LOS ANGELES (AP) — Paula Patton is having the best summer ever.

Professionally, the 37-year-old actress is busy promoting the romantic comedy “Baggage Claim,” which opens Sept. 27. “2 Guns,” starring Patton, Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg, opened earlier this month.

Personally, Patton is relishing the success of her husband, Robin Thicke, who has the catchy summer hit, “Blurred Lines.”

“You couldn’t have planned this better. It’s a really odd, wonderful coincidence,” said Patton of their simultaneous career highs.

“We celebrate in the kitchen late at night after we put our son to sleep, and we’re like, ‘Can you believe this?'” she said with a high-pitched squeal. “And then we do things like (tell each other) ‘drive the speed limit,’ ‘don’t mess around.’ It’s like ‘don’t mess this up!'”

In an interview earlier this month, Patton talked about prepping Thicke for her sexy on-camera scenes and said a healthy dose of jealousy is the key to a lasting relationship.

AP: What does Robin think about your “Baggage Claim” makeout scenes with Derek Luke, Boris Kodjoe and Djimon Hounsou?

Patton: I always prep him for the sexy scenes. I mean the moment he’s not a little jealous is the day that I’m very worried, OK? And I think he feels the same way. You have to have a little bit of jealousy. But mostly it’s happiness for each other because we’ve known each other since we were kids and we dreamt the same dream together and we know how hard it’s been. It’s had its peaks and its valleys. It’s a marathon. So when you have great moments like this, or when you just get to work, quite frankly, you’re just so thankful that you can kind of overlook the things that might hurt a little bit.

AP: In the film, your character faces a lot pressure to get married and start a family. Did you experience anything like that?

Patton: You know a little bit because my husband and I met when we were so young and then we lived together, ‘lived in sin,’ and then we had a long engagement. It was sort of that ‘is it ever going to happen?’ But we were so young. We were just kind of having fun.

AP: Will you pressure your kids to settle down?

Patton: I wouldn’t do that, no. I find that so archaic to be honest. I’m not really a traditional person that way. I don’t think people need to follow anybody’s rules but their own. Follow your heart.

AP: Did your son visit you on the movie set?

Patton: My son came to visit me a lot, but there’s a lot of scenes that you just don’t want ‘why are you kissing a man that’s not daddy?’ That’s just not good. That’s not healthy for a 2-year-old. He’s three now, but that could scar him. You know what I mean? So it was a lot of set (visits) to the trailer. He wasn’t there for the Boris Kodjoe makeout scene. I can tell you that much.

AP: What if he sees the movie one day?

Patton: Eventually he will and listen, that’s part of the deal. No one’s parents are perfect. You’re going to have to suffer a little humiliation of having to see mommy do these things. It’s the way it’s going to go.

AP: What’s your secret to balancing motherhood and your career?

Patton: You just sleep a lot less. Always tired. Always. I’d be lying to you if I told you something different.

AP: What has motherhood taught you?

Patton: That’s it’s given me great perspective, made me a lot less self-involved. Maybe before if you lose a role or something happens and you just sit in your bed all day and cry. There’s no time for that (now). Somebody needs to eat, they want to go to the park, and it’s great because it puts life in perspective and those moments become a lot smaller and a lot less significant once you have a child.

AP: What is it like to experience such personal and professional fulfillment?

Patton: I feel like my son has been a lucky charm. I really do. I don’t know what it is and I do think children can be lucky charms. You have to treat them with reverence and respect and discipline, but he did somehow. With him he brought many gifts.

By Greg Gilman
TheWrap

We’ve seen the photos of Matthew McConaughey wearing a whole lot less Matthew McConaughey.

Now we see get to see his even slighter self in action.

Bing: Matthew McConaughey returns to his old self

The “Magic Mike” actor famously lost a bunch of weight he could ill afford to lose to play a noble drug dealer in “Dallas Buyers Club,” the based-on-a-true-story movie of cowboy Ron Woodroof, who embarks on a quest in 1986 to find, smuggle and distribute not-yet-approved HIV medication.

Also from TheWrap: Matthew McConaughey’s ‘Dallas Buyers Club’ Release Moved Up to Nov. 1

Jared Leto portrays an HIV-positive, cross-dressing prostitute who becomes Woodroof’s friend and partner in the illegal drug ring. Jennifer Garner co-stars as a doctor who treats AIDS patients, and maybe falls in love with one, too. 

Focus Features is releasing the Oscar-friendly movie on Nov. 1. Watch the trailer.

NEW YORK (AP) — After bringing Jackie Robinson to the big screen, Chadwick Boseman is going to try another icon: James Brown.

