Entertaining Posts: 06/23/11

Thursday, June 23, 2011

"Glee" star Cory Monteith was teen drug addict

LOS ANGELES | Thu Jun 23, 2011 3:33pm EDT

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - "Glee" actor Cory Monteith said he had such a serious drug problem as a teenager that friends once feared he could die.

Monteith, 29, plays naive high school football star Finn Hudson in the television musical comedy. But the Canadian actor told Parade magazine he was nothing like his quiet, well-behaved TV character, and that by the age of 13 he was skipping school to get drunk and smoke pot.

At 16 years old, when he quit school for good, he had attended 12 different schools.

"I burned a lot of bridges. I was out of control," Monteith told Parade. "I had a serious problem" (with drugs). "Anything and everything as much as possible.

Afraid that he "could die," his mother and a group of friends staged an intervention when he was 19. "That's when I first went to rehab. I did the stint but then went back to doing exactly what I left off doing."

It was only later that he decided to get clean.

"I stole a significant amount of money from a family member," Monteith said. "I knew I was going to get caught, but I was so desperate I didn't care. It was a cry for help. I was confronted and I said, 'Yeah, it was me.' It was the first honorable, truthful thing that had come out of my mouth in years."

Monteith said he felt "lucky to be alive" after his troubled youth.

Since starring in "Glee", Monteith has signed up for a number of movie projects including the July romantic comedy "Monte Carlo" with Disney star Selena Gomez and "Gossip Girl" actress Leighton Meester.

Monteith's interview appears in the June 25 edition of Parade.

(Reporting by Jill Serjeant, editing by Christine Kearney)

Bristol Palin talks pregnancy, McCain in memoir

By Christine Kearney

NEW YORK | Thu Jun 23, 2011 12:32pm EDT

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Single mother Bristol Palin takes swipes at everyone from Republican Senator John McCain's family to the media and her ex-fiancee in her memoir, published this week.

The memoir of the 20-year old eldest daughter of conservative political star Sarah Palin, "Not Afraid of Life: My Journey So Far," starts with a sketchy account of losing her virginity to Levi Johnston, the father of her son who later posed nude for Playgirl and was critical of Sarah Palin.

The account recalled going on a camping trip with Johnston, drinking wine coolers and waking up in a tent the next morning with no memory of losing her virginity.

She blamed Johnston -- who she generally refers to as a "gnat" and eventually broke up with -- for taking advantage of her. "You knew I didn't want to have sex until I was married!" she says she told him, adding, "How could you?"

Johnston defended himself saying, he too, was drunk.

"I thought I was headed into an evening of harmless high school fun. But really, I was headed into the deep quicksand of sexual sin, during a night that I barely remembered," she said in the memoir, published in the United States on Friday.

Later, she recalled Johnston's reaction to her being pregnant. "Better be a ... boy", he told her.

She also writes about the subsequent media attention during her mother's 2008 campaign as the Republican running mate of McCain where the younger Palin was also thrown into the media spotlight for being pregnant.

"For some reason, I didn't realize the ripples my pregnancy would cause throughout the nation," she said.

After that first blurry evening of sex, she and Johnston coupled again because, in her words, he was buying her purses and rings and clothes. "We had sex again. It was part 'thank you,' part 'security deposit'" she writes.

On the campaign trail with 2008 Republican presidential candidate McCain, she pokes fun at his wife, Cindy and his daughter Meghan, who was "comparing my family to hers, and complaining. Oh, the complaining."

She goes on to describe tearing up at her mother's supportive reaction to her time on the television dancing contest "Dancing with the Stars," which she lost to actress Jennifer Grey after controversially making the finale because the audience liked her rather than her dancing technique.

"There was something about seeing mom's face that made me feel unusually emotional," she said. "We'd been through a lot over the past few years, and we'd managed to end up stronger than when we started."

She finishes the book the way she started, quoting the bible and reaffirming her decision "not to have sex again until I'm married" while being an advocate for sexual abstinence for unmarried teens.

"I'm not a role model, a dancer, or a preacher. I'm just a normal girl who couldn't hide her problems and learned a few lessons along the way," she said.

Diddy settles civil lawsuit over NY club shooting

NEW YORK | Thu Jun 23, 2011 1:47pm EDT

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Rap mogul Sean "Diddy" Combs has settled a multimillion dollar lawsuit with three people in a 1999 shooting involving his protegee at a Manhattan nightclub, one of the victim's attorney said on Thursday.

An attorney for one of the victims, Natania Reuben, confirmed the settlement but declined to give further details, saying the settlement that occurred earlier this year was bound by a confidentiality agreement.

