Bruce Vilanch: Last News

Bruce Vilanch is getting mistaken for Travis Kelce and Jason Kelce‘s mom, Donna Kelce!

The organizers of a Dolly Parton musical currently touring the UK have issued a statement condemning homophobic abuse being directed at the cast during performances.

Arriving, appropriately enough, in the wake of Mother’s Day, comes a new book toasting the mother of all Bad Mother movies, Mommie Dearest.Ashley Hoff’s With Love, Mommie Dearest: The Making of an Unintentional Camp Classic offers chapter after entertaining chapter digging into the making of the notorious 1981 drama starring Faye Dunaway, tearing down rose bushes, bearing walls, and some of the scenery as Hollywood film legend Joan Crawford.Based on the eponymous best-selling memoir by Christina Crawford, Joan’s adopted daughter, detailing years of emotional and physical abuse at the hands of her Oscar-winning mother, Mommie Dearest was supposed to be a serious exposé of child abuse. Somehow, that’s not the movie that director Frank Perry and producer Frank Yablans wound up making, as is vividly chronicled in Hoff’s book.“Nobody sets out to make a failure,” says the author and Hollywood historian, whose previous book Match Game 101: A Backstage History of Match Game took a behind-the-scenes look at a different camp phenomenon.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Introducing the Manhattan Transfer’s final show at Walt Disney Concert Hall, writer Bruce Vilanch emphasized the multi-genre status the vocal ensemble built up and maintained over a 50-year-plus career that, from all indications, really was coming to a close Friday night. “I’m thrilled to be here for the final concert of the greatest pop-rock-jazz-soul-R&B-scat-vocalese-Brazilian group in the history of America,” Vilanch said. In keeping with that multi-hyphenate spirit, the group’s apparent swan song in downtown Los Angeles’ toniest venue was a happy-sad-ebullient-misty-eyed affair.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Just as the Coca-Cola company, after smudging a perfect product in 1985 with the New Coke, brought that product back and called it Coca-Cola Classic, the 95th Academy Awards telecast made a game attempt to rectify the mishaps of the past few years — the ratings slippage, the pared-down-like-a-skeleton-in-a-train-station 2021 edition, the debacle of The Slap — by bringing back something that we might call Oscar Classic. It was safe, it was familiar, it was tasteful, it was reassuring. It didn’t rock the boat, it didn’t overstay its welcome (actually, that marks sort of a break from Oscar Classic), and it left you feeling that the world’s preeminent awards show, all doom-saying punditry to the contrary, is still, on balance, a very good thing.

Denise Austin still has fond memories of her pal Richard Simmons. After decades in the spotlight, the fitness guru suddenly stopped teaching at his workout studio in 2014 and has now retreated from public life altogether. In August, FOX aired "TMZ Investigates: What Really Happened to Richard Simmons," a special that explored his rise to stardom and surprising departure.

Feeling the love! Richard Simmons took to social media to show appreciation for his fans days after the TMZ documentary surrounding his 2014 disappearance aired on television.

It’s largely considered to be the worst Oscars ceremony of all time. And ten years later folks are spilling the tea on how much worse it was behind the scenes!