Boseman has been cast to play the Godfather of Soul in a planned biopic by “The Help” director Tate Taylor. The film from Universal Pictures and Imagine Entertainment is currently untitled. Mick Jagger and Brian Grazer are among the producers.

Bing: Andre 3000 playing Jimi Hendrix

The project has been in development for years, with various actors and directors attached. It’s set to finally begin shooting this fall in Mississippi.

In an interview Monday with The Associated Press, Taylor said of the great soul singer: “Those are big shoes to fill.”

WENN

“Arrested Development” creator Mitch Hurwitz says a proposed movie version of the sitcom is inching closer to reality.

The project, which will reunite the entire team on screen, has been in the pipeline for some time, but now Hurwitz is working on a script and is convinced studio executives will be “really eager” to shoot the film. He tells Rolling Stone magazine, “I think it would be very doable to get them together for four or five weeks to make a movie … I’m working on the movie right now. I can’t get into much more detail, because I don’t want to scare anybody off.”

Bing: Mixed reviews for new ‘Arrested’ episodes

“I don’t want to be presumptuous about it,” he said. “I don’t own the property outright — it’s a 20th Century Fox property. But everybody seems really into it and really eager to make a movie.” The Emmy Award-winning sitcom, which went off the air in 2006, was revived for new episodes via Netflix earlier this year.

WENN

Actor Alec Baldwin has been involved in another altercation with a photographer. The alleged incident occurred on Tuesday in New York and there are conflicting reports surrounding who the aggressor was.

According to TMZ and sources close to Baldwin and his wife Hilaria, the couple was grabbing something to eat when the shutterbug became overzealous.

However, the photographer insists he did not approach the couple aggressively. He tells WENN, “I was taking video and asking questions. Ultimately I was doing my job.”

Baldwin’s newborn daughter, Carmen Gabriela who was born on Friday, was not with the actor at the time of the incident.

The actor and the photographer, who both admitted to pushing each other, have decided not to press charges and the police have reportedly closed the case.

This isn’t Baldwin’s first run-in with paparazzi. Last summer, he was accused of hitting a photographer, after obtaining a marriage licence in New York.

All these people going crazy over this needs to get a life move out of your parents house get laid and grow up

NEW YORK (AP) — Julie Harris, one of Broadway’s most honored performers, whose roles ranged from the flamboyant Sally Bowles in “I Am a Camera” to the reclusive Emily Dickinson in “The Belle of Amherst,” died Saturday. She was 87.

Bing: Videos of Julie Harris

Harris died at her West Chatham, Mass., home of congestive heart failure, actress and family friend Francesca James said.

Harris won five Tony Awards for best actress in a play, displaying a virtuosity that enabled her to portray an astonishing gallery of women during a theater career that spanned almost 60 years and included such plays as “The Member of the Wedding” (1950), “The Lark” (1955), “Forty Carats” (1968) and “The Last of Mrs. Lincoln” (1972).

She was honored again with a sixth Tony, a special lifetime achievement award in 2002. Her record is up against Audra McDonald, with five competitive Tonys, and Angela Lansbury with four Tonys in the best actress-musical category and one for best supporting actress in a play.

Harris had suffered a stroke in 2001 while she was in Chicago appearing in a production of Claudia Allen’s “Fossils.” She suffered another stroke in 2010, James said.

“I’m still in sort of a place of shock,” said James, who appeared in daytime soap operas “All My Children” and “One Life to Live.”

“She was, really, the greatest influence in my life,” said James, who had known Harris for about 50 years.

Television viewers knew Harris as the free-spirited Lilimae Clements on the prime-time soap opera “Knots Landing.” In the movies, she was James Dean‘s romantic co-star in “East of Eden” (1955), and had rolls in such films as “Requiem for a Heavyweight” (1962), “The Haunting” (1963) and “Reflections in a Golden Eye” (1967).

Yet Harris’ biggest successes and most satisfying moments have been on stage. “The theater has been my church,” the actress once said. “I don’t hesitate to say that I found God in the theater.”

The 5-foot-4 Harris, blue-eyed with delicate features and reddish-gold hair, made her Broadway debut in 1945 in a short-lived play called “It’s a Gift.” Five years later, at the age of 24, Harris was cast as Frankie, a lonely 12-year-old tomboy on the brink of adolescence, in “The Member of the Wedding,” Carson McCullers’ stage version of her wistful novel.

The critics raved about Harris, with Brooks Atkinson in The New York Times calling her performance “extraordinary — vibrant, full of anguish and elation.”