"I can confirm it happened, but I can't say anything else because of the confidentiality agreement," attorney Debra Reiser said.

The civil lawsuit stemmed from a December 27, 1999 incident in which Diddy, his then-girlfriend Jennifer Lopez and rapper Jamal "Shyne" Barrow were taken into custody following a shooting scuffle at the now-defunct Club New York in Times Square.

Barrow, who began shooting a gun in the melee, was later convicted of assault in shooting two bystanders who were wounded, while Reuben was wounded in the face by bullet fragments and in 2008 filed a $130 million lawsuit for compensation.

In his criminal trial, Barrow said that the shooting was in self-defense, after another group of men with whom Combs and Barrow had an altercation with started shooting.

Representatives from Diddy's Bad Boy Records, now a subsidiary of Interscope, could not be immediately reached for comment. His spokeswoman did not immediately return a query for comment.

Barrow, 33, was released in 2009 after serving nine years of a ten-year sentence because of assault, weapons possession and reckless endangerment charges stemming from the shooting. Shortly after his release he was deported back to his native Belize.

Combs and an employee of his, Anthony Jones, were acquitted on weapons charges.

The New York Post quoted former Club New York Owner Michael Bergos - who did not sign the confidentiality agreement - as saying that Reuben received $1.8 million in the settlement and that the other two victims received $50,000 and $500,000.

"I did nothing wrong and I may need to talk about (the incident) sometime in the future," Bergos told the Post.

(Reporting by Bernd Debusmann Jr., editing by Christine Kearney)

Harry Potter ebooks are on the way, but no sequel

By Mike Collett-White

LONDON | Thu Jun 23, 2011 9:44am EDT

LONDON (Reuters) - The seven Harry Potter novels will be available as ebooks in October, author J.K. Rowling said on Thursday at the launch of a new interactive online website that will allow readers to navigate through the wizard stories.

Rowling gave her clearest indication yet that she would not write an eighth Harry Potter story to follow the final installment published in 2007 by Bloomsbury in Britain and Scholastic in the United States.

"I do have closure with Harry," Rowling told reporters at the launch of the Pottermore website (www.pottermore.com).

"I have no plans to write another novel. I'm pretty sure I'm done on the novel front...But it was fun while it lasted."

Such is the scale of Rowling's fan base and the success of her novels that any indication of a new novel would be major news in the publishing and cinema world.

The long-awaited launch of the ebook versions could itself bring in many new readers to a series of stories that has already sold 400 million copies around the world and generated a record-breaking movie franchise made by the Warner Bros. studio.

The ebooks will be exclusively available from October in several languages on the Pottermore site, which has been set up in partnership with Sony Corp. They will be usable on all major electronic reading devices.

"It is my view you can't hold back progress," Rowling said in London.

"Ebooks are here and here to stay. Later than a lot of people, I for the first time downloaded ebooks and it's miraculous for travel and for children in particular. I feel great about taking Harry into this new medium."

The unveiling of Pottermore and its online store comes three weeks before the release of the eighth and final Harry Potter film "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 2," also an event likely to generate huge media and fan interest.

Harry Potter publishers around the world, Warner Bros and Sony have supported the launch of Pottermore, and are all set to benefit commercially from the Pottermore Shop.

GIVING SOMETHING BACK

Rowling said Pottermore was about giving something back to her fans around the world, who were among the first to create a large and influential online community. It was also about encouraging people to read more, she added.

"We knew there was a big demand for ebooks, but ... I wanted it to be something more than that," the author explained.

"I wanted to pull it back to the reading, to the literary and story experience ... I've had a lot to do with virtually every aspect of it."

There are around 18,000 words of new material in the form of background on characters' lives, for example, and the history of the houses at Hogwarts school.

The free site allows visitors to become part of the stories by going through the Sorting Hat process, for example, or visiting Diagon Alley to buy anything from wands to potions to help them navigate the magical and "muggle" worlds.

The site only covers the first novel "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's (Sorcerer's) Stone," and the remaining books will be added over time. The storyline of the second book will go live in early 2012.

Rowling said she had been working on the project for around two years.

The site opens for registration on July 31, the fictional Harry Potter's birthday, and the first million people to register will get early access to the website and the chance to help put the final touches to the experience.

The site will open to all users in October.

Although closing the door on the Potter series, Rowling did not rule out publishing an encyclopaedia of Potter's world.

"Will there ever be an encyclopaedia? Possibly. If ever I do do a printed encyclopaedia, I would like for all the proceeds to go to charity."

(Editing by Paul Casciato)