Cindy Crawford and husband Rande Gerber, the film’s co-stars Vera Farmiga and Anna Kendrick. Clooney had two ladies on his arm: girlfriend Elisabetta Canalis and his mother, Nina.
How the Jolie-Pitt kids have grown! See the slideshow
“Brangelina seemed happy together,” an attendee tells Us, nothing that they were “inseparable,” and held hands frequently throughout the night. Not that they didn’t mingle. Canalis complemented Jolie on her hair (which looks to be a new shade of brown in photos). Jolie, snacking on tomatoes, spoke with Farmiga about wearing fur and its brutality. Pitt, meanwhile, nursed a beer and asked other guests about their Thanksgivings. “He seemed genuinely interested in their response,” the eyewitness says.
Check out these photos of George Clooney’s women over the years
Another happy couple? Clooney and Canalis. The actor cheerfully introduced her to the crowd; “Elisabetta fit right in,” the witness tells Us.
Think you know Angelina’s cup size?
The Jolie-Pitts departed around 1:30 a.m. — holding hands.
Ian Halperin’s Brangelina: The Untold Story of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie paints a less rosy picture. “They’ve broken up so many times it would make your head spin,” writes author Halperin, who declares that the couple will break up by “Christmas 2010.”
Dark Void comes from developer Airtight Games, a team featuring core designers of Xbox cult fave Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge.
It plays like Gears of War meets Rocketeer (yes, there’s flying and shooting) and tells the story a pilot who crashes in the Bermuda triangle and finds himself caught up in some kind of extra-dimensional alien invasion.
Brad Pitt’s production company Plan B recently signed a deal to make a movie based on the game. Pitt himself may star as protagonist William Agustus Grey.
Dark Void will be published by Capcom in January for the PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.
Bill and Melinda Gates are giving away billions to find a cure for AIDs, to curb childhood malaria, and to improve computer literacy worldwide among the young.
But what about sisters Helen and Swanee Hunt, daughters of Texas oil magnate H.L. Hunt? They’re tapping women across the country to write checks that promote women’s health and job-training programs.
Then there’s Brad Pitt, who runs the Make It Right Foundation. He’s pledged $5 million to help construct 150 new low-income homes in New Orleans.
These rich and famous are on the latest Barron’s magazine list of the world’s 25 best philanthropists — based on the results of their charity.
On top is Ebay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife Pam. They’ve committed at least $300 million since 2004 to such innovations as Wikipedia.
Others on the list in the Nov. 30 edition of Barron’s:
–Howard G. Buffett, oldest son of Berkshire Hathaway tycoon Warren Buffett. Howie has earmarked funds to improve rural water supplies in 13 countries.
–Peter and Jennifer Buffett. Warren’s youngest son and his wife are focusing their philanthropy on helping women and girls in developing nations.
Brad Pitt has made quite an impact on the city of New Orleans since he started building new homes for those devastated by Hurricane Katrina. While the homes are first class, there are mixed reviews about his work and what is being done to help the city.
In an interview with the NY TImes, James Dart, a Manhattan-based architect who was born and raised in New Orleans, described the houses as “alien, sometimes even insulting,” adding, “the biggest problem is that they are not grounded in the history of New Orleans architecture.”
But Dart still expressed admiration for Pitt. “He deserves a great deal of credit,” adding that Pitt had “done more for New Orleans” than any government agency.
In 2007, frustrated by the slow pace of rebuilding in the Lower Ninth, Pitt set up a foundation called Make It Right. According to the NY Times, the foundation then “commissioned 13 architecture firms to design affordable, green houses. The organization plans to build 150 homes, all for returning Lower Ninth residents. So far, just 15 of them are occupied.”
The main route into the Lower Ninth is where the “Brad Pitt Houses” are located. They are sprawling, angular buildings in bold hues not usually seen outside a gelateria and are now becoming New Orleans’s newest tourist attraction.
In more interviews done by the NY Times, Jennifer Pearl, a broker who has several houses for sale in the Lower Ninth, has a practical view. “Brad has the very best intentions,” she said. “However, had he come here with houses that looked like what had been here before, he probably could have had four times, five times as many houses up by now.”
Another issue with the houses is their elevation: to protect them from future floods, they have been built on stilts that turn their front porches into catwalks. The goal of porches is to create a sense of community, and that’s hard to do when neighbors and passersby are literally overshadowed.
“It’s like New York — you know, the skyscrapers,” said Ms. LeBlanc, who lives in a single-story house next to one of the much larger Make It Right creations. “And there are going to be more,” she added.
Us Weekly has screamed it on covers and the New York Post did the same on Sunday (Brangelina’s SEXY SECRETS), but are Brad and Angelina really fighting constantly and breaking up in the near future as an upcoming book claims? Reading the details, I’m not so sure.
