If you made most girls write down their wildest dreams, chances are they'd include almost all of the following; Brad Pitt, some water, Brad Pitt's knickers, a gun, the colour blue, Brad Pitt's socks and the threat of legal action – right girls?
Those girls had better brace themselves for an explosion of joy, because the December issue of Vanity Fair features a blue-lit Brad Pitt on the cover, in his knickers and socks holding a gun in the rain. And, just so he doesn't alienate his female fans with lawsuit fetishes, Brad Pitt is also apparently thinking about angrily taking legal action against Vanity Fair for using an unauthorised picture of him when it could have used one of him covered in sand and cuddling a brown baby while inspirationally looking off into the middle-distance while a choir of angels weep with gratitude or something.
Brad Pitt is 42 years old. Before too long his looks – the thing that keeps Brad Pitt famous – will wither and perish like the Nazi's face at the end of that Indiana Jones film. We get the impression that Brad Pitt senses this too, since he's starting to try to establish himself as a proper actor with a social conscience. Old Brad Pitt was happy taking looking all dreamy in cheese like Meet Joe Black or getting his bum out in cack like Troy, but New Brad Pitt stars in convoluted pretentious nonsense like Babel and signs up for confusingly Charlie Kauffman rip-offs like Chad Schmidt. Old Brad Pitt larked around Malibu with Jennifer Aniston, New Brad Pitt throws money at charity and says nice things about gay people and rebuilding New Orleans. Truly, New Brad Pitt is a great American.
But even great Americans have their weaknesses, and so does Brad Pitt – although Brad Pitt wants to save the world, he'd probably quite like to do it without the help of photographs, which he tends to get a bit touchy about. People who have attempted to take pictures of Brad Pitt have ended up choked or jailed or arrested, while images of Brad Pitt have indirectly led to secret service investigations and gigantic bidding wars and inadvertent Indian boy vehicle accidents.
So just imagine what Brad Pitt did when he realised that Vanity Fair magazine had decided to put a picture of him in his pants taken from a video portrait he did with artist Robert Wilson last year on the cover of its new edition (yes, the one with the confused old man in it) without getting his permission first. Actually, don't bother imagining it, since E! Online has spelt it out anyway:
[Brad] claims the cover shot is actually a still taken from a video portrait he made with artist Robert Wilson in September 2005 and that he never gave the okay for any portion of it to appear in print. (The avant-garde video depicts a silent Pitt getting soaked by water, and ends with the actor raising a water pistol and firing toward the camera.) "We are very disappointed that Vanity Fair has chosen to put an unauthorised cover on their magazine," the 42-year-old's publicist told E! News. "It seriously makes me question their integrity and motives." According to Pitt's camp, he only found out he would be gracing the magazine's cover when publicity photos for the issue began making the Internet rounds last week.
However, Vanity Fair says that Brad Pitt knew all about it and he should stop being such a big girly ninny:
"Brad Pitt posed for a Robert Wilson video portrait and, in the photo release (signed by Pitt), agreed to allow Wilson to use the portrait or any images from that sitting in connection with any publicity on Wilson's video project… Vanity Fair decided to do a story on Wilson's video portraits and obtained rights to the entire collection of photographs from those sittings, which included Pitt's… In a letter dated October 5, 2006, and sent to Pitt care of Brillstein-Grey, Wilson informed Pitt that a still image from his portrait was going to be featured in the December art issue of Vanity Fair."
It seems to us that Brad Pitt has started taking career lessons from Jessica Alba, who also got in a fight with a magazine when Playboy stuck her on the cover without asking first. That's something we're particularly pleased about, since Brad Pitt has long-neglected his core fanbase of women who enjoy watching humans tongue-kiss monkeys.
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