TMZ Report: You can hug it out now, bitch ... 'cuz the movie version of "Entourage" just got green lit. "Entourage" creator and head writer, Doug Ellin sent a simple message: "It's a go. Love you all." Ellin posted a black and white photo of the cast, showing that they're all Kumbaya. As we reported ... the announcement of an "Entourage" movie was delayed because actors Adrian Grenier and Jerry Ferrara were holding out for a bigger piece of the action. That's all history now ... everybody's back ... cameras will start rolling in January. Read more: http://www.tmz.com/2013/10/29/entourage-movie-green-lit-a-go-cast/#ixzz2j9VJaK00 Visit Fishwrapper: http://www.fishwrapper.com
LAS VEGAS (AP) -- It looked like a mismatch even before Peyton Manning hooked up for his first touchdown pass to Wes Welker and the rest of the NFL found out just how bad the Jacksonville Jaguars really are.
But now it's official. The Denver Broncos are the biggest favorite ever in an NFL game in this gambling city, a whopping four-touchdown pick Sunday at home against the hapless Jaguars.
Sports books in and around Las Vegas make Manning and the Broncos a 28-point favorite over Jacksonville, unheard of in an industry where half-point swings can be huge and most teams are rated within a few points of each other. But even the big line hasn't stopped people from betting money on the Broncos, even after they didn't cover the spread in Sunday's 51-48 win over the Dallas Cowboys.
"It didn't take people long to jump on the Broncos bandwagon, which is at its capacity now," said Jay Kornegay, who runs the sports book at the LVH hotel. "And we expect that to continue."
Though the city's legal sports books don't keep historical records on such things - and the NFL refuses to even acknowledge that betting lines exist - those in the industry say the lopsided point spread surpasses the 26-point margin for favored Pittsburgh against Tampa Bay in 1976 when the Buccaneers were an expansion franchise and the Steelers got within a game of the Super Bowl.
More recently, the biggest favorite was New England as a 24-point pick over Philadelphia in 2007, the year the Patriots made it through the regular season undefeated.
"You have a team that can't seem to get out of their own way against a team that put up 51 points on
Sunday," said Jimmy Vaccaro, vice president of sports marketing at the South Point hotel. "Everything feeds into this. It's the best versus the worst."
The game is so lopsided that most sports books aren't even putting up money lines on the game, where a bettor can simply pick a team to win or lose. Instead, oddsmakers tried to find a number that would somehow entice betting on the Jaguars even if they are given almost no chance of winning the game outright.
That line turned out to be 28 points, meaning bettors who think Manning and the Broncos won't let off the gas at home against Jacksonville have to give up that many points to get a bet on Denver. Those who like Jacksonville, on the other hand, will start with a four-touchdown edge on their bets.
"You might want to get out the Farmer's Almanac and hope they have 14 feet of snow Saturday night in Denver if you're taking the 28," Vaccaro said. "But it's still the NFL, where anything can happen."
Denver bettors found that out Sunday when the Broncos - who were heavily bet as 7 1/2-point favorites in Dallas - failed to cover the spread for the first time this season. Before that, bettors were cashing in tickets by the handful on the Broncos and on the total score going over what oddsmakers thought it would be.
"Dallas was America's Team but it's definitely Denver now," Vaccaro said. "It's all because of Manning, too. He's revitalized the whole franchise and made them the Super Bowl favorite."
Kornegay said the city's sports books have had a good year so far taking money on the NFL, though the tremendous popularity of the Broncos has cost them some money. He said it was reminiscent of the 2007 season, when bettors kept putting money on the Patriots until oddsmakers got wise and raised the lines so much it was tough for even a dominant team to cover the spread.
RJ Bell, who runs a website that analyzes betting and betting patterns, said casual bettors will continue to back the Broncos no matter what, while the professionals are more about where the numbers actually end up.
"If you say this line is 28 or even 32 points the average bettor just shrugs and figures Peyton Manning will score no matter what," he said.
For those who do like the Jaguars, there is recent historical precedence for betting them. In the 2007 game where New England was favored by 24 over Philadelphia, the Patriots didn't come close to covering the spread in a 31-28 win.
(CBS News) Ron Howard was barely beginning his career when he appeared in "The Andy Griffith Show." All these years later, he's a highly successful director, with a new movie out. Mark Phillips talked with Howard in London:
It's not hard to pick an appropriate location to talk to Ron Howard about his movies.
You could have picked a grand cathedral to talk about "The Da Vinci Code," or a university campus to talk about "A Beautiful Mind," or a space museum for "Apollo 13."
For his latest film, a super-car showroom is the place, because the movie is about the high-octane world of motor racing.
And Howard, perhaps the most successful mainstream movie director of the past few decades, has an admission to make: As with the occult, or mathematics, or space flight, motor racing is not something he knew much about before he made the movie.
Indicating a McLaren, he said, "You know, I appreciate cars enough to recognize sort of what we're looking at, but, you know, I wouldn't invest in a car like this. It'd be in fact a waste of great machinery to have me driving it!" he laughed.
"And I didn't know much about Formula One except that it was cool and sexy and very, very dangerous."
