Beck/Smith Hollywood

Ryan Lochte

The 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremonies are tonight (7/27), and it’s not too early to start thinking about your side bets on which winning athletes will hang on to their celebrity status after coming down from the podium.  In fact, the best prospects for celebrity gold already have fat endorsement deals in place, contingent upon their performance. You may not be too aware of swimmer Ryan Lochte yet – but Gatorade, Ralph Lauren, Gillette, Mutual of Omaha, and Speedo certainly are. According to Business Insider International, he stands to make between $3-4 million if certain incentive clauses kick in on his endorsement contracts –meaning, of course, that he fares well against international rivals and super star teammate Michael Phelps.The myriad battles over endorsement deals are large sidebar stories to the games. There is the clash of the titans situation in which athletes must not hawk wares by companies with which they have personal endorsement deals during the games; only those companies that are official Olympic sponsors are supposed to be shilling. That’s why you won’t be seeing Phelps helping himself to Subway sandwiches during the Olympics – of which McDonalds is a sponsor – though his mother might.

The alchemy that turns some Olympians into celebrities while others return to the ranks of the relatively unknown requires a blend of ingredients, including, first and foremost, that said Olympian is interested in becoming a celebrity. Charisma is required. A gift of gab. Then — sorry, but it’s true – attractive looks. You need not be classically beautiful or handsome. Quirky can work. But the camera must like you.

U.S. Women’s Gymnastics Team members Jordyn Wieber, Gabby Douglas, Aly Raisman, Kyla Ross and McKayla Maroney are possibilities. Track star Lolo Jones – if only she could pull off a comeback win after failing in Beijing, she’d be a great bet. Stunning double amputee running sensation, Oscar Pistorius of South Africa, ought to be good for some rights deals.

There’ve been plenty of Olympic heroes whose brilliance as athletes just didn’t transfer into other realms. Of course. Seven-Gold-Medal-winning Mark Spitz comes to mind. He was super handsome, but came off stiff, to say the least, in post-Olympics appearances. Watching a comedy sketch with Bob Hope in which Spitz played a dentist was the TV answer to having your teeth drilled. Very uncomfortable, with the deep fear that at any second, it could erupt into shrieking pain. Mellower now, Spitz is actually more watchable. This year, he appeared in a commercial for Ageless Male, a testosterone supplement. Available at Walmart.

Olympians have fared far less well with acting than with other sorts of public appearances. “Tarzan” Johnny Weissmuller and ice skating movie sweetheart Sonja Henie are the two biggest movie star names that began with Olympic glory – and that was way back in another century. Before he became a criminal, O.J. Simpson appeared in the “Naked Gun” movies, “Capricorn One” and the mini-series “Roots.” He was never much of an actor, but David and Jerry Zucker figured out how to use him effectively within their “Naked”shenanigans. Tara Lipinski put lots of effort into building an acting career, but she remains most easily identified as the Gold Medal-winning figure skater. Cathy Rigby retired from gymnastics in 1972, did her first turn in “Peter Pan” in ’74 , appeared on Broadway, and has spent much of her time doing stage work from “Annie Get Your Gun” to “Meet Me in St. Louis.” She’s 59 now. And she still gets referred to as a gymnast.

Reality TV is a much more welcoming sphere, luckily for today’s Olympians. Case in point: Decathlon Gold medalist Bruce Jenner’s movie career is exemplified by the awful big screen bomb “Can’t Stop the Music” – but we all know the career gold he is mining as the patriarch of the Kardashian clan.

Short track speed skating king Apolo Anton Ohno is not only the most decorated American Winter Olympics champ of all time with eight medals, he’s proven to be highly watchable as a celebrity and commercial pitchman. He won on “Dancing With the Stars” and appeared on “I Get That a Lot” — and sold tons of Oreo cookies, Vicks Nyquil, McDonald’s burgers and Cokes.  Ohno and fellow Olympian and “DWTS” champ, Shawn Johnson, have just been announced as among the returning competitors for the coming season’s all-star championship.

