Startling Developments! Cook Meltdown! And an amazing new Casting rumor!

Hey folks, Nick here, and wow ... WOW ... this news took me out at the knees and wouldn't leave me until I was gushing ... with Ghostbuster love! New developments that my spies reported straight from the set of GB3 "The Busters of Ghosts," and the news is ... spine-shattering. Any other project I would have forecast doom after such production-halting events like this, but it's the fans like us and blogs like this that keep the suits humping the idea of a Ghostbusters 3 to life. And it looks as if humping until this dead baby is back to life is just what this project may need after what happened this week.

First news: rumor of Dane Cook's Christian Bale-esque meltdown on set. Apparently Cook has been coming late to set after lounging in stand-up clubs/brothels in and around Montreal, where some of the principal photography/location scouting has been taking place. My spies report he has been booking hour-long blocks at open mic nights/champagne rooms, arriving for his show late and insiting on speaking English to a primarily French-Canadian audience. Needless to say, late nights rapidly screaming English jokes at French-speaking audiences took a toll on him. A spy deep within the production reported this week that Cook arrived on set on Wednesday, unkempt and reeking of liquor, but what unusual was that he was eight hours late; the shoot was scheduled to begin at 8am, and Cook arrived at 4pm. What followed may go down in legend as on of the great blow-ups/meltdowns, or "melt blows" as they say in H-wood.

Upon arriving on set so eight hours behind schedule, Cook was immediately harangued by newly-christened director Hump (the exclusive we broke RIGHT HERE ON THIS BLOG!), who followed Cook from his trailer to makeup, screaming all the while (and those on site have reported that Hump is notorious for his expectoration). Cook was stoic and emotionless as he was helped into his tremendous fat suit by four patient Mexican makeup artists as the irate film maker screamed a combination of fancy Euro-talk and English into his ear. (The fat suit, called "McSweeny" on-set, is a double-whammy new character that we have learned much of in the last few weeks: a morbidly obese German youth, Lief Käsebrot, who is called into ghost-bustin service after it is revealed to him via an irate psychic that his lifetime diet of fast food and sausages has enraged an entire spectral herd of ghost-cows and at least 35 ecto-pigs that plan to march on The Hauge ... unless they are stopped! How Käsebrot hooks up with the ither GBs in NYC remains a mystery.) After the four-hour makeup process finished, it seemed that Cook had at last had enough, and, secured in his mammoth fat suit, he tackled Hump and began to smother him within the giant folds of latex lard. Hump screamed and kicked, but Cook seemed immune. Using his bulk to pin Hump to the floor of the makeup trailer, Cook reached behind him and tore the straps from his comically undersized proton pack, using them to hogtie an increasingly sweaty Hump to the floor.

Cook stood slowly (it takes a disproportionate amount of time to stand when wearing McSweeny), coughing a strange brown bile that trickled down his engorged neck, and soon launched into a hypnotically sadistic rendition of Humpty Dumpty as he tore away the seat of his fat suit. Imagine the scene: a balding, wiry-haired director, tied like a pig on the floor of a makeup trailer, sweating profusely; a terrified staff of makeup artists, hiding their eyes in shame and fear but mostly shame, like rejects from the final scene of the Blair Witch Project, just hoping whatever terrible thing is going on right behind them will just be over; and a maniacal Dane Cook, ripping chunk after chunk of fat suit away from his ass until he is but fat legs, no waist, and all fat torso, arms, neck, and head, screaming the lovable children's song as he goes. The climax came as Cook, his bare ass exposed at last, moved over to the hogtied Hump and proclaimed: "Let's see your horses and men put THIS ONE back together!" And with that, Dane Cook dropped a creamy brown pile of rancid human shit on Director Dagon Hump. Despite the abundance of Charmin toilet paper littering the set, Cook did not even have the decency to wipe. He disappeared into his trailer, and returned minutes later wearing nothing but sweat pants and holding a surf board. "Looks like I'm gonna have to ride this one, and cut it soft," he was heard to say, before boarding a Montreal bus and disappearing into the city.