Author and reporter Ian Halperin supposedly spent five years piecing together Brangelina: The Untold Story of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie and spoke with 900 sources. He was most recently seen doing the media circuit to talk about Michael Jackson, the subject of his last book.
Halperin spoke with Sunday’s NY Post to dish up some of “his most sensational findings” about Brad and Angelina. Reading the article, I find much of it hard to believe.
To be clear, I haven’t read the book. I’ve never met Halperin. I’ve also never met Brad Pitt and I’ve spent just 20 minutes in a hotel room with Angelina and about five others during a junket, during which she avoided talk of her personal life.
The Post’s Halperin-Brangelina feature opens with an anecdote about then-Mrs. Pitt Jennifer Aniston meeting Jolie on the set of Friends shortly before Mr. and Mrs. Smith began filming. Despite the 900 sources, this insider-y sounding anecdote comes uncredited from Aniston’s 2005 interview with Vanity Fair’s Leslie Bennetts.
From the NY Post/Halperin:
It was 2004, just weeks before shooting was to begin on the action flick “Mr. and Mrs. Smith,” when Angelina Jolie happened to visit the set of the hit show “Friends.”
“Brad is so excited to be working with you,” Jennifer Aniston told her husband’s new co-star. “I hope you guys have a really good time.”
From Aniston’s 2005 Vanity Fair cover interview:
Aniston has met Jolie only once, when she took a passing opportunity to say hello. “It was on the lot of Friends — I pulled over and introduced myself,” Aniston recalls. “I said, ‘Brad is so excited about working with you. I hope you guys have a really good time.’”
Moving on to what is either some poorly fact-checked chronology or just an error, the next NY Post paragraph reads:
Less than a year later, Brad Pitt and Jolie would pose for W magazine in a spread called “Domestic Bliss.” Real-life romance soon followed, as modern Hollywood’s most famous love triangle played out in the tabloids. Eventually, Pitt would leave Aniston and take up with Jolie.
The W spread came out in June 2005. Pitt and Aniston officially split 5 months earlier.
Next paragraph:
“Brad had never had such incredible sex,” Halperin says. “My sources say that they sometimes spent 18 to 20 hours a day in bed. But sex eventually wears off.”
How likely is this? The incredible sex, who’s to argue? But 18-20 hours in bed a day having it? I’m not sure. When Brad and Angelina met in 2004 she was a single mom to son Maddox, and she adopted Zahara in July 2005. Did she spend days on end in bed with her boyfriend while her toddler son and newly-adopted daughter were elsewhere? It seems unlikely.
Next is the part that is the most egregiously wrong, and alone casts everything else Halperin writes about Pitt and Jolie (as reported by the NY Post anyway) into doubt:
A woman who worked with Pitt while he was filming “Troy” told Halperin: “They were definitely in love, but that’s where it gets tricky. If you want to know if they’re still together, the answer depends on when you ask the question.
“I’ve heard that they’ve broken up so many times it would make your head spin.
“There are apparently screaming matches, usually with her doing the screaming. Nobody really witnesses that part of it — they just see him leaving in a huff. But then he ends up coming back again, and nobody knows what happened to bring him back.”
Troy came out in the summer of 2004 and was filmed in 2003, before Brad had ever met Angelina.
An unnamed woman who worked on that film is telling second hand stories about Brad and Angelina’s breakups and screaming matches, when there is zero evidence she had ever met Angelina, much less seen Brad and Angelina as a couple.
And there are things like this, exaggerations in the least:
Halperin claims that Pitt’s biggest problem with Jolie is her controlling nature. “She won’t let [Pitt] out of the house alone,” he said.
She supposedly won’t let him out alone, yet there are plenty of paparazzi photos of Pitt alone on his motorcycle cruising LA., like here and at dinner with friends, like here.
Maybe Brangelina are fighting constantly, with Jolie a temperamental control freak and Pitt a pothead cheater, and maybe they’ll soon split up. But from what I’ve read of this book, I think it’s just as likely they won’t.
AL ANDREWS, who lives on Tennessee Street in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, said he didn’t mind the tour buses coming through his neighborhood, but he wished the visitors “would give some of what they pay to the community.” Mr. Andrews lives in one of the brightly colored, modernist houses rising on a small patch of the Lower Ninth, four years after it was devastated by Hurricane Katrina.
In 2007, frustrated by the slow pace of rebuilding in the Lower Ninth, Brad Pitt set up a foundation called Make It Right; the foundation then commissioned 13 architecture firms to design affordable, green houses. The organization plans to build 150 homes, all for returning Lower Ninth residents. So far, just 15 of them are occupied, but those 15 make a big impression.