Olympians have certainly found a haven in “DWTS.”  Kristi Yamaguci, Misty Mae Treanor, Louie Vito, Evan Lysacek and Hope Solo also freshened up their fame with turns on the popular ABC show – as did Olympians-turned-boxers Sugar Ray Leonard and Floyd Mayweather.

Many Olympic faves return to the cameras as commentators, and do commendably. This year, E! Entertainment will be bringing us “the lighter side” of the games with coverage of the celeb scene and parties in London outside ye olde Olympic Village. Aboard for that ride is someone who fits in on both sides of the equation: Bruce Jenner, of course.

Saturday (7/28) is National Dance Day — in case you didn’t know. Flash mobs are expected to spring up all over the country. There will be at least one springing up at L.A.’s Music Center — with dance greats Debbie Allen and Adam Shankman on the scene. This we know from Shankman, who has a movie set in the flash mob scene that’s coming out Friday (7/27) — in case you didn’t know.

“Step Up Revolution,” the fourth installment of the hit dance movie franchise, which he produced, comes on the heels of the Shankman-directed “Rock of Ages” and amid Shankman’s judging appearances on “So You Think You Can Dance.”

How does he do it all?   “All I have to do is not sleep and eat on the bus,” he says.

He gives credit to his sister and fellow producer, Jennifer Gibgot, for helping get “Step Up Revolution” made — and finding their talented fresh-faced leads, Kathryn McCormick and Ryan Guzman. The Shankman-Gibgot track record is awesome.

“We gave Zac Efron his first movie, and Channing Tatum his first movie,” Shankman reminds.   To say Guzman is new to the dance movie scene is an understatement. “He’s a cage fighter; incredible! Not hard on the eyes. And he is very happy to take his shirt off,” Shankman lets us know.

“What’s nice about these movies is, they don’t need stars. They just need people who can do everything. They’re a great proving ground for directors,” Shankman says. And, as far as studio executives are concerned, “All they care about is, ‘Don’t go over budget.’ They’re incredibly difficult movies to do, so they leave us alone.”

Shankman wrapped his Tom Cruise starrer, “Rock of Ages,” on a Friday in Miami, and “Step Up” began production the following Monday. “We talked about wanting to set ‘Step Up’ someplace sexier, and I was having such a good experience with setting the ‘Rock of Ages’ production there, it made sense to piggy-back.”

Next on his agenda is the family comedy “This is Where I Leave You” — about a non-observant Jewish family forced to sit shiva together for a week to fulfill their departed father’s last wish — with Efron, Malin Ackerman and Jason Bateman. He is hoping to have that ready to begin shooting this fall — and after that, his non-dance, action-adventure version of “The Nutcracker.”

Non-dance? The guy who only wanted to be a chorus boy back when he was a young lad, who went on to become one of America’s best-known purveyors of the art of dance, doing “The Nutcracker” without dance?

“Oh, I’d never be involved in the dance one,” he says.   “And be thrown up against the most brilliant choreographer ever — George Balanchine?” Expect Shankman’s version of the “Nutcracker” tale to be more like Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland” than Balanchine’s version of the Tchaikovsky ballet.

            It’s a very different Tyler James Williams we’ll be seeing in Matthew Perry’s forthcoming NBC series, “Go On.”  The former “Everybody Hates Chris” lead is playing a member of Perry’s therapy group — a guy whose brother is in a coma.

According to him, the series that has Perry as a sportscaster attempting to deal with his psychological woes is “one of those comedies where, ha ha it’s funny — but it’s actually very sad.  It’s really dramatic, and you have people dealing with real issues, and yet it’s funny and you laugh.  There’s always that one point in the episode where we have to get really serious.”

“The show is going to be a surprise,” Williams believes.  “I think you’re going to see a lot of dramatic sides from people who you’ve just seen doing comedy in the past.”

And it marks a leap to a more mature character for the 19-year-old multi-talent, who last month starred in the Disney Channel’s “Let It Shine” hip hop musical — that became the No. 1 TV movie among kids and tweens this year in the ratings.

