Miss California USA Pageant Director Keith Lewis explained the decision to fire then-Miss California Carrie Prejean in the following statement: “This was a decision based solely on contract violations including Ms. Prejean’s unwillingness to make appearances on behalf of the Miss California USA organization.”

But In an exclusive interview with Big Hollywood, Ms. Prejean’s attorney, Charles S. LiMandri, who says that he and his client learned of the firing during a phone call from gossip site TMZ, vehemently denies those allegations.

“She greeted troops, ‘Fox and Friends,’ she was lined up for the Special Olympics this weekend. It is pure BS.”  He continued that neither the Miss California USA Pageant organization nor Miss USA owner Donald Trump had ever taken issue with the frequency of her media appearances: “They never said it was a problem.”

According to Mr. LiMandri, the real reason behind the firing was three-fold: His client’s beliefs regarding same-sex marriage, a possible book deal with his client (a deal approved by Mr. Trump), and the fact that Ms. Prejean refused to pose for Playboy Magazine or participate in a docudrama promoting same-sex marriage.  (more…)

In this episode, “NewsBusted” covers: Obama at Notre Dame, Nancy Pelosi, Waterboarding, Code Pink, Terrorist Prisoners, Pro-Life, Chrysler, Donald Trump, Carrie Prejean, Perez Hilton, Playboy Magazine, Vanessa Hudgens, and Zac Efron.
 

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The sun is sinking in the west
The cattle go down to the stream
The redwing settles in her nest
It’s time for a cowboy to dream….

Exquisitely crafted, but never ostentatious. Pleasantly mellow, but never lazy. Thematically rich, but never preachy. Respectful of tradition, but never stolid. Deeply compassionate, but never descending into schmaltz. Five decades ago, a group of men now long-dead (and, it must be said, one smokin’-hot woman, still-living) followed an aged veteran director into the Arizona desert to make a humble, heartfelt western based firmly on quintessentially American notions of courage, decency, and good humor. The result of their collaboration, Rio Bravo (1959), remains one of the great visceral pleasures of cinema.

Howard Hawks’ masterpiece stemmed from his disgust with the joyless anti-heroics of uptight, melodramatic westerns like Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon (1952) and Delmer Daves’ 3:10 to Yuma (1957) — dark “message movies” that seemed to revel in smugly depicting small-town Americans as cynics and cowards. The man behind such classics as Scarface (1932), Only Angels Have Wings (1939), To Have and Have Not (1944), Red River (1948), and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) was in his early sixties in 1958, his career winding down after decades of constant production. He had interned for Famous Players-Lasky way back in 1916, and directed his first features in the mid-1920s. Thirty years later he was old and tired, and his last film, Land of the Pharaohs (1955), had been a disheartening flop. Since then, the previously prolific director hadn’t helmed a picture in three years, an unheard-of period of self-exile for a man who had cranked out movies regularly for decades. But the brazen slap across the face that High Noon had given America’s western mythology had bothered him. “I made Rio Bravo,” he later told an interviewer, “because I didn’t like High Noon. Neither did Duke. I didn’t think a good town marshal was going to run around town like a chicken with his head cut off asking everyone to help. And who saves him? His Quaker wife. That isn’t my idea of a good western.” (more…)

In this episode, “NewsBusted” covers: IMF, Recession, Insect Torture, Barack Obama Scholarship, New York TImes, Hezbollah, Audrina Patridge, HBO, Sarah Palin, Lisa Rinna, and Playboy magazine.

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