- MTV is going to hold a live fundraiser for the Jersey shore. It's about time they paid back to the community they took so, so much from.

- Jon Hamm's penis is an Obama supporter, naturally.

- Here are the two main characters of your favorite TV show of all time, telling babies to get out and vote.
http://youtu.be/QJpv_1YkFLs

-Here are photos of all the celebrities voting on Election Day. ALL of them. Thanks, Huffington Post!

All New People.

The sitcom star Zach Braff works hard not to be thought of as a sitcom star.

He became famous—and made his money—as the pleasantly goofy medical student at the center of the hospital dramedy Scrubs, which debuted on NBC in 2001. But in his spare time he also wrote and directed the well-received 2004 indie hit movie Garden State. His bios note his Shakespeare work with the Public Theater—parts in a George C. Wolfe production of Macbeth in 1998 and a Central Park Twelfth Night in 2002. Last summer, he returned to the New York stage, and acquitted himself more than ably in Paul Weitz’s dark comedy Trust at the Second Stage.

Now he is back at the Second Stage, not as an actor but as a playwright; his debut effort, All New People, opened there last week. If not exactly an ambitious work, it is an attempt at a serious one, another dark comedy about peoples’ secrets, about their pasts, about trying to find small moments of happiness in what can be a dispiriting world.

It is sharply funny, nimbly directed by Peter DuBois (who also directed Trust and, a year and half earlier, yet another pitch-black Second Stage comedy, the excellent Becky Shaw) and it features a respectable ensemble cast. If its characters are one-dimensional, its progression overly schematic and its attempt at profundity misplaced, it has still achieved its goal. Mr. Braff can rightly be called a playwright, one produced at a major off-Broadway company.

All New People opens with Charlie, a bearded and bathrobed 30-something played by Justin Bartha, standing on a chair, his head in a noose, enjoying a cigarette and preparing to hang himself in a stylish, art-filled, double-height living room with a huge wall of windows looking out on a gray, impassive sky. He takes his last drag and, thus arranged, realizes he cannot reach the ashtray placed on a countertop nearby. He’s flummoxed—ridiculously, endearingly worried about discarding a butt when he’s about to discard his body. It’s a charming, attention-getting opening, funny and subtle, and indicative of some of the smart and dexterous comedy to come. (Not all of that comedy is subtle and clever: moments later, when the real-estate agent Emma, played by Krysten Ritter, arrives to show the house, Charlie will stumble in trying to get down from the chair and end up hanging from the noose, only to be saved by Emma.)

It is Charlie’s birthday, he is distraught for reasons he at first won’t reveal and he just wants to be alone. But the guests just keep arriving: First Emma, a manic, and smart-ass Brit with an unsuccessful real-estate career and a bit of a drug problem; then Myron (David Wilson Barnes), a failed high-school drama teacher turned drug-dealing firefighter, in unrequited love with Emma; and finally Kim (Anna Camp), a ditzy prostitute with—you’ll be shocked to learn—a heart of gold. They’re four lost souls—snarky, slapsticky lost souls—serendipitously coming together in the middle of winter at an empty summer house in an empty beach town.

The town is Loveladies, on Long Beach Island, New Jersey. This is familiar territory for Mr. Braff—his trademark Garden State verisimilitude, familiar from his shot-on-location-near-where-he-grew-up film—and it gives the play the slightest sense of grounding. (The Observer should disclose both that we knew and were friendly with Mr. Braff at the suburban New Jersey high school we both attended, which makes cameos in both All New People and Garden State, and that for the past 30 years we’ve spent a week or two each summer on Long Beach Island.)

But other than that across-the-Hudson veneer—and the copious drugs consumed—this is a fairly standard and slim drunken-night-of-revelations play, though one with a number of great one-liners and a cast that delivers them with excellent timing. Mr. Barnes, as the smarmy Myron, is particularly delightful, just as he was in Becky Shaw, though he is helped by getting many of the best lines. “I’m not a prostitute; I’m an escort,” Kim protests at one point. “And I’m not a fireman; I’m a pressurized-water courier,” Myron parries.

There’s enough similarly sharp dialogue to keep the audience thoroughly engaged and more than sufficiently amused. But as Mr. Braff moves toward a message, All New People gets less effective and more obvious. Ultimately, and with a little help from his new friends, Charlie realizes that things aren’t so terrible, that the crap in his life, too, shall pass, and that it’s nice to be with other people, especially on what we’ve learned is his birthday. “What if it’s just for tonight?” he asks near the play’s end. “What if we say, just for tonight, everything’s OK?”

All New People’s earlier abundant humor and biting cynicism are, by this point, gone. The characters have become earnest, things have been wrapped up, we have gotten our final-scene lesson. Just like in a sitcom.

editorial@observer.com

That was in 1993's Manhattan Murder Mystery, his first role, before his hit run on Scrubs, before his writer-director turn with Garden State. Armed with those financial and artistic successes, Mr. Braff has returned to the stage-he's done a few small parts in Public Theater Shakespeare productions-for Trust, an excellent dark comedy by Paul Weitz, which opened last week at the Second Stage Theatre. In it, Mr. Braff plays, more or less, Woody Allen.

He's good at it: In his nine years on Scrubs, he perfected the charmingly awkward thing, the antihero leading man. His Trust character, Harry, isn't the same as his Scrubs character, J.D.-there's a steely spine under Harry's neurotic exterior, and he's not nearly so goofy-but Mr. Braff has a virtuosic command of the comedy in Mr. Weitz's very funny script, with great timing, funny bits of stage business and, at least in the play's early scenes, an Allenian arsenal of pauses, stutters and double takes.

Harry opens the play as an over-analytical, overly chatty, excessively needy nebbish in a bad suit who's visiting an S&M parlor. He has sold his dot-com for $300 million and doesn't know what to do with his life. (Being rich, he explains, is "like, I don't know, deeply deflating?") His wife doesn't like him; he has no friends; he's stopped by the dungeon in hopes of feeling something. He soon realizes his dominatrix, Mistress Carol (an outstanding Sutton Foster, playing very much against her usual sweet-girl type), was a high-school classmate; they go for coffee, and for the first time in a long time, he feels a connection. It's meet-cute, sort of, but with chains and a ball gag.

(In real life, I should mention, Mr. Braff and I were friendly acquaintances in high school, though we've never had any subsequent S&M run-ins, and he never played me a Shins song that changed my life.)

Harry's wife, Aleeza (a nicely arch and caustic Ari Graynor), is a painter who can't paint, crippled by her husband's amazing and unexpected wealth, someone who doesn't need to do anything and thus can't do anything. Mistress Carol-her real name is Prudence-lives with a domineering boyfriend, Morton (Bobby Cannavale, dependably manly and, here, surprisingly skinny), who's impressed with his own intelligence and abilities but can't actually hold down a job. ("I got 1560 on my SATs," he rants to Prudence. "I should be the one with a hundred million dollars!")

Mr. Weitz-the screenwriter, director and producer behind American Pie and About a Boy, among others-has written a script that is funny, dirty, occasionally shocking, literate and intelligent and emotionally rich. (Which is to say: It is a prime example of what could be thought of as the Second Stage aesthetic, and it makes a fine companion to Leslye Headland's funny, dirty, shocking, intelligent Bachelorette, currently playing at the company's uptown space.)

It paints four distinct and compelling characters, though Harry is a touch underdeveloped: His transition from submissive dweeb to canny manipulator-suddenly, he's not Woody Allen anymore-is insufficiently explained or justified.

The cast is excellent, and under the guidance of Peter DuBois (who two seasons ago directed Second Stage's Becky Shaw, which was also smart, funny, dirty and shocking), they give finely calibrated performances. Alexander Dodge's set is pretty, simple and cleverly constructed-beds and restaurant tables slide on and off from the wings; S&M handcuffs are flown in from above-and Mr. DuBois keeps the action flowing briskly on it.

The four unhappy characters begin the play living a life that feels wrong but without any real idea of how to alter it. But the unexpected reconnection of Harry and Prudence-Harry has had a crush on her since high school, it turns out-has ramifications that show each the possibility of a different life. "It's not about fun," Prudence says of the domination-submission fantasies she acts out with her clients. "It's about accepting yourself, even if it's temporary." Eventually, and very gratifyingly, these characters do, in unexpected ways.

"I got a job. I am part of the working world," Morton announces in his final scene. "I'm managing a Mexican restaurant." He'd earlier thought he was too good, too smart for a regular job. "Turns out I'm pretty good at managing Mexican restaurants," he says. And that's good enough.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S BIG, Gay Dance Party, which arrived last week at Theatre Row after a sold-out and praised run in last summer's New York International Fringe Festival, delivers on the promise of its title in the most technical sense: There is Abraham Lincoln (indeed, a handful of them, a sort of chorus line-cum-greek chorus in beards and hats); there are gay-rights issues; and there is, in one scene, what could perhaps be termed a dance party.