His leap into maturity “was part of the game plan,” he says.  “We wanted to open up the audience a little, although I’ve had somewhat of an adult audience through most of my life.”

Williams acknowledges that “Go On” is “a little risky,” but that’s part of the excitement.

Bruce Kimmel is having a blast with his “Outside the Box” web comedy — inspired by the fact, “I watched some really bad You Tube series, and I thought, ‘Gee, everybody can do this.  Why don’t I try doing something that’s really fun?  And interesting.  And actually funny?’”

Thus Kimmel — the man who brought us “The First Nudie Musical” and “The Brain From Planet X” among many other things — added the internet to his eclectic show business career, a career that’s already taken him from TV to Broadway to record producing.  He covers the latter two in his latest book, “Album Produced By…”

Kimmel’s tales of working with the likes of Stephen Sondheim and Ann Margaret are a fun read.  He came to adore Lauren Bacall, but found Carol Channing quite different from her persona.  He’s aware that others have had opposite experiences, with Bacall a tiger, and Channing sweet as pie.

“Bacall, who I was really warned about by multiple people was a complete charmer and I just loved her.  She was fantastic.  Apparently she can be another way, if you catch her on a different day or different circumstances,” he acknowledges.  “Carol was difficult.  She’s who she is; she’s delightful in certain ways, and not in others.  Most people don’t ever have to be around that side, so it’s fine.”

The internet has been abuzz with reports that Mary Murphy is en route out of “So You Think You Can Dance,” and Mia Michaels is returning to replace her.  Don’t believe

them, according to Murphy.  “Whatever you hear this entire summer, it’s probably going to come from my ex-manager,” she tells us.  “And you’re probably going to keep hearing things too, because we’re in a legal matter and it’s all about money.  It has nothing to do with Fox, nothing to do with Mia Michaels.”

The ebullient dance icon with the 20 megaton laugh isn’t laughing when she adds that “managers taking money from people is the oldest story in the book in this business, but I never thought it would happen to me.”

She’s determined not to be “one of those people who pay someone to go away.  That’s not me.  I’m Irish.  I’m in it for the long haul.”  She talks about taking her case to court, where, she declares, she is confident she would win.

But in the meantime, Murphy says she won’t be surprised if there’s some sort of new flap every week just before she goes on the air on “SYTYCD” — which is now into this season’s live performance episodes.

As far as any friction between her and Michaels, “There’s never been anything between me and Mia Michaels, my goodness!  I certainly admire her unbelieveably, and I tell her that every chance I get.  Her work is inspirational, and the bench piece she did is one of my favorites.  You can see it on line, where Fox did our Top 10,” adds Murphy, referring to a Michaels-choreographed number with a couple dancing over, around and atop a park bench.

Murphy does laugh her huge laugh when the topic of her relationship with exec producer and fellow judge Nigel Lithgoe comes up.  Sometimes the two toss zingers at each other like an old married couple.  “Yeah!  I’m glad you noticed that because we truly do have fun and love what we do.  We love being dancers.  We’ve been dancers our whole life and we just have a ball up there.  We love what we’re seeing!

“I can’t be more excited because this season truly is the best season, I think we’ve ever had.  We always say, ‘How can we beat that?’  But it’s true, these dancers keep getting better and better, just like athletes keep getting better and better.”  And that’s not just hype:  we’ve seen some of the most breathtakingly creative, amazingly executed dances ever in Season 9.

Kathy Najimy admits she had some trepidation going into shooting of the Hallmark Channel Original Movie, “How to Fall in Love,” premiering Saturday (7/21).

“I know they have guidelines for their channel that are really important to them, but I tend to improvise and all that.  But then I got there, and, after one day I was improvising and having a great time.”  She tells us that in one sequence, she is helping Eric Mabius’ character by pretending to be his blind date, “and he’s asking me what my hobbies are.  So every take I would go through a made-up list of hobbies” — ever more absurd.