The movie, "Rush," is not just about racing, it's about the gripping, death-defying rivalry between two of its legendary drivers: James Hunt, the life-in-the-fast-lane, pedal-to-the-metal Brit who knew no fear, played by Chris Hemsworth; and Niki Lauda, the cold, calculating Austrian with an overbite, played by another remarkable look-alike, Daniel Bruhl.
"One man is one of the handsomest men in the planet -- true icon, playboy," said Howard. "And who's the opponent who stands in his way above all others? This kind of Austrian, myopic careerist whose nickname is 'The Rat.' Little rat-faced guy. Perfect, perfect!"
The movie may be about car racing, but Formula One -- the brand that's hugely popular in the rest of the world but which has always had difficulty cracking the American market -- serves as a modern, bloody, gladiatorial arena.
The film is set in the 1970s, where a driver's chance of dying over the course of a season approached a staggering one-in-five.
Niki Lauda's fiery crash in the 1976 German Grand Prix, in which he was severely burned and as good as dead -- he had the last rites administered -- is a centerpiece of the movie.
"You wouldn't write this script this way," said Howard. "If it was fiction, you wouldn't have the finale work in such a surprising and an emotional way. Will [the audience] believe that this guy could get back in the car six weeks after that kind of accident?"
A severely-scarred Lauda was, shockingly, back racing just six weeks after the crash. If it wasn't actually true, people wouldn't believe it.
Howard has come up against this problem before -- in outer space. "Apollo 13" told the story of the near-disaster of the explosion on the 1970 moon mission.
"I had a test screening for 'Apollo 13' very early on," he said. And the test audience -- like the general audience afterwards -- loved it."
Except for one guy.
"So I went to that card first, of course," Howard laughed. "A 23-year-old male. How come everybody likes it, this guy doesn't? And I started looking at it and he wasn't giving much detail. Big broad, strokes, just negative comments. Finally I flipped over to the side [where] it said, 'Please give us your thoughts about the ending.' And he said, 'Terrible. More Hollywood BS. They would never survive.' Well, 'course he didn't know it was a true story."
Some have scratched their heads at Ron Howard's own true story.
As Ronnie Howard, he was Opie, the perfect little kid on the '60s "Andy Griffith Show."
As TV hit adolescence, so did Howard, as Richie Cunningham on "Happy Days." TV led to the movies. America's iconic teenager in America's iconic teenager move, 1973's "American Graffiti."
But this son of a show-biz family was never going to be happy as just an actor . . . and opportunity came rolling along.
When the producers wanted him to be in the 1977 "Grand Theft Auto" car chase movie, he said he'd do it if he could direct it.
"It was the deal, yeah," Howard said. "I had to parlay the 'American Graffiti,' 'Happy Days' profile, and in a low budget movie, you know, I was enough of a star to sort of help finance it. And as a trade out, I got to direct it. So I had to leverage my way in there.
"You find you have to leverage your way into a lot of places, and it doesn't quite ever stop," he laughed. "But I just loved it. And I think I felt in a lot of ways it was a more complete reflection of who I am, what I like to do, directing."
It's what he'd wanted to do ever since he saw the 1967 movie, "The Graduate." Dustin Hoffman being seduced by Anne Bancroft's older woman -- a movie that changed a lot of people's lives.
"I started watching 'The Graduate' over and over again," Howard told Phillips, "and I began thinking about the way Mike Nichols shot things, which certainly had nothing to do with the way anything was ever photographed on 'The Andy Griffith Show,' or anything else that I had ever been around."
"What was it about 'The Graduate'?" asked Phillips. "I mean, a lot of people of a certain age, let's say, were very impressed by that movie, not just for the obvious reasons."
"Well, it was at that moment both rebellious and hilarious, and the music was great. It looked and sounded and felt very, very different from everything else."
Coming up toward 60 now and to the 30-movie mark -- and with two Oscars in his pocket -- there's barely a type of film he hasn't done. From the true stories like "Apollo 13," to kids' fairy tales like
"How the Grinch Stole Christmas," to grown-up fairy tales like "The Da Vinci Code," Howard admits not everything he's done has been high-minded.
"There've been a couple movies that I've taken on because I thought, 'Boy, I think there's really an audience for this, and I think I know how to do it, and this'll be great business,' " he laughed.
"Which ones are those?" Phillips asked.
"I probably felt that way about 'The Grinch.' "
Although it did provide an opportunity for that Ron Howard trademark: sneaking his family into his movies: His father, Rance; his daughter, Bryce; his wife, Cheryl.
"It's my only superstition," Howard admitted about his wife's appearances. "Doesn't have to be a big part, but I want her to be in all of the films. And she has been."
And if it works, it works.
"Rush" has been a box office hit in Britain. It will have a tougher run in the NASCAR-dominated U.S., where it opens nationwide this weekend.
"Rush," for Ron Howard, isn't just the name of his latest movie. It's what he gets making them.
"I'm not interested in a lot of long vacations. This is what I do. And I can't think of a better day than getting up with a set of storytelling problems to face and an interesting group of people to face them with."
For more info:
"Rush" (Official movie website)
To watch the trailer for Ron Howard's "Rush" click on the video player below:
