Tag: Featured

The Jennifer Lawrence Diary™

Lawrence made $46 million, but look who just bumped her further down the new list of 100 highest-paid celebrities

Jennifer LawrenceBoulevard reviews the latest media coverage of the Oscar-winning Louisville native in our exclusive Jennifer Lawrence Diary™. Today’s news, rated on a scale of 1-5 stars:

Two starsWe should all have such problems, right? Lawrence made an estimated $46 million in the year ended last month, ranking her no. 49 on Forbes’ just-published list of the world’s 100 highest-paid celebrities, dropping from no. 34 a year ago.

The top five, with their year-ago ranking:

Cristiano Ronaldo
Ronaldo

The story appears in Forbes’ July 26 issue, with “mobile mogul” Kim Kardashian on the cover; the reality TV star ranked no. 42, with $51 million, down from no. 33 a year ago. The issue also includes the previously reported list of America’s 25 richest families, a roster that includes the Browns of Louisville, Brown-Forman’s founding family. They ranked no. 20 with $12.3 billion, unchanged from a year ago.

Chris Pratt
Pratt

Despite dropping in Forbes’ ranking, Lawrence has rocketed to the top of the pay scale in Hollywood: She got a whopping $20 million for the upcoming “Passengers,” setting a new bar for future projects. The movie, with “Jurassic Park” star Chris Pratt and a scheduled Dec. 21 release, is about a spacecraft transporting thousands of people to a distant colony planet, when a malfunction in its sleep chambers causes two passengers to wake up 60 years early. (We can safely guess who plays those two passengers.)

Lawrence, 25, starred in three movies released during the year Forbes counted big paychecks: “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 2“; “Joy,” and “X-Men: Apocalypse.” Plus, she got cast in one of the hottest properties of the year: “Bad Blood,” a biopic about disgraced Silicon Valley start-up executive Elizabeth Holmes.

Other films in the works include “It’s What I Do,” and an untitled Darren Aronofsky project, now filming.

A $5 billion list

Overall, Forbes said, the world’s 100 highest-paid celebrities pulled in $5.1 billion pretax during the magazine’s June 2015 to June 2016 scoring period. Figures are based on numbers from Nielsen, Pollstar, Box Office Mojo, Songkick and IMDB, as well as interviews with industry insiders and many of the stars themselves.

Jobs

$8.50 an hour as a Belle of Louisville deckhand to bust up drunken passenger brawls. But who watches for pirates?

time-clockBoulevard reports extensively on executive pay at big local employers. But we also look at what folks make down in the trenches — or on the mighty Ohio River. Here’s an opening from Metro Louisville’s help-wanted listings.

The job: deckhand.

The duties include sweeping, mopping, and waxing the dance floor, then watching dancing passengers for dangerous activity, including fights. On the Texas deck, you’ll also guard against fighting passengers. (Battling passengers seems to be a theme.) And in your most serious job responsibility, you’ll keep an eye on the pilot, and “ensure safe navigation in the event the pilot/captain becomes incapacitated.”

Your employer: The 102-year-old, city-owned Belle of Louisville is America’s last genuine Mississippi river steamboat still in operation, offering sightseeing 2½-hour lunch and 3-hour dinner cruises on the Ohio.

What it pays: $8.50 an hour for what amounts to a seasonal job. Is it just us, or shouldn’t such serious responsibilities — fights! drunk passengers! incapacitated captains! — pay more? Odder still, the only qualifications are that you must be 18; pass pre-employment and post-employment alcohol and drug tests; wear safety equipment, and be available for a varied work schedule.

Related: In pirate talk, “wet your pipe” doesn’t mean what you might think.

Photo, top: Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” series. The fifth installment, “Dead Men Tell No Tales” is set for release xt year.

RSVP

Mysteries of Louisville’s society party scene: Are those giant scissors in your pocket, or are you just happy to see us?

Champagne smallerBig smiles, big personalities and big business networking — yes, it’s everyone’s favorite feature in The Voice-Tribune: party photos! Boulevard picks through the pics, choosing our favorite coverage.

The cosmos presents so many mysteries: How did those Easter Island statues wind up there? What is dark matter? How does the Voice-Tribune choose which parties to cover?

We ask after noticing this week’s 10 parties include The Vein Treatment & Aesthetic Center’s annual summer open house on June 29. “The well-attended event,” we learn, “featured exciting prize drawings as well as discounted pricing on an assorted array of Vein Treatment & Aesthetic Center products. Various reps were also there to answer any questions attendees may have, and all enjoyed plenty of wine and light hors d’oeuvres.”

With all due respect, as people say when they actually mean the opposite, Boulevard wonders whether that event really qualifies as the crème de la crème of Louisville’s social scene. Yet, props to the 16-year-old clinic for silk-purse marketing its vericose and spider vein treatments.