The romantic comedy has Mabius as a former high school ugly duckling who hires the pretty and popular girl he had a crush on back in the day — Brooke D’Orsay — to help him shed his lingering wallflower ways.  It’s one of a string of projects for Najimy that includes the upcoming Barbra Streisand flick, “The Guilt Trip.”

Najimy and her husband and 15-year-old daughter made the move from L.A. to New York last year.  “I love New York so much it’s painful,” she says.  “I just adore it.”

She has a return to the stage in her sites.  “That’s where I come from with the Kathy and Mo show,” reminds the funny lady, who rose to fame with Mo Gaffney in the off-Broadway sensation that became an HBO hit.  “I’m writing a one-woman show right now for the New York stage.  It’s called Lift Up Your Skirt.  It’s not literally about lifting your skirt — it’s about being honest and putting everything out in the open.”

She’s workshopping the show, getting reactions and then “I rewrite, rewrite, rewrite.  It’s a process.  You have to do it.  I’d love to skip to opening night, but I’m just figuring out what I really want to say and why.  I’ve been on Broadway before and I’ve been off-Broadway, and there’s a reason I want to do this one-woman show,” she says.  “I don’t know if it will be quite what people expect, but I’m doing this one for me.”

The Mark Cuban you see gleefully muscling other people out of deals on “Shark Tank” is not the same guy you’ll see on ABC’s “Trust Us With Your Life” show Tuesday (7/17).  “He’s actually very fun and outgoing and nice,” claims “Trust Us” talent Brad Sherwood.  “I think on their show, his persona is that of the completely hardcore businessman.  He has a totally different persona on our show, telling his stories from his life.  You’ll see on the show — he has a silly side.”

He certainly has a lusting-for-fame side.  Cuban evidently enjoys getting face time on television — don’t forget “Dancing With the Stars” — even though he obviously doesn’t need it.  This is the guy who owns Landmark Theaters and the Dallas Mavericks among many other things.  He’s worth a reported $2.3 billion, for crying out loud.

And now he’s landed on “Trust Us With Your Life.” For those who have yet to sample the ABC summer offering, it has Fred Willard as host and reteams Wayne Brady, Colin Mochrie and Sherwood from “Whose Line is it Anyway” as well as other improvisational artists.  They apply their skills to re-enacting stories that celebrities tell about themselves — or at least, they use the real-life situations as a starting point for their wild improvs.

“We’ve all been together so many different times, not only on ‘Whose Line,’ but performing live together, and other stuff.   It’s nice to get the whole gang back on a show with improv, which is what we love to do,” Sherwood says.

Eight segments were shot.  “They’re going to run them, and depending on how they do,” Sherwood says, “they’ll decide if they want to do some more.”

 By Stacy Jenel Smith

Ernest Borgnine in The Hallmark Channel’s “Love’s Christmas Journey”

Ernest Borgnine will be remembered for his Oscar-winning performance in “Marty,” his popular TV series “McHale’s Navy” and his work in “From Here to Eternity,” “The Wild Bunch” and dozens of other films — but I’ll remember him best in his latter day role as the Great Old Guy.  He loved to tell his stories and show off his vigorous enthusiasm for life even in its waning years, and it was a gift to take in that energy whenever the chance came along.

The 95-year-old charmer was still working — and quite capable of working a room — pretty much to the end.  I asked him, just before his last birthday in January, what was the secret to his robust longevity. 

 ”My secret is: keep laughing.  That’s the idea,” Borgnine replied, in one of his big jovial declarations.  “If you can keep laughing and keep smiling, one way or another, by golly, you’re bound to find other people around you laughing, too.”

He went on, “I’ve had my times when I just felt terrible, just awful, you know?   But hey, there’s always something that comes along that makes you feel good.  That’s what matters, really — it’s how you approach life.  You can be like the people who go around with a cloud over their heads for the rest of your days and it’s terrible.  Or you can wake up in the morning and say, ‘Hey, man!  I’m alive and God has had a good look at me and blessed me.’”

