Tom Brady and wife Gisele Bundchen will shortly become the newest A-list residents of Brentwood’s Country Estates enclave, with thecompletion of this 22,000-square-foot French chateau. The Boston Globe has new pictures of the expanse, which offers eight bedrooms and a pool. And a 3.75-acre lot covered in lush gardens with a lagoon-shaped pool. And a six-car garage. And a covered bridge.

Apparently, beaches aren’t the only thing eroding in Malibu. Pierce Brosnan finally unloaded this ocean pad on Malibu’s Broad Beach for an as-yet-undisclosed price. The property has been on the market for the better part of 18 months. Originally listed at $3.9 million, the listing got a big-time chop, taking it down to $2.79 million before it went pending.

Anderson Cooper is putting the finishing touches on this landmark NYC firehouse, purchased at $4.3 million in 2010. The folks at Curbed NY snapped this photo of what is shaping up to be one hot pad. There are precious few details on how this 8,240-square-foot Greenwich Village conversion looks inside, but the exteriors have undergone a bit of restoration; the elaborate red brick and stone facing is pristine, and the once bright red, now stately black garage door signals the change in ownership. The engraved “Fire Patrol House No. 2” signage remains out front, along with a limestone fireman's post in the front entrance.

Rose McGowan finally found a house to call home -- after having sold her previous residence, a 1928 Los Feliz Spanish, to Paul McCartney’s manager for $1.775 million. Curbed LA reports the actress sold that house because “she thought it was triggering her allergies.” McGowan's new Hollywood Hills abode, which she purchased for $1.39 million, has four bedrooms and 3.5 baths.

lBarbi Benton -- actress, former model and Hee Haw regular and ex-girlfriend of Hugh Hefner --has listed her Bel Air residence for $11.95 million. That's quite the discount from its original listing price at $17.5 million in 2008. Benton is married to real estate developer George Gradow.

Online gaming mogul Mark Pincus of Zynga justscored a buyer for one of his two listed properties for an undisclosed price. The residence, located in San Francisco’s Cole Valley neighborhood, was offered at $2.189 million in September, then dropped in short order to $1.97 million. It’s still a ways off from the $2.85 million Pincus and his wife, Alison, paid in 2005.

Gabriel Brener, a U.S. soccer club owner and son of a Mexican industrialist, is quietly shopping this colossal Holmby Hills expanse for what the Wall Street Journal reports to be more than $80 million. In 1998, Brener acquired the former residence ofWalt Disney from the estate of Disney’s widow for $8.5 million. The two-story limestone mansion he built after tearing the Disney residence down sits on 3.5 acres, which is made up of several parcels surrounding the former site of Disney’s storied Carolwood Drive mansion.

In the original trailer for John Singleton's 1991 film Boyz N The Hood, violent images play over a thudding drum track, as voice over introduces viewers to the hard heart of South Central Los Angeles. "This is Los Angeles, gang capital of the nation." Then, "In South Central L.A., it's tough to beat the streets."

Even before the strain between police and the black community became symbolized by the videotaped beating of Rodney King at the hands of LAPD officers, the city was becoming synonymous with crack cocaine and gang violence. In particular, South Central was notorious for gang colors and drive-by shootings.

Into this environment, 20 years ago this month, Singleton's film exploded off the screen, challenging the tabloid stereotypes of urban life and chipping away at notions of who could and should be making movies in Hollywood.

Stephanie Allain, who worked at Columbia Pictures at the time, was one of the few female executives — and one of the few executives of color — at a major Hollywood studio. In May of 1990, Allain says, she was looking for an assistant who would read scripts for the studio.

"I heard about a kid who was still in school who was interested in the job," Allain says. "So I called him up. Little John shows up in my office and he starts telling me about the script he wrote. And he's telling me how he's gonna direct it, and he's not even out of school and he has an agent. And I'm thinking, 'Okay, this kid's not really a reader, he's a writer. Let me read the script.'"

The kid was 22-year-old John Singleton, and his script told the story of Tre, Ricky and Doughboy, three friends growing up with dreams of one day moving beyond their violent circumstances in South Central. The script focused on the relationship between Tre and his father, Furious Styles, a single parent trying to instill values in his troubled son contrary to the pressures and temptations of his environment.

"It's a story that a lot of those cats used to make in the '80s, in the suburbs, but made in the 'hood," Singleton says of the films that inspired Boyz N The Hood. "I loved the pictures, but none of those people looked like me. So me and my friends would catch the bus up to Hollywood, and we'd go see the movies, and we spent the whole time going down Vermont talking about the movie we would make. And the movie that we would make would always be something like what I did withBoyz N The Hood."

Singleton's script was written with power and immediacy. Allain says it absolutely floored her.

"It was one of those moments where I closed my door, I sat and I read it in one sitting," Allain says. "I was devastated. And I closed in and thought, 'Okay. This is what I'm here to do.'"

Singleton says he just wanted to put a young, black, male experience of Los Angeles up on the screen.