“That play was really the beginning of everything big for me,” Harris had said.

The actress appeared in the 1952 film version, too, with her original Broadway co-stars, Ethel Waters and Brandon De Wilde, and received an Academy Award nomination.

Harris won her first Tony Award for playing Sally Bowles, the confirmed hedonist in “I Am a Camera,” adapted by John van Druten from Christopher Isherwood’s “Berlin Stories.” The play later became the stage and screen musical “Cabaret.” In her second Tony-winning performance, Harris played a much more spiritual character, Joan of Arc in Lillian Hellman’s adaptation of Jean Anouilh’s “The Lark.” The play had a six-month run, primarily because of the notices for Harris.

The actress was something of a critics’ darling, getting good reviews even when her plays were less-well received. These included such work as “Marathon ’33,” ”Ready When You Are, C.B.!” and even a musical, “Skyscraper,” adapted from an Elmer Rice play, “Dream Girl.”

Her third Tony came for her work in “Forty Carats,” a frothy French comedy about an older woman and a younger man. It was a big hit, running nearly two years.

Harris won her last two Tonys for playing historical figures — Mary Todd Lincoln in “The Last of Mrs. Lincoln” and poet Emily Dickinson in “The Belle of Amherst” by William Luce. The latter, a one-woman show, became something of an annuity for Harris, a play she would take around the country at various times in her career.

The actress liked to tour, even going out on the road in such plays as “Driving Miss Daisy” and “Lettice Lovage” after they had been done in New York with other stars.

Harris’ last Broadway appearances were in revivals, playing the domineering mother in a Roundabout Theatre Company production of “The Glass Menagerie” (1994) and then “The Gin Game” with Charles Durning for the National Actors Theatre in 1997.

In 2005, she was one of five performers to receive Kennedy Center honors.

Harris was born on Dec. 2, 1925, in Grosse Pointe, Mich., the daughter of an investment banker. She grew up fascinated by movies, later saying she thought of herself as plain-looking and turned to acting as a way of becoming other persons.

She made her stage debut at the Grosse Pointe Country Day School in “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” at age 14. In the years that followed, she studied drama in finishing school, prep school, Yale University and the Actor’s Studio.

Before “Knots Landing,” Harris made numerous guest-starring television appearances on dramas and was a regular on two quickly canceled series — “Thicker Than Water” in 1973 and “The Family Holvak” in 1975.

Her Emmys were for performances in two “Hallmark Hall of Fame” presentations: “Little Moon of Alban” in 1958 and “Victoria Regina” in 1961.

Harris was married three times, to lawyer Jay I. Julian, stage manager Manning Gurian and writer William Erwin Carroll. She had one son, Peter Alston Gurian.

Funeral arrangements are pending.

CARLISLE, Iowa (AP) — Russell S. Doughten Jr., whose series of evangelical films about a post-rapture Earth was screened to millions of Christians in churches around the world, has died. He was 86.

Doughten died Monday at his home in Carlisle following a long battle with a kidney ailment, Peterson Funeral Home confirmed Saturday.

Although Doughten worked on various secular films — he helped produce the 1958 science fiction classic “The Blob,” among other films — he was best known for his four-part film series about what life on Earth might be like after the rapture, or end of times, The Des Moines Register reported. Evangelicals think true believers will ascend to heaven and those left behind will fight a war between Jesus and the Antichrist.

The series, which began with 1972’s “A Thief in the Night,” follows a young woman who is among the non-believers left behind. Doughten appeared in the movie and its three sequels as a pastor with weak faith who doesn’t ascend to heaven. The long, wiry beard he wore in the film was his trademark throughout much of his career.

Like much of Doughten’s work, the series was shot in Iowa. Former Iowa Film Office head Wendol Jarvis said Doughten strived to make the state a filmmaking destination.

“A lot of people learned their trade from Russ Doughten,” Jarvis said. “He was a man who believed in his message and loved his trade. He was very generous to the people he worked with, and he was never one to boast about anything he did.”

Doughten also produced the 1967 crime thriller “The Hostage,” which starred John Carradine, father of “Kung-Fu” star David Carradine. And he made “Fever Heat,” a story about the thrills of stock car racing, filmed in Stuart, Iowa.

Doughten was born en route to the Iowa Falls hospital on Feb. 16, 1927. He graduated from Chester High School and studied drama at Drake University in Des Moines, where he met his wife of 63 years, Gertrude Sprague.

Doughten is survived by his wife, three sons, four grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.

 

Great actress….

Well deserved….

No need to sell the audience short Sharon. I have a very long attention spand.The whole sex scene is distracting the plot.