Indeed, from the main route into the Lower Ninth, the Claiborne Avenue Bridge, it’s impossible to miss the Brad Pitt Houses, as everyone here calls them. They are sprawling, angular buildings in bold hues not usually seen outside a gelateria. Monuments to the city’s resilience, and to Hollywood’s big heart, they are also New Orleans’s newest tourist attraction.
Tour buses, including those of Cajun Encounters (504-834-1770; www.cajunencounters.com) and Gray Line (504-587-0709; www.graylineneworleans.com), pass by the houses but don’t stop to let passengers walk around. You can also take a taxi the five miles or so from the city’s center to the Lower Ninth; the round-trip fare is under $30. (Virginia Miller, a spokeswoman for Make It Right, said the organization may eventually offer tours, but “right now the priority is getting residents settled.”)
I drove a rental car, following MapQuest directions, to the intersection of Tennessee and North Galvez Streets, near the heart of the new enclave. I found that residents like Mr. Andrews and his neighbor, Gertrude LeBlanc, were happy to converse. “If we don’t talk,” Ms. LeBlanc, a cheerful septuagenarian, said, “how will people know what happened to us?”
During my previous trip to the Lower Ninth four years ago, I mainly saw devastation. Wrecked houses were everywhere. Now much of the debris has been cleared, and acre after acre has gone back to nature, with grass almost as high as the reconstructed levees. The main effect in much of the district is an eerie stillness.
But “Brad Pitt’s neighborhood” is a beehive of activity, with builders and landscapers vastly outnumbering residents. A sign in front of each of the houses gives the name and city of its architect. One, called the Float House, was designed by the Pritzker Prize-winner Thom Mayne of Los Angeles. The main part of the house is built to rise with surging flood waters, on pylons that keep it from coming loose. It’s difficult to see the innovative foundation, but unusual external features are easy to spot, such as a kind of trellis cut into intricate patterns and painted turquoise, set against the raspberry-hued building.
Nearby, an angular house by GRAFT, a multinational architecture firm, features a porch enclosure that looks as though it had been cracked open by a storm, an unfortunate visual resonance. A house by the Japanese architect Shigeru Ban has a private courtyard space between the living room and bedrooms, but none of the detailing that would make it feel like a part of New Orleans.
Indeed, the houses seem better suited to an exhibition of avant-garde architecture than to a neighborhood struggling to recover. A number of designers I talked to, some of whom had visited the neighborhood, lamented the absence of familiar forms that would have comforted returning residents.
James Dart, a Manhattan-based architect who was born and raised in New Orleans, described the houses as “alien, sometimes even insulting,” adding, “the biggest problem is that they are not grounded in the history of New Orleans architecture.” But, like other architects I spoke to, he expressed admiration for Mr. Pitt. “He deserves a great deal of credit,” Mr. Dart said, adding that Mr. Pitt had “done more for New Orleans” than any government agency.
Jennifer Pearl, a broker who has several houses for sale in the Lower Ninth, has a practical view. “Brad has the very best intentions,” she said. “However, had he come here with houses that looked like what had been here before, he probably could have had four times, five times as many houses up by now.”
Another issue with the houses (except for Mr. Mayne’s) is their elevation: to protect them from future floods, they have been built on stilts that turn their front porches into catwalks. The goal of porches is to create a sense of community, and that’s hard to do when neighbors and passersby are literally overshadowed.
“It’s like New York — you know, the skyscrapers,” said Ms. LeBlanc, who lives in a single-story house next to one of the much larger Make It Right creations, like a Mini Cooper boxed in by SUVs. “And there are going to be more,” she added.
To most residents, the construction is simply good news. “It’s hard living here now, but it’s going to be worth it,” said Melba Leggett-Barnes, a cafeteria worker, who is concerned about crime in the neighborhood. The lack of commercial activity is also disappointing. “We used to be able to go to the corner store,” she said. “Now we don’t have a grocery; we don’t have a laundry.”
Ms. Leggett-Barnes, whose house was designed by the Philadelphia firm KieranTimberlake, is — literally — the poster child for Make It Right; her image, plastered on bus-shelter signs around the city, urges former residents to return to the neighborhood.
“There may be people who want to move back,” she said, “but don’t know that it’s possible.”
Some visitors also make a stop at the other end of the Lower Ninth, on Andry Street, where three houses built by Global Green (another Brad Pitt-supported charity) stand bright and inviting — and unoccupied. The houses, by Andrew Kotchen and Matthew Berman of Workshop/APD in New York, are listed for $175,000. (One of them is open to visitors; Monday and Friday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.; Saturday, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.; or call 504-525-2121 for an appointment.)
Unlike the Make It Right houses, which are reserved for returning residents of the Lower Ninth, the Global Greens are available to anyone. “We’d love it if you’d buy one,” Ms. Pearl said, a hopeful lilt in her voice.