Among his recent work was his portrayal of a man whose wife was dying in the final episode of “ER.”  He played it with such honest simplicity, it was a four hankie job, for sure.

“It was hard in the sense that it never happened to me and to make it look like it was real, I had to really dig into my heart and my head,” said Borgnine, who is survived by his wife of 39 years, Tova.  Their marriage was his fifth, and he made it clear that with this one, he’d gotten it right.  “We thank our lucky stars, because after all this time and everything that’s happened, we love each other all the more every day,” he said in ’09. 

Borgnine won an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Guest Actor on a Series that year — while returning “ER” stars George Clooney, Eriq LaSalle and Noah Wyle did not.  When I pointed that out to him, he smiled and said with a twinkle, “I know.  I shouldn’t gloat, believe me.”  (Michael J. Fox won that year.)

Later, when Borgnine made his notorious remarks against the gay love story in “Brokeback Mountain,” I was among the many who cringed as if it had been our own elderly relative who’d said it.  He’s not a mean guy, we wanted to say.  He’s from another time…  We wished he hadn’t’a.  But he had.

Borgnine said that of all his many movie production memories, none surpassed his experience in making the 1977 miniseries, ‘Jesus of Nazareth.’  He played the Roman Centurian in the production that starred Robert Powell — and recalled that while they were shooting the crucifixion sequence, at one point he was required to look at a dot positioned for correct eye line as if he were viewing Jesus on the cross, and then he would react. 

He asked director Franco Zeffirelli if someone could read the line, “Father forgive them for they know not what they do,” so that he could get into the moment for his performance.  Then, he said, “They turned the camera and I looked up at the dot…but suddenly I saw the head of Jesus Christ, and it fell to one side as he died.  I started crying like a baby.  When they finished shooting, I looked around and everybody was crying.’”

However, he added with a slight laugh, “Zeffirelli said, ‘Ernesto, that was very good.  Can you try one without so many tears?’

“That’s been written about in books,” added Borgnine, who came out with his autobiography in 2008.  “It’s the one thing I carry with me the rest of my life.’”

In the last couple of years, Borgnine took on a number of smaller roles in fare such as The Hallmark Channel’s “Love’s Christmas Journey.”  And then there was his final starring vehicle — writer-director Elia Petridis’ indie film, “The Man Who Shook the Hand of Vicente Fernandez.”  The dramedy, which has been seen by festival audiences, has him as an old man bitterly disappointed that he never became famous — who suddenly finds himself the center of attention among the Latino workers in his nursing home when they learn of an incident in his past. 

“I doubted very much if I could pull off something like this,” he admitted.  “Carrying a picture is a whole lot different than just being in a picture.  You have to think ahead to where things are going at all times.  But this young man was so enthusiastic and confident, it made me feel confident.  He said, ‘No one else in the world can do this.  You’re brilliant.’   He was just a dream to work with.  I learned so much.  I can’t say enough,” he said of Petridis. 

Borgnine got an extra job while in the midst of shooting – performing the marriage ceremony for Petridis and his fiancee. “The state of Washington allows this kind of ceremony, so, so help me Hanna, that’s what happened.  It was wonderful,” he said.

He confessed he loved it when crew people on his movies asked questions about the old days in Hollywood.  He would regale them with tales of the times when the studios cranked out Westerns by the dozen.  

“We need those Westerns again.  Doggone it, I miss that so much.  I used to have so much fun making Westerns,” he told me. 

“I’ll never forget the time when we had visitors from France and England out on one of those sets, standing behind the camera, ready to watch me do a scene where I get on a horse.  I came out and said, ‘Okay, where’s the ladder?’  Ha, ha.” 

As a put-on, prop people brought out a ladder, much to the surprise of the onlookers, and Borgnine climbed up saying, “John Wayne uses one of these.  Didn’t you know?  Well, I’m not going to let out any trade secrets.”                             

With that, Borgnine burst into one of those big laughs of his that made you want to join in. 

Hey man!  You were alive, and God blessed us all.

