• Skype sponsored a panel at Cannes today called “Buzz Builders,” and it featured a number of Friends of SpoutBlog: Alison Willmore, Michael Jones, Eugene Hernandez and, via the sponsor’s internet based calling system, David Poland. Poland used the panel to announce that he’ll “be very surprised” if “The Hollywood Reporter is still [around] three years from now.” Jeff Wells’ commenters used the opportunity to make cracks at Poland’s track record with predictions.
• Girish calls Robert B. Ray’s The ABCs of Classic Hollywood ” the best new film book I’ve encountered in a long while.” It sounds fascinating: “Ray’s starting point is this quote from Vincente Minnelli: “I feel that a picture that stays with you is made up of a hundred or more hidden things. They’re things that the audience is not conscious of, but that accumulate.” Ray proposes a fascinating and unorthodox method for discovering these hidden things. For each film, he puts together a collection of ‘entries’, one or more for every letter of the alphabet.”
• Andy Horbal’s going all Web 0.5, using his blog to advertise his email list. I’ll let him explain: “…by the time my friends realized [a movie] had opened, I’d already seen it and was on to the next film.In response to this problem I started a mailing list for everyone I knew who was interested that discussed what was new, what looked good, and when I was planning on seeing everything….[A]fter about two months I believe I have a handle on what I’d like these e-mails to look like and I’m going public: you (yes, you!) can now subscribe to ‘The Movie E-Mail.’” Details at Mirror/Stage.

Back in October, we brought you a guide to finest examples of on-screen cleavage from the days of pre-code Hollywood. In our ongoing quest to revisit Hollywood history through the nip-slip and up-skirt crazed lens of the celebrity coverage of today, we now point you to the World Of Wonder blog, where Chip Duckett has nothing but praise for a recent “accidental boob reveal” by Mamie Van Doren. “This woman is 77 years old, and is frankly hotter than anybody on the planet one-third her age,” Duckett writes. This, he says, is how the “oopsie! semi-nip-slip…is done properly in 2008.”

Van Doren, seen at her heyday at right, was Universal’s card in the Marilyn Monroe copycat craze of the late 50s, the star of such not-quite-classics at Ain’t Misbehavin‘ and High School Confidential! She’s been pretty much off the radar since the end of the Fantasy Island era, but with the tenuous Marilyn connection intact, can we assume this is Van Doren’s entry in the Monroe–>Lohan–>Musto self-promotion-via-calculated toplessness sweepstakes? Let’s hope!