Unless a miracle happens, I think Dane Cook's involvement in Ghostbusters 3 is officially over. And it may have been a long time coming: my spies in the production have revealed new concept art for a "bold new direction" Hump and the H-wood suits were planning for this project. Maybe Cook was planned to be outted for a while; only Hollywood insiders know for sure. But the good news is, it looks like the original creators (Riteman, Ramis, Aykroyd, Murray, and Moon) are starting to finally get their voices heard. I can't say much more than just show you the picture I've seen. I can't vouch for its authenticity; I've heard some regard it as a clever photoshop and nothing more, while others say it is indeed a true photo of this great comedic team donning the brown jumpsuits. Either way, I think I can safely say: The Comedians of Comedy as Ghostbusters?! It looks like the fans may finally get a new squad of Ghostbusters worthy of their predecessors. Behold!

"The Busters of Ghosts" Insider Scoop!

Hey folks, Johnson here, taking over for my collaborator Nick as he has some facial boils lanced. This past week I got a chance to sneak a peek on-set of Ghostbusters 3, posing as a fluffer for Tiger Woods, who plays a mad scientist that makes toilet paper out of feces in the film. This was the first in many shocking revelations I recieved vis a vis "The Busters of Ghosts: Third Time's a Charmin" as its being called internally (apparently not everyone is sold on the title, and by that I mean everyone but the somewhat violent director Dagon Hump, who recently received a sizeable surplus of Charmin toilet paper for his agreement to plug the product. This is how things get done in Hollywood.)

Mr. Hump has a well-deserved "artsy-fartsy" anti-commercial reputation, after the Indonesian-born director's first film "Death Stalks the Buffet Line" flopped massively while winning the jury prize at Cannes. The film depicts, in a Bergman-esque contemplative manner, the languor and ennui of a serial rapist who spends every night eating at the Old Country Buffet, only to be raped to death climactically by a professional bowling team. In what has been argued to be a sarcastically scathing review masked as a glowing one, The Luxemborg Post's Rupold Deveritt wrote, of Mr. Hump: "Hey, somebody get this fucking idiot to direct Ghostbusters 3." Apparently, someone took him seriously, producers not being skilled at reading through thick literary irony, as the master of ponderous, existential meloncholy is squarely at the helm of "The Busters of Ghosts."

And what a helm it is! I witnessed the first day of shooting, where a fistfight broke out between actor Vince Vaughn, who plays the ghost of Justice in a society gone wrong, and Dagon Hump when Vince refused to stare directly in the camera, addressing the audience, when he delivers a particularly powerful line: "morality is a ghost, busted by scientists, in a society dying of reason." In a bit of method acting typical of Vaughn, he insisted he actually address the four Ghostbusters, each played by Dane Cook (Vaughn ad-libbed a pretty funny line, "too many Dane Cooks in the kitchen," which made Mr. Hump so angry, he stabbed Vaughn with a fountain pen, calling him with a profound shout "The Fascist of Golgotha.")

In a typically contrarian move, Dagon Hump has introduced constant marketing opportunities for Charmin toilet paper. Sometimes, for no reason at all, characters are holding many rolls of the sanitary napkin in their arms, while they deliver lines that bear out no relevance to the Charmin. I managed to overhear Mr. Hump discussing his reasoning for this choice with Dane Cook: "we are all shit." Dane Cook kept giggling through Hump's solemn philosophizing, saying: "man, wouldn't it be funny if like the Charmin bear just busted through the door, saying like, 'hey, keep wiping your ass with my stuff!'" I'm no expert in psychology, but it seemed like Hump thought Dane Cook was a masterfully ironic figure, as he kept glowing with pride each time Cook would make a cultural reference and saying, "You are a jester in my postmodern court."

Whew! What a scoop! I'm not sure the film's producers like the direction Hump's taking things in, as they took him aside shortly following the Vaughn fight, telling him: "Let Vaughn be Vaughn. His dumbass attitude writes checks." Hump's reaction was simply to vomit on the floor, singing the chorus of "You Only Get What You Give" by the New Radicals as he wretched. We'll have to see how this one plays out!

Rumoermongering

Hey folks, Nick here, and I got a juicy piece of gossip today. Some of my well-placed spies in H-wood floated a rumor my way that can be best described as Ghostbusters: Brown Bunny edition.

Do you like ghosts? (Applause in the affirmative.) Do you like ghostBUSTERS? (More applause.) Do you like Ghostbusters ... sucking dick?!