But if you read the title as carrying the implicit promise of a campy historical review, of a smartly counterintuitive political argument or even of a simple evening of goofy entertainment, you'll be soundly disappointed. An intriguing title and a handful of ironic-vaudeville staging devices can't obscure the fact that Abraham Lincoln's Big, Gay Dance Party, written by Aaron Loeb and sloppily directed by Chris Smith, is a didactic and predictable message play about the virtues of tolerance, acceptance and gay rights.

It opens with a play-within-a-play, a grade-school Christmas pageant near Lincoln's Illinois hometown, in which a fourth-grader playing Abe reads from a script that mentions questions raised by historians about Lincoln's relationship with his law partner, Joshua Speed, with whom he shared a bed.

The teacher, a kindly closeted lesbian in mom jeans and knitted vests, is promptly fired and put on trial (in this world, teachers' unions apparently don't exist), and the play promptly becomes Inherit the Wind: A moralizing politician prosecutes, an old nemesis defends, a high-flying big-city journalist comes to town.

There are a few intriguing moments, as when the (black) defense attorney and (gay) big-city journalist argue about the degree to which the gay-rights movement is similar to the civil-rights movement, about the relative privilege of American gay men. "You boys live in the richest cities in the world-scratch that, the richest neighborhoods in the richest cities," the pol tells the reporter. "And yet, when someone hurts your feelings, you beautiful men with your awesome hair and expensive clothes and perfect teeth start talking like you're sharecroppers from Mississippi." But as soon as it's raised, it's abandoned. This Big, Gay Dance Party is also, briefly, an AIDS play, a coming-out story and a historical pageant, as when, from time to time, we're read a Lincoln quote about the importance of acceptance or unity.

It also has a strange take on homosexuality for gay-rights melodrama. Jazz hands are an inevitable signifier for gayness; the older, big-city gay man has his eye on the young, small-town gay boy; the happily long-partnered lesbian is deeply ashamed of her "secret."

Still, Abraham Lincoln's Big, Gay Dance Party is genial and mildly entertaining. Tolerance, acceptance and gay rights are good things. But well before the end of this two-and-half-hour sophomoric exercise, a viewer becomes a bit jealous of the titular president: At least he didn't have to wait for his play to end.

editorial@observer.com

You won't find Garden State on many Best of the Decade lists, and with good reason: Zach Braff's film nearly suffocates you with hipster twee. But, still, has anything been more influential on the latter half of the aughts? Without Garden State, (500) Days of Summer and a host of other 20-something ennui fests wouldn't even exist. Sure, it has become a punch line—and a litmus test; if someone truly loves Garden State, we immediately raise an eyebrow—but it's easy to see why this film struck such a chord initially: it's funny, it has some great music cues and it features Peter Sarsgaard. What more could any indie-lover want? [IFC, 8 p.m.]

Tuesday: Planet of the Apes

Flipping around the channels a couple of weeks ago, we stumbled upon Tim Burton's ill-advised remake of Planet of the Apes, and, to our surprise, we were oddly transfixed. Not because this film is any good—spoiler alert: it's not—but because a remake of Planet of the Apes actually happened! We would have loved to be a fly on the wall during the pitch meeting when Mr. Burton sold 20th Century Fox executives on not only Mark "Talks To Christmas Animals" Wahlberg in the Charlton Heston lead role, but also Estella Warren as the female lead (non-ape edition). Say hi to your mother for us. [Cinemax, 8 p.m.]

Wednesday: Taken

Three reasons to watch Taken, the surprise sleeper hit from this past February: 1.) Liam Neeson, who combines Jason Bourne with the tenacity of a great white shark in the name of saving his daughter from being sold into sex slavery. 2.) The plot, which can literally fit inside a fortune cookie (see: man saving daughter from sex slavery). 3.) Did we mention how much ass Mr. Neeson kicks, all within the safely re-edited confines of a PG-13 rating (Taken was much more violent when it made the rounds through Europe)? Seriously, this movie is a load of fun because it's as simple as a cheeseburger. Just make sure to check cognizant thought at the door. [HBO, 9 p.m.]

Thursday: It's a Wonderful Life

Enough has been written (and re-written) about It's a Wonderful Life, that, at this point, finding some virgin snow to intellectually play around in is borderline impossible. So we'll just say this about our favorite holiday movie: it's so dark and weird and twisted and sad that parts don't feel like a Christmas movie at all. But then the third act happens—replete with Zuzu's petals and "Auld Lang Syne"—and we're a puddle of tears and hope. 63 years later and George Bailey is still the richest man in town. [NBC, 8 p.m.]