Tom Cruise may have been blindsided by Katie Holmes’ divorce papers, but we – the media and the public – were more than ready.  Rarely has a Hollywood couple drawn more skepticism, from the moment they revealed their togetherness.

Going back to the dawning of their relationship in 2005, the folks at Us magazine polled their readers, you may recall, and found more than 60 percent believed Cruise’s romance with the 16-years-younger Holmes was a fake.  Even when the couple got engaged, many simply didn’t buy it.

Perhaps it was the crass, overblown, smells-like-a-publicity-stunt way in which Cruise and Holmes proclaimed their mutual affection on the eve of his ‘n’ hers summer blockbusters — “Batman Begins” and “War of the Worlds.”  Remember?  He made his proposal at — but of course — the Eiffel Tower the Friday before her “Batman Begins” opened.

The Cruise-Holmes relationship hit a new level of intensity, even for Hollywood.  With unconfirmed reports that Tom was so obsessed and controlling that he gave Katie a GPS-equipped cell phone so he could know where she was at all times, fans began snapping up “Free Katie” t-shirts.

The ranks of TomKat supporters have been comparatively slim.

But there were doubting Tom’ers long before Katie came along.  Despite his marriages to Mimi Rogers and Nicole Kidman, some – okay, many people refused to believe Cruise was interested in romance for anything other than appearances.

His relationship with Penelope Cruz was met with the same kind of disbelief as his relationship with Holmes.  As Us put it in 2001, after Cruise and Cruz were seen dining together at the ultra high profile Spago restaurant:  “…There was something about the typically secretive Cruise announcing a new relationship to the world that made some people suspicious.”

And one wary columnist noted, “Tom Cruise…doesn’t do anything that doesn’t have a reason.”

Some suggested that the sudden Public Displays of Affection between Cruise ‘n’ Cruz were really Tom’s way of throwing the press pack off following the machinations of his and Nicole Kidman’s divorce settlement, which appeared to be becoming contentious at the time.

Despite all the nay-sayers, Tom and Penelope lasted into 2003.  Reports surfaced that a plan for a Valentine’s Day wedding had been postponed due to Penelope’s worries about a rumored relationship between Tom and Colombian actress/model Sofia Vergara – but those were denied, of course.

Tom and the beauty who would go on to “Modern Family” stardom were evidently enough of an item that Tom met Sofia’s mother.  The meeting was confirmed by Sofia’s aunt Lilita Jamarilla, who told reporters: “For Sofia, the most important thing in a man is that he has good teeth. She studied dentistry and fronts campaigns to encourage children to look after their teeth.”

One can easily see why a gal like that would be drawn to Tom’s sparkling smile.  But after only a couple of months it was over:  Tom met Katie Holmes and was soon perched on Oprah’s couch, famously gushing about finding love.

In the beginning, of course, he found love with Mimi Rogers.  Their May 1986 wedding was “very small, very private and completely normal, which was our goal,” said Mimi.             Tom and the first Mrs. Cruise then went on to lead purposefully low-key lives – so low-key that nobody knew about it when they separated in 1989.  That news came out in 1990, along with stories about how Tom had something going on with his “Days of Thunder” costar, Nicole Kidman.

Even his comparatively down-to-earth marriage to Rogers wound up serving up a measure of cynicism and public humiliation for Tom.  In 1993, when she posed for Playboy, Rogers chalked up their parting to sexual incompatibility.

“Tom was seriously thinking of becoming a monk,” she told the magazine.  “And he thought he had to be celibate to maintain the purity of his instrument…It became obvious we had to split.”

Why?

“Oh,” answered Mimi, “my instrument needed tuning.”

That sounds so light and Hollywood catty now, compared to the dark schism of Cruise and Holmes.  The unconfirmed stories that Holmes is dead set against their six-year-old daughter Suri being indoctrinated into Cruise’s Scientology way of life — and has secretly been making plans to set herself and Suri free for a year — are chilling.  Interestingly, few seem to doubt them.