Well if some in the H-wood suits have their way, you may just see that, in what could be a drastic new direction for the script: a hard R-rated GB3, done mockumentary style, that follows the GBs into a haunted prison, and we see the ghosts of prisoners (and, inexplicably, the "ghosts" of their crimes). I'm talking Ray Stantz in a shower-rape scene with ghosts, I'm talking Venkman burning his own face off when the ghost of a child molester "slimes" him in an especially disturbing way, and I'm talking, folks, about Winston getting hate-crimed to DEATH by the white supremacist ghosts in the laundry!

Perhaps the only thing more distressing than this news is the "Ghosts of Ghosbusters Past" sublot, which sees a CGI John Belushi, "playing" a long-dead Stantz colleague, rise from the dead to pick up a ghostly proton pack (made of what?! ectoplasm?!), and then recruit the CGI ghost of Jonh Candy (which appeared to be just edited images of Uncle Buck thrown up on screen, if what I've seen is anything to go on), Chris Farley, and Keith Moon. You see the ghost of Phil Hartman briefly but the ghost of Andy Dick does something to him off camera. I don't know, the footage I saw was poor quality, it was smuggled to my on an iPod touch via a well-placed spy. What does these spectral GBs do? They unite in their positive energy and attempt a last-ditch rescue effort to save the remaining ghostbusters from the prison. Sounds pretty dumb, but the ghost Ecto-1 (called Ecto Ecto-1) was pretty badass.

I remain hopeful that this is some kind of joke rough draft or something, test footage, whatever ... I really don't want to see this franchise go they way of Cloverfield ...

Update: Dane Cook as Ghostbusters?

Hey folks, Nick here, and it looks like those rumors of Ghostbust3rs casting just won't settle down. We already heard about (and were the first on the net to debunk!)the "lesbusters" rumor of an all-butch lesbian team taking over from the octogenarian team of original Ghostbusters ... we knew that rumor was bunk because the script that it was based on (which saw the original boys in brown giving up the mantle in 2026 in a distant, "AI"-esque future where robots are prostitutes and the Necromancer ghost of Michael Bay (who died in this alternate future at 54 from explosives-linked brain cancer) is trying to bring about Armageddon with roboghosts and a loyal army of ghosts from all the childhood dreams he's murdered).

So yeah, that rumor was false. But this rumor is far more interesting. Take a look at this image smuggled out of the wardrobe department, courtesy of one of our spies:



A few interesting tidbits about this juicy image. For one, it was handed off to me attached to a script page that had Harold "Egon" Ramis's character working at a top-secret psycho-reactive stem cell facility in Lucerne, Switzerland, where the pluripotent stem cells (which, some experts note, are called "ghostem" cells because they are so regenerative) and other scientific stuff like ectoplasm are studied. In the brief page there is some scene-setting stuff, but notably some dialogue from Egon where he explains the ability to combine ectoplasm and stem cells to virtually clone into existence long-dead things. An interesting political slant of GB3? An shameless attempt to be topical? This would make sense because it could explain how Dane Cook could be funny in the film; we all know his ability to create joy and laughter died long ago. Either way, the rumors I've heard swirling around casting the new Ghostbusters crew, and the image above, all fit with this bit of film info.

If what I hear about casting is correct (and the above image seems to confirm this) the new Ghostbusters team will be made up of ... Dane Cook. That's right, all four new Ghostbusters will be played by Dane Cook, and he'll be playing them simultaneously, like Micheal Keaton in Multiplicity.

Cook is apparently keen to try out some different suits and other costumes to make the clones somewhat differentiated. For example, Cook has tried on some of the rubber fat suits (like the kind used in the Nutty Professor), so we could have the fat clone. He's tried on a dress or two and had wardrobe re-worked the jumpsuit for the lady clone. No word yet on what kind of Hollywood magic will produce the funny clone.

Some things to note: it seems kind of crass having Cook in blackface to replace Ernie "Winston" Hudson as the obligatory black Ghostbuster. Also kind of off is the Twin Towers still standing in the photo ... does this mean the movie will indeed take place in the early 90s, just after the events of GB2? Or does it foreshadow an alternate-reality NYC timeline that may play an integral role to the plot?

Only time will tell! Check back for more spy scoops as the ball really gets rolling on GB3 production!