"It's like you, you're taught to have the potential to explode," he says. "You know, it's like if a person looks at you wrong, if a certain slight could turn into, like: boom!"

Nevermind that he'd never directed a feature film before: Singleton was determined to direct the script himself, despite the objections of the studio.

"He was offered like $100,000 just to walk away," Allain says. "'What would you say if we gave you $100,000?' And John was so cool. I was so proud of him. He said, 'I'd say this conversation's over.'"

When casting for the film began, Singleton focused on the lead role, Tre Styles, which eventually went to Cuba Gooding Jr., still just a kid himself, on the hustle for his next gig.

"You gotta remember this was early in my career," Gooding says. "it wasn't about reading scripts for me. It was about picking up your sides for an audition the next day. This is embarrassing to really cop to, because I'm looking back on it now, [but] I didn't know what stage direction was. I didn't know what 'EXT,' 'INT' — I didn't know that meant 'exterior,' 'interior.' I just knew my lines. I knew Tre's lines. I knew his father Furious is mad at him, and I knew that emotion. That's how I came to this story."

Singleton cast veteran Laurence Fishburne as Tre's father, and filled out the rest of the cast with what what would become a who's who of black actors: Angela Basset, Regina King, Morris Chestnut, Nia Long and, in his first role as an actor, the rapper Ice Cube.

Gooding remembers that the relative inexperience of the cast didn't keep them from sensing that something special was happening.

"None of us knew what we were involved with," Gooding says. "We just knew that we had nothing to lose to put our whole body, heart and soul in these roles, and that's exactly what we were looking to do."

Watching the film today, it's amazing to think that a first-time director was able to coax such mature performances from his cast. One thing that Singleton says helped: he took directing lessons from Francis Ford Coppola, by way of Fishburne, who had worked with Coppola on Apocalypse Now.

"This is before we even started. I said, 'Tell me everything you did that Francis taught you as an actor,'" Singleton says. "And we sat in my little apartment and everything, he'd say they'd read the script and he'd do improvisation that had to do with the characters and nothing to do with the script to flesh out the characters, he says, and then we'd eat a lot of pasta and drink some wine and stuff."

The film was almost instantly recognized as an extraordinary work. Boyz N The Hood was selected for the 1991 Cannes Film Festival, and when it opened in the U.S. on July 12, it was met with both critical and financial success. It took in nearly $60 million at the box office and earned Singleton two Academy Award nominations, for best original screenplay and best director. He was the youngest director, and the first black director, ever nominated in the latter category.

In the two decades since Boyz N The Hood, Singleton has gone on to write, direct and produce films that have earned nearly half a billion dollars at the box office, including Shaft and 2 Fast 2 Furious. But Stephanie Allain says his first film is still his signature piece, and "still powerful."

What started in 1991 with a 22-year-old who just wanted to make a movie with characters who looked like him, is now, 20 years later, a powerful documentation of the pains and hopes of an entire city.

The number of American-born all-time greats in the field of writing, painting, and composing is legion, but given the nation's relative inception (conceived on July 4th, 1776, for those wondering), the late start afforded citizens of the United States in those fields has largely rendered their significance and impact to secondary status, at least in historical studies and critics lists.

On the other hand, the rise of Hollywood and its moving pictures can trace long parallels with the emergence of the United States' international dominance. In many ways, the two can trade examples of cause and effect -- are American films so dominant because of the nation's stature in the world, or does the country enjoy its status in part because of its contribution to world cinema? -- but regardless of chicken/egg pondering, what is abundantly clear is that the country's greatest actors have dominated the cinema and culture map for over a century.

With that legacy in mind, and the impending celebration of America's birth, it's interesting to debate just which actor has been this nation's greatest. Of course, there have been a huge number of great foreign-born actors, especially from Britain, but just as the world takes the lead in so many other fields, acting is America's own enterprise.

The list of brilliant talents is unending, but only so many have had the lasting impact required for consideration. Here's a subjective list of twelve of the greatest of all time, cut from different eras and styles of cinema. Vote for the actor you think is the greatest American thesp of all time, and debate your choices in the comments.

Buster Keaton

Humphrey Bogart

via:cnn

A Los Angeles inventor who photographed Michael Jackson 33 years ago hopes those images will now help launch an electric motor he claims could solve the world's energy problems.

Reginald Garcia will use cash from the sale of 130 unpublished Jackson photos to fund testing of the motor, which he claims generates more electricity than it uses. Garcia is in the process of getting the photos appraised and prepared for sale.

The photos show a 19-year-old Jackson and his brothers during a video shoot at a Hollywood studio in March 1978, before he began changing his appearance with surgery.

The Afro hair style and 1970s clothing show "a rare glance" of Jackson in an "awkward teenage stage," an image that he personally tried to bury in later years, according to a collector who sold photographs to the singer.

"If it was an image he didn't like, he was more likely to buy them than if they were images he did like," said Keya Morgan. "Were he alive now, I would definitely go to him and I'm sure he would want to buy them."

With Jackson gone, Morgan's Keya Gallery is buying the image copyrights and helping Reginald Garcia sell the original slides, prints and contact sheets that have been forgotten on his shelf for decades.