Friday: Till Death

Because it isn't officially the holiday until you watch four consecutive episodes of Till Death, Fox is kind enough to air (read: burn off) a marathon of the sit-com on Christmas night. We doubt you'll decide to watch Brad Garrett crack wise about how miserable married life is over putting on the Season Five DVD of Lost Santa Claus brought you, but Till Death is somewhat compelling. Think about it: this is a show that no one watches and yet it still airs. Do you think that worries the cast and crew, or, like so many others, do they just have the "eh, a job is a job" mentality that is so prevalent in America right now? More important, has anyone ever put this much thought into Till Death? Probably not. [Fox, 8 p.m.]

Scrubs creator Bill Lawrence declined to say specifically whether the show would follow Braff into the sunset, but offered a glimpse of his outlook when he said, “You can’t kill this show.” If the show does continue, Braff said he could see himself making occasional guest appearances, just for old times’ sake. Having already directed six “Scrubs” episodes himself, he also left open the possibility of returning in that role.

Coming on the heels of his success as writer/director of the 2004 film Garden State, Braff is in the midst of two movie endeavors. He’s directing one of twelve short films as part of New York, I Love You, produced by the makers of Paris, je t’aime.

But his big project, and likely a reason for his TV departure, is Open Hearts, an adaptation of a dark Danish film that he had to shelve in September 2006 for lack of cast members. "It's a really dark drama about a car accident and the way the accident affects all the people involved in it,” he said. Sounds a bit like Crash, no?

It’s yet to be seen what lead actor Scrubs will turn to for life support.

The actor Zach Braff walked up. "I’m a tremendous fan of your work,” he told Mr. O'Horgan, who directed 70’s-era icons like Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar. The actor had to repeat his name ("Z-A-C-H,” he said, “B-R-A-F-F"), and then he told the director that he was the guy buying Mr. O’Horgan’s high-floor, 2,500-square-foot apartment at 840 Broadway.

Now it's a done deal. According to city records, Mr. Braff used a corny L.A.-based trust named Second Stix to buy the place. He spent $3.2 million, which you may remember from all the ink the apartment's gotten.

Mr. Braff isn't the first famous young face in the building (Heather Graham has the penthouse upstairs), but things used to be much different at 840 Broadway. “We all bought a floor for like 20,000 bucks," a long-time resident told The Observer in the summer, "but mine was still being occupied by a guy making stuffed animals.”

“I’m a tremendous fan of your work,” he told the Hawaiian-shirted auteur, and he repeated his name. A companion of Mr. O’Horgan’s reminded him that Mr. Braff is the young man who’s buying his Greenwich Village loft.

“Z-A-C-H,” the actor said. “B-R-A-F-F.”

According to city records, Mr. O’Horgan’s 2,500-square-foot apartment is on a top floor of 840 Broadway. Maybe Mr. Braff knows that actress Heather Graham, who has guest-starred on his show Scrubs as Dr. Molly Clock, happens to be in the building’s penthouse.

Mr. O’Horgan and three other long-term building owners have been there since the 1970’s: “Eighth Street was happening, Saint Mark’s Place was happening, it was kind of a hippie thing,” one of those owners told The Observer. “But everyone that came down sort of took a chance.

“We all bought a floor for like 20,000 bucks, but mine was still being occupied by a guy making stuffed animals.”

The longtime owner, who bought in 1971 and who is also a co-op board member, said the Braff deal isn’t official yet. “We haven’t seen his financials, we haven’t seen anything. In the old days, it would probably be no question; now people do look at references and financials and things like that.”

Mr. O’Horgan, whom Newsweek once called “the Petronius of our theatrical decadence, the drag-haberdasher of the lumpen-avant-garde,” fills his loft with a collection of global musical instruments, the board member said. “He’s a true saint—he’s a great guy, just an incredible human being.”

It’s hard to tell how much old Petronius’ apartment would cost Mr. Braff if he can close the deal, especially because it isn’t officially on the market. The resident says he thinks “it would go for a little over $3 million.”