The center, according to its website, “coddles patients with a smorgasbord of cosmetic services in a cozy skin-clarifying facility. During your microdermabrasion, a skin savant will gently sweep perished skin cells under the closest rug, then set an antioxidant-rich ultrasonic infusion to the task of moisturizing arid flesh and rejuvenating the body’s roughened husk.”

To be sure, we’re a wee taken aback by the juxtaposition of “smorgasbord,” “perished skin cells,” and the “light hors d’oeuvres” served at the clinic’s open house. But that’s why we’re not in public relations.

Now, to our party pics pick!

Hands down, it was the June 30 celebration at home furnishings store Dwellings for its new location at 139 Breckenridge Lane. Of Tim Valentino‘s 32 pics, guests Palmer Cole and Tyler Freeman in photo No. 19 were the week’s best.

No grand opening would be complete without a ribbon-cutting ceremony, and Dwellings and the St. Mathews Chamber of Commerce didn’t disappoint — leading to our last mystery of the cosmos:

Big scissorsWhere do all the chambers get those giant ceremonial scissors to cut ribbons? Turns out, there’s an actual company, Golden Openings of Urbandale, Iowa, that sells them — along with golden shovels for groundbreakings, plus all the other accoutrements of commercial ceremonies. Their biggest working scissors are 40 inches long and sell for $199.

Golden Openings even sells a 17-page book for $19 that “guides you through the ribbon cutting from start to finish. This book provides a detailed description of the items you’ll need to consider to have a first class ribbon cutting!”

Media and Marketing

Forget about extra-crispy Col. Sanders; here comes another DC Comics’ superhero version — a bucketful of them

Produced with KFC itself, the newest comic in the series is “The Crisis of Infinite Colonels,” wherein the KFC founder we know must defeat the evil Col. Sunder from Earth-3.

Harland Sanders
Sanders

“To pull it off, he teams up with a whole host of Colonels from across the DC multiverse, like Bizarro Colonel, Steampunk Colonel, and the one and only Col. Arla Sanders from Earth-11,” says The Verge.

The comic echoes the current KFC campaign of multiple Sanders’ impersonators, including the most recent: professional tanner and actor George Hamilton.

Last October, DC and KFC teamed up for “Kentucky Fried Chicken Presents: The Colonel of Two Worlds.” Based in the Los Angeles area’s Burbank, the 82-year-old publisher is best known for its Superman, Batman and other characters.

Sanders launched his iconic Kentucky Fried Chicken chain in 1930 from his roadside restaurant in Corbin, Ky., during the Great Depression. He died in 1980 at 90 years old. Read more about KFC and corporate parent Yum.

RSVP

Let’s dance! In the party pics conga line with Shannon Cogan, and a saucy Aussie

Champagne smallerBig smiles, big personalities and big business networking — yes, it’s everyone’s favorite feature in the society shiny sheets: party photos! Boulevard picks through the pics, choosing our favorite coverage.

With NFocus Louisville’s sudden demise, Boulevard is more dependent than ever on The Voice-Tribune for our window on the ladies who lunch and the men who punch.

Shannon Cogan
Cogan

Tangoing straight to the chase, here’s today’s party pics pick: Let’s Dance Louisville, where Cathedral of the Assumption hosted a “Dancing with the Stars”-esque fundraiser last Saturday, featuring local “celebrities” (to use the editor’s choice of punctuation).

Of the 73 (!) photos by workhouse paparazzo Tim Valentino, our favorite is No. 19: WAVE news anchor and silver-sequin pailletted Shannon Cogan, sandwiched between weatherman Brian Goode and Robert Curran, the Louisville Ballet’s Australian executive director.

TTFN!

Photo, top: That’s Nyle DiMarco and his partner Peta Murgatroyd, crowned Season 22 champions of “Dancing with the Stars” on May 24.

Media and Marketing

Heartbroken in Louisville! The last direct link to the greatest advice columnist ever has been severed

Kathy Mitchell and Marcy Sugar, who for 14 years wrote the syndicated “Annie’s Mailbox” column for The Courier-Journal and hundreds of other outlets, called it quits today. They started as the long-time editors of the original “Ann Landers” column, written for nearly 50 years by the late, great and ever-stylish Esther Pauline “Eppie” Lederer. (That’s her, top, with her trademark hair.)

“We’ve urged you to live your lives to the fullest,” Mitchell and Sugar told readers this morning. “Now it’s our turn.”

Annie's Mailbox smallerStarting tomorrow, Mitchell and Sugar are being replaced by the conveniently named “Annie Lane,” who will be writing a column called “Dear Annie.” Lane, who grew up in California, is a certified yoga instructor who also worked in sales at an Internet advertising startup; a law firm, and, before that, a federal magistrate. She’s written extensively for Creators Syndicate’s special sections.

The original Landers column was started in 1943 by Chicago Sun-Times writer Ruth Crowley. Lederer took it over in 1955, but declined to have a different writer continue the column after her death in 2002. (At the time, she lived in a $4.4 million, 16-room Lake Shore Drive co-op in Chicago with three — three! — maid’s rooms.)

Like de Havilland and Fontaine

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