Garcia pulled the box of photos out of his closet last month when he was looking for ways to finance testing of his "self-generating" motor, Garcia said in a CNN interview this week.

"He was the greatest guy you could ever talk to," Garcia said of his day with Jackson.

Garcia was a student at California Tech and a freelance photographer when a friend of his sister's, who worked for CBS Records, asked him to take pictures of the Jacksons at Gower Studios in Hollywood, he said.

The color photos show the Jackson 5 dressed in blue tuxedos, singing on a soundstage.

The black-and-white images were taken during breaks in the video shoot, Garcia said.

"I sat him in front of a mirror and shot some photos, and I said 'act like you're reading a letter like you just got from your girl,'" he said. The result was a photo showing Jackson and his reflection in a dressing room mirror. Garcia said he only recently realized it echoes the singer's later hit "Man in the Mirror."

Garcia and business partner David Marohnic brought his photos and the prototype of his invention to CNN's Los Angeles bureau to demonstrate the engine and talk about their plans.

"What we're essentially looking for is trying to take the photos that Reggie took of Michael Jackson, his legacy, use those funds to try to take our prototype to the market and ultimately clean up the environment and use less greenhouse gases as a result of a motor that's very highly efficient," Mahronic said.

The motor buzzed as two voltage meters measured the energy going in and the power flowing out, back to the battery.

"It's generating more energy recharging the battery than it actually draws from the battery," Marohnic said.

Garcia reconfigured the brushes and rewound the copper in a standard motor "so it captures the negative electromagnetic field as it collapses, sends energy to a capacitor and recharges the battery," he said.

The sale of the Jackson photographs will allow them "to certify that the prototype does everything that we say it's going to do," Marohnic said.

"It's written in the stars," Garcia said. "We have a destiny of a greener earth, a door opening today that should lead us to this clean earth."

Cirque du Soleil wants to recreate Michael Jackson's Neverland Ranch in Sin City.

The Mandalay Bay hotel-casino on the Las Vegas Strip plans to open a sprawling entertainment complex that includes a Jackson-themed lounge, an interactive memorabilia museum and a theater designed to replicate the iconic refuge of the deceased musical legend, Cirque du Soleil president Daniel Lamarre said Wednesday.

"This place, Mandalay Bay, is going to become the home of Michael Jackson in many, many ways," he said at an announcement at the casino attended by Jackson's older brother, Jackie.

John Branca, co-executor of Michael Jackson's estate, said the attraction will offer fans a permanent place to celebrate, as well as give them the opportunity to see some of the objects displayed at Neverland Ranch.

"Very few fans would ever get to visit Michael's Neverland Ranch because of its remote location," he said.

Plans for the Las Vegas lodestone, set to open in 2013, are part of the budding business relationship between the acrobatic troupe and the pop star's estate.

Cirque du Soleil's homage to Jackson kicks off in October, with the most expensive show in the French company's history. The $57 million Michael Jackson, The Immortal World Tour will open in Montreal and hit 30 cities including New York, Miami, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

The tour's Las Vegas stop at Mandalay Bay will kick off with a fan convention in December as a preview to the permanent Jackson attraction.

Concept art for the touring show's set prominently features a massive tree symbolic of a favorite oak that was outside Jackson's Neverland bedroom. The singer nicknamed it the Giving Tree and had a perch built atop it where he wrote music and sometimes slept.

For Jackson's Thriller, tombstones overwhelm the set in a nod to the music video's horror-film motif and gyrating zombies.

Excerpts from Jackson's music videos will be part of the 90-minute show, with no specific performer representing Jackson. Immortal will also feature as-yet-unreleased songs that Jackson finished before his death in 2009.

The tour then goes to Europe, Lamarre said, while Cirque producers open a more intimate, theatrical show at the new Las Vegas theater.

Jackson's estate and Cirque will each own 50% of both projects and share equally in the cost of putting on the productions.

Tour director Jamie King said he searched for acrobats, dancers and musicians from across the world who could capture Jackson's spirit and showmanship.

"I feel like I am not doing it alone, I feel like I am doing it with Michael as my co-director all the way," said King, who has directed concert tours for Madonna, Rihanna and Celine Dion and is a former Jackson back-up dancer.

Jackson admired the Canadian troupe's work and attended Cirque shows in Los Angeles and Las Vegas. His support, Lamarre said, helped build the company.

Cirque du Soleil has since become as ubiquitous on the Las Vegas Strip as all-you-can-eat buffets or buzzing slot machines, with shows in recent years honoring Elvis Presley, Celine Dion and the Beatles.

Mandalay Bay, long home to Disney's The Lion King musical, has never hosted a Cirque show before.

Mandalay Bay President Chuck Bowling said the Jackson attraction will strengthen the casino's financial health in future years.

The theatrical performance will take over The Lion King stage when that show closes in December, and some venues in the casino will have to be relocated to accommodate the mega attraction.

Lamarre said the changes will be permanent.

"The tradition here is our shows last forever," he said.