The LaBoeuf as Hanks-come-lately doesn’t quite work, however, once you look beyond the (ho-hum) comparison of both actors’ “quirky charms.” Mr. Hanks, remember, spent the majority of his 20’s on the hustle for work. The early 1980s are littered with small TV appearances on such highbrow fare as The Love Boat, Taxi, Happy Days, Family Ties and the short-lived (but brilliant, actually) sitcom Bosom Buddies before making, um, a splash in a little movie about the love between man and mermaid at the tender age of 27. It would be almost another decade—including years of fun clunkers like Joe Versus the Volcano, Turner and Hooch, and Bonfire of the Vanities—before Mr. Hanks would turn in his Oscar-winning performance in Philadelphia. Mr. LaBeouf, meanwhile, started acting at age 12 (his stand-up act began when he was 10), landed a Disney Channel show at 13, and was costarring with Will Smith in I, Robot by 2004.

But all this matters not one whit. Though Mr. LaBeouf himself told Vanity Fair that he’s compared to “any dark-haired actor who wasn’t an Adonis, basically: Tom Hanks, John Cusack, Dustin Hoffman. It has nothing to do with performance,” the mag couldn’t resist publishing a two-page photo reenactment of Splash featuring Mr. LaBeouf with a disturbingly breasty lady of the sea.

It’s not that Mr. LaBeouf isn’t a talent or deserving of a bright future. His face is fresh. He’s quick with a quip on the late-night chat show circuit. He had a charmingly kooky childhood (Mom smoked a lot of weed; Dad was a professional clown; hot dogs were for dinner!). But if young Shia is what makes a leading man these days, we’re in trouble. He’s barely legal, and the star of his biggest film wasn’t even him; it was a robot disguised as a car.

Yet, after Transformers raked in almost $70 million its opening weekend, an almost audible sigh of relief rolled down the Hollywood Hills and reverberated across the land: A star! A star! Thank God almighty, at last a star! Of course, the anointment of Mr. LaBeouf is only the latest attempt of the Hollywood hype machine to name its new leading man (alternating in its search for the next Julia Roberts). And, really, he might want to take cover once he checks out how the other recent almost-Clooneys have fared. Look at poor Orlando Bloom, who seems doomed to stay swashbuckling for life, one way or another. His brightest moment came not when he was handed the reins to Cameron Crowe’s lackluster Elizabethtown, or brandishing a sword in Kingdom of Heaven; it was when he got to make fun of himself on Ricky Gervais’s hilarious HBO hit Extras (“With this face? I wouldn’t get ignored. I’ll tell you who does get ignored—Johnny Depp. On the set of Pirates of Caribbean the birds just walked straight past him.”). And what about Irish charmer Colin Farrell (where is that guy, anyway?), more famous for his drunken make-out sessions at various Miami hotels than his occasionally fine acting performances. (We’ll forgive the well-intentioned A Home at the End of the World.) Jude Law seemed like a good bet … till people heard his attempt at a southern accent in All the Kings Men. “You want Tom Cruise and all you can get is Jude Law,” Chris Rock joked at the 2005 Academy Awards. “You want Russell Crowe and all you can get is Colin Farrell? Wait. Alexander is not Gladiator.”

Meanwhile, as entertainment reporting descends into round-the-clock celebrity nose-picking updates, the men who coulda been honest-to-god contenders are choosing to opt out. Johnny Depp lives abroad, appearing briefly to fulfill publicity obligations before disappearing—poof!—in a cloud of smoke. The onetime wonder boys Matt Damon and Ben Affleck seem far more interested in babies than staying in the spotlight. Ditto Spider-Man Tobey McGuire and man’s man Russell Crowe. The only way Leonardo DiCaprio makes the paparazzi spreads is while bicycling around the West Village in a baseball cap and shades, or by trying to save the environment. Sure, we’ve got Owen Wilson to bat around every once in a while, but generally speaking, even the comedy mafia (Will Ferrell, Ben Stiller, Paul Rudd) generally seems to fly low.

So what do we get instead? A bunch of faux-lebrity men—the guys whose names occupy precious space in our brains thanks to the brilliant work of the World Wide Interweb. They’re everywhere. There’s a whole subgenre of MTV reality stars. For starters, Nick Lachey, who weathered the humiliation of watching his then-wife Jessica Simpson’s career skyrocket past his own whilst filming the popular Newlyweds and survived the eventual schadenfreude of their inevitable divorce, only to become famous for … let’s see … moving on in love to also-inexplicably-famous Vanessa Minnillo. When sexy hot tub pictures start circulating online, you know you’ve arrived! Then there’s superdog Jason Wahler of Laguna Beach and The Hills. His pouty lips and spiky hair are ever-present on red carpets and buzzy parties. He was a spectacle when he sat front row last year at Olympus Fashion Week, where a scrum of photographers stomped past a hard-working (and unrecognized) Law & Order actor to watch him make out with Lauren “L.C.” Conrad (also famous for the above-mentioned shows). He even got the ultimate in star treatment: discussing his struggle with sobriety with People magazine. Meanwhile, the news last May of the engagement of Mr. Wahler’s castmates Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montag was heralded by Us Weekly as an exclusive.

