Actor Armie Hammer (left, with actress Blake Lively) in a promo shot from TV series 'Gossip Girl.' Hammer will play twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss in 'The Social Network.'
(Credit: The CW)Did director David Fincher end up finding a pair of 6-foot-5-inch identical twins to play ConnectU founders Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss in "The Social Network," his upcoming movie about the contested origins of Facebook? It appears the answer is no.
According to blog The Playlist, which picked up on filmmaker Richard Kelly's Twitter account, a single actor has been cast: 23-year-old Armie Hammer, best known for the role of moneyed sleazebag Gabriel on teen drama "Gossip Girl." A thread on screenwriter Aaron Sorkin's Facebook page reveals that additional young actors cast include Max Minghella, Rooney Mara, Dakota Johnson, Brenda Song, and Josh Pence--but no character names were provided.
"The Social Network," which kicked off filming in Boston this week, is an adaptation of Ben Mezrich's unauthorized Facebook tell-all, "The Accidental Billionaires." Founder Mark Zuckerberg will be played by actor Jesse Eisenberg, while pop star Justin Timberlake will play Valley it-boy Sean Parker.
The question remains as to whether Armie Hammer, who actually is 6-foot-5, will be playing both twins with the help of some "Parent Trap"-style camera work, or if they've combined Cameron and Tyler, who had a longstanding legal battle with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg after they accused him of stealing their code and business plan, into a single character.
In either case, he sounds like the perfect casting choice for the white-collar Harvard graduates, who hail from Greenwich, Conn., and competed in the 2008 Olympics in Beijing on the U.S. rowing team. According to the Internet Movie Database, Hammer "is the great-grandson of industrialist, art collector, and philanthropist Armand Hammer."
Dude won't even have to act!
You know you love it: The CW Television Network has decided to start streaming its teen show Gossip Girl online again.
According to The New York Times, free ad-supported episodes of the program will soon reappear on The CW's Web site. They'd been taken down in April as an "experiment" to see how it affected viewership ratings.
(Credit:
The CW)
Here's what happened: The melodrama about upper-crust high schoolers in Manhattan, based on a best-selling young-adult book series, had been blessed with the greatest of hype--the star power of creator Josh Schwartz, better known as the guy who brought us The O.C.; regular mentions in Gawker and New York magazine; scandalous sightings of its young cast partying all over the city; and racy ad campaigns featuring taglines like "OMFG" and "Every Parent's Nightmare."
But its ratings had been downright subpar, even as the show's subject matter grew more and more guilty-pleasure-fantastic with sex, drugs, gambling, murder, and the exploits of rakish antihero Chuck Bass.
The CW had said all along that because of Gossip Girl's young, tech-savvy audience--the title character is an anonymous blogger, after all--that traditional television ratings simply didn't apply. Nielsen ratings, the longstanding measure of broadcast popularity, don't measure episodes recorded on DVRs or watched on the Web, after all. But under pressure, the network pulled the show from its Web site to see if TV ratings would improve.
Any gain in ratings was negligible, the Times report said. That said, Gossip Girl episodes had been available for purchase in the iTunes Store throughout the "streaming ban," and it was certainly still possible to record them on set-top boxes.
But with the second season of Gossip Girl premiering September 1, this means that you'll once again be able to get your Upper East Side baby billionaire fix from the comfort of your procrastination-friendly office cubicle.
Chuck Bass would so approve.
Disclosure: The CW is a joint venture between Warner Bros. and CBS, parent company of CNET News.
Party at the Wired Store!
(Credit: Louis Seigal for Wired)On Thursday night, a slew of well-dressed publishing types flooded into a cavernous space in Manhattan's SoHo neighborhood for the opening celebration of 2007's Wired Store. For the past few years, the tech-focused magazine has created a "pop-up store" to feature the gadgets that it wants to highlight this holiday season.
And like any party, there was an open bar. Last year's Wired Store party had featured booze from Budweiser and Yellow Tail. This year, Wired parent company Conde Nast had stepped it up a notch with drink selections courtesy of Patron tequila--including a mojito bar that was consistently mobbed all night.
But the real attractions were the gadgets, which visitors can order by hitting up a computer kiosk inside the store. On display were digital photo frames, satellite radio consoles, solar-powered messenger bags, HDTVs, robots, and thousand-dollar headphones. There were also talking barbecue thermometers, the cute One Laptop Per Child computer, a "Darth Vader Learning Laptop," and a $13,450 "water bobsleigh" designed in Germany.
And no "hot gadgets for the holidays" list would be complete without a mention of either or both Red Octane's Guitar Hero III and MTV's Rock Band video games. At the Wired Store, both were on display and fired up for test runs. But one party guest I was talking to thought that Guitar Hero had passed its prime ahead of the holiday season.
"I don't know," he said to me. "I think Guitar Hero totally jumped the shark on Wednesday night. Did you see it was all over Gossip Girl? That's when you know it's totally over."
"Yeah, um, I watch Gossip Girl," he added, embarrassed.
The cast of 'Gossip Girl'
(Credit: The CW)I'll admit it: I watched Wednesday night's series premiere of Gossip Girl, the new teen drama on the CW network that details the slightly-too-scandalous lives of privileged young New Yorkers--as chronicled by an anonymous blogger. One of the prominent characters in the first scene is a sleek LG Chocolate mobile phone. The show is packed with MacBooks, BlackBerrys, Sidekicks, and just about any other gadget that the average American high schooler could possibly want.
It is, indeed, tech-savvy. But let's face it--they aren't exactly dealing with the Gizmodo-guzzling demographic. I was betting that the word "blog" wouldn't even appear in the series premiere, despite the overall premise of the show.
Thankfully, I didn't bet any cash on it. "Blog" was said twice--albeit in the same conversation between socially awkward introvert Dan (played by Penn Badgley) and his father Rufus (played by Matthew Settle), a suspiciously good-looking ex-rock star. The two were stapling posters for Rufus' band's concert on lampposts around the Brooklyn neighborhood of Williamsburg, which is apparently Gossip Girl's equivalent of "the 'hood." (If you'd like a reality check, head over to Craiglist and do a search for Williamsburg apartments. Yeah, not cheap.)
The approximately 16-year-old Dan seemed to think it was all kind of tedious. "You know, Dad, there's this thing called MySpace where you post all this information online," he said. "Save some trees. Have a blog." See? He said blog.
His father scoffed: "If musicians got off their blogs and picked up their guitars, the music business would be in better shape." Hmm, so according to that logic we can blame blogging indie rockers for that "This Is Why I'm Hot" song? I'll take it.
Dan's response was predictable: "Spoken like a true relic." Funny, since the actor playing his dad doesn't look a day over 35.
So maybe I lost my personal Gossip Girl bet, but I'm still holding out for the episode in which the anonymous hellraiser of a narrator is revealed to be a Boston-based Forbes magazine editor.
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