Beyoncé Hearts FLOTUS; Reshoots for 'The Avengers'
Welcome to the Smart Set. Every morning we bring you the gossip coverage, filtered. Today: Beyoncé's very public intimate thank you to Michelle Obama, Michael Ovitz gets snubbed by an X17 captions writer, and Joss Whedon is still tinkering with The Avengers.
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Beyoncé says she always wanted a way to thank Michelle Obama for being a good role model, so she wrote a note to the First Lady and posted a photo of it online. Don't let the aggressively loopy handwriting fool you: this is a shrewd move by Beyoncé. She's doubling her thank you note value. Never underestimate the viral appeal of the human touch.
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[Beyonce.com via Us Weekly]
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Courtney Love's already shaky-seeming claim that Dave Grohl once hit on Frances Bean Cobain was officially vaporized yesterday when her 19-year-old daughter emailed a cutting and perfectly devastating 48-word statement on her mother's Twitter tomfoolery to members of the media. Writes Cobain:
While I'm generally silent on the affairs of my biological mother, her recent tirade has taken a gross turn. I have never been approached by Dave Grohl in more than a platonic way. I'm in a monogamous relationship and very happy.
Twitter should ban my mother.
That will always be the dream. [Page Six]
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Busy day on the Scarlett Johannson front: She finally admitted she and Sean Penn were in fact dating last year when they were spotted aggressively canoodling during the White House Correspondents Association dinner. ("We spent time together, yeah," she tells Vogue. "I never put a title on it, really, but we were seeing each other.") Also, in the same interview, she described her 2010 divorce from Ryan Reynolds as "horrible" and "comically amiable," which sounds pretty horrible, from a getting-on-with-your-life standpoint. The good news is, she also seems to like her new crisply named ad executive fella Nate Naylor, even though he's a mere civilian, and is just getting his first taste of Famous Person Life. "It must be very strange for him," she says. "It's an adjustment - I mean, it's got to be an adjustment for him way more than it was for me at nineteen. But he’s really remarkably good about it.” To be fair, everyone seems good with the press once you've dated Sean Penn. [Us Weekly]
Did the squares at the National Press Club censor, bury, or otherwise try to deliberately hide a poster that read “I was there, I remember, I inhaled” from a new exhibit devoted to rock photographer Tom Gundelfinger O'Neal's that opened on Wednesday night? Rick Pullen, a sponsor of the exhibit, says yes. Club president Theresa Werner says no, explaining the poster was taken down because it wasn't submitted for the club's review before it went up."They didn’t follow the rules,” she explains, adding “we put things up and take them down all the time.” [The Reliable Source]
The Avengers opens May 4, which apparently didn't stop director Joss Whedon from shooting a new scene with Robert Downey, Jr. last night. That seems like a pretty tight turnaround, and a sign that the picture might not be playing, though publicist Amy Pfister tweeted last night that anyone surprised by reshoots three weeks before a movie ships to theaters "has obviously never worked for Michael Mann." We kid Michael Mann. [Vulture]
Photo agency X17 is shopping shots of Jimmy Choo co-founder Tamara Mellon and an unidentified "lucky guy" in an orange bathing suit goofing around and engaging in unsafe horse play on a yacht off St. Barth. As it turns out, the lucky guy is Michael Ovitz, who never used to go unidentified in photos, because he was Michael Ovitz, dammit. Oh well. At least he looks happy. Yacht life suits him. [Deadline]
Politico's Mike Allen was inducted into the Virginia Communications Hall of Fame in Richmond last night. From now on, everyone should refer to him as Hall of Famer Mike Allen. [Politico]