MTV is also (partly) responsible for giving us Pete Wentz and Joel Madden, seemingly interchangeable in an eyeliner/tattoo/emo-boy haze considering we’ve never heard their music (being that we’re over the age of 14). There was a time when we liked Brit addict Pete Doherty’s music, but who can remember the Libertines now when the ubiquitous image of Mr. Doherty with on-again/off-again girlfriend Kate Moss involves him wearing a dirty hat and big enough bags under his eyes to go to the moon and back. Zach Braff—he’s kinda funny on Scrubs (and some of us really liked Garden State!) but he also kinda seems (thanks in part to the hype—bad hype) like a self-involved creep. Is he the best we can come up with for our modern-day womanizer? Warren Beatty, can’t you do something?

Meanwhile, when Bruce Jenner was Decathlon-ing his way to Olympic gold in 1976, do you think his greatest wish was for his son, Brody, to grow up and star on a show called The Princes of Malibu, and get press coverage for being linked with Kristin Cavallari, Nicole Richie, Lauren Conrad (again!) and Haylie Duff? D.J. AM … really? We don’t understand why we know he’s a sneaker-head, enough to get a cameo as himself on Entourage. It’s enough to make us nostalgic for the days of Kid Rock.

Still, there is one refreshing twist in this crazy fame game: the reversal of the role of Hollywoodish ingénue. In the earlier days of cinema it was the big, hunky, male stars that got the names of those pretty starlets clinging to their arms into gossip columns. These days it seems the opposite. Would we really care about this Joel Madden fellow—he’s in a band called Good Charlotte, by the way—if he didn’t date tween-kitten Hilary Duff before reportedly impregnating Nicole Richie (whose origins of fame are almost as mystifying)? We know that Mr. Wentz belongs to some band called Fall Out Boy (quick, name what instrument he plays), and that Gavin Rossdale was the frontman for 90’s one-or-two-hit-wonder Bush, and that the terrifyingly good-looking Josh Duhamel decorates the screen nicely when he works. But it’s doubtful they’d be household names if they didn’t have famous chicks to cling to (Ashlee Simpson, Gwen Stefani, and Fergie). Who the f*%k is Cisco Adler anyway, besides the make-out buddy of Mischa Barton? Are we doomed to a world where Brandon Davis, famous for, as far as we can tell, his family money and branding Lindsay Lohan “firecrotch,” makes headlines? And quite frankly, isn’t Brad Pitt—the golden standard for blazing movie star—beginning to be thought of (a little) as Angelina’s bitch?

WE'VE ALL BEEN TOLD AD NAUSEUM about the perils of aging for leading ladies. But look what’s happening, too, with the men: Jack Nicholson didn’t get his break in Easy Rider until he was 32. Paul Newman was 36 when The Hustler premiered. Clint Eastwood, a man whose 70’s have been his most creative decade, was 28-years-old when he first got a chance to appear in the 1958 TV show Rawhide. These actors had a chance to learn their craft and get beaten up a bit in life before landing in the spotlight. But, as Johnny Drama pointed out on Sunday night’s Entourage, the insatiable need to stay young is no longer just a woman’s issue. There’s no time to let an actor develop his craft—his talent!—before slapping him on a magazine cover and declaring him the next big thing.

Poor Shia LaBeouf (his last name translates, quite literally, as ‘the meat’). The feeding frenzy won’t die down anytime soon; he’s got Indiana Jones Four still to work on. But where is there to go but down from there? “I want to do something really dark after Indy,” he told Vanity Fair. “Like a Raging Bull of hip-hop”.

Maybe Orlando can costar?

“He was just randomly taking photos of himself—like lots of them,” said the witness, who watched raptly as the romance between the actor and his lens unfolded. “It was sort of weird. But he seemed to be having a good time.”

Mr. Braff was apparently unaware of the Bungalow policy prohibiting the use of cameras, and was surprised when a bouncer told him to stop. “He was like, ‘Dude, I’m just taking pictures of myself and my friends—I’m not like some weird celebrity-stalker!’” relayed the source. The group left soon thereafter.

Mr. Braff, who has reportedly dated the paparazzi-paranoid actress Natalie Portman, didn’t return calls for comment.