This eBay auction in conjunction with spcaLA Night with the Dodgers August 20th. The eBay auction starts today at noon pacific and ends on Thursday August 20th at noon pacific. All proceeds benefit the programs and services of spcaLA.

You can view a sneak peek of the items up for bid here. Happy bidding!

insidetoronto.com has two copies of The Fly to give away. To enter The Fly contest, people must e-mail their names, complete addresses, daytime telephone numbers and the answer to this skill-testing question: Who directed The Fly? by August 12. See insidetoronto.com for rules and more information. Good luck!

Geena Davis: Strong, smart and in need of a day job after ABC canceled her TV run as the president of the United States, Davis could whip this morning show into shape.

Who could not agree on this? Take a look at the interviews section for examples on how well Geena fits in that couch! : D

The Top 10:

1 Thelma & Louise (1991)
2 Easy Rider (1969)
3 Planes, Trains And Automobiles (1987)
4 Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert (1994)
5 The Blues Brothers (1980)
6 Road Trip (2000)
7 Little Miss Sunshine (2006)
8 National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983)
9 Rain Man (1988)
10 Summer Holiday (1962)

All the best to you and your family, I hope you are being spoiled today! For the fun of it, here’s Geena’s astrology map.

Proceeds from the auction benefit the emergency relief efforts in Darfur, Children’s Defense Fund and Cure Autism Now.

Designer: John Varvatos
Color: Shiny Gunmetal

Read more at their website!

“Did you shoot him? Did you do a Thelma and Louise?”

Geena Davis cocks her forefinger and thumb into the shape of a gun, blowing her imaginary assailant away, a tactic thankfully not needed by her interviewer the prevous night after an attempted mugging on L.A.’s Melrose Avenue. The woman who was Thelma suddenly laughs, clearly pleased at this real-life reference to her favourite movie, the one that transformed her from the quirky star of such features as The Accidental Tourist, The Fly and Earth Girls Are Easy into the woman at the centre of last summer’s feminist zeitgeist. And now, with the huge success of the Davis-domincated A League of Their Own — $90 million and rising – into the woman who has dramatically become a major movie star, right there at the very top of the Tinsel Town tree. Not bad going for a former oversized model from somewhere called Wareham, Massachussetts.

The aptly-named Genial Pictures production company is located on the lost at 20th Century Fox. The 35-year-old boss – her startling six-foot frame accentuated by a bright orange pantsuit and red sneakers – sits back in her chair, her long legs stretching out in fron of her onto a 50s coffee table. Sitting in the corner is the green-and-white 50s bike that she will occasionally mount to whizz around the lot. A Spanish-language poster for The Fly hangs on the wall. Her orange hair still wet and slicked back off her face, Geena Davis has about her an ineffable quality, a quality that shows in her wry smile, her ready laugh, her quite delicious sense of irony.

It is this unique brand of idiosyncratic charm that has set Davis’ various characters apart, characters who have in common a hope so innocent as to seem almost naïve, along with a quiet, unshakable dignity no matter what the gods may be dishing out on any particular day.

Certainly, she must be doing something right with A League of Their Own. This utterly charming tale of the little-known women’s baseball league established during World War II while the boys were off fighting at the front had failed to feature in most Hollywood pundits’ pre-summer predictions. Penny Marshall’s ensemble piece has, however, hit a home run with audiences of all ages, sealing Davis – the movie’s central character – as a major box office draw.

“I’m thrilled it’s a hit,” says Davis. “The whole business is based on money, and if you get hits with women, then it shows it can be done.”

Even in the UK, where any sign of a national obsession with the great sport of baseball is thin on the ground, Davis is confident that the movie will take off.

“It will work on other levels,” she enthuses. “To me, it’s a move about people who never got to use their talents finally getting a chance.”

As Dottie, the naturally graceful dairy worker recruited to play for The Rockford Peaches while awaiting her soldier husband’s return from the war, Davis immediately becomes the team’s anchor player, even inspiring has-been coach Tom Hanks to snap out of his apprarently permanent drunken stupor. Player a top-grade catcher – the nearest thing baseball has to a wicket keeper – was, however, not the easiest task in the Davis portfolio to date.

“I had bruises, man, all over my legs,” she recalls. “I had bruises that had stitches on them, where you could see the imprint of a baseball on my forearms. Then I realised that it was a lot easier to call a ball with other parts of your body.”

In an attempt to stave off such physical exhuastion and the general rigours of a four-month shoot in the hot Indiana sun, Davis and Hanks would think of yet more surreal ways of keeping themselves – and the long-suffering crew – entertained.

“Tom is great,” she laughs. “It was like having your favourite big brother. We’d do goofy stuff. My favourite thing was to sing Bohemian Rhapsody, which nobody knew, because it’s such an old song. And I happen to know all the words to Bohemian Rhapsody, so I would sing it at the top of my lungs. Now, of course, it’s like this gigantic hit, because of Wayne’s World. Then, for some reason, I got obsessed with Jesus Christ Superstar, and I guess as a distraction from the heat and the hours and the tension on the set, I got all interested in making everybody mount this production of it. I made everybody practice, and I cast everybody into parts. We were going to do Jesus Christ Superstar Goes Hawaiian.”

“Geena had the lyrics copied,” confirms a fellow League actress Anne Elizabeth Ramsay, “and it started getting more and more serious. We’d go back to our trailers and say to one another, ‘Is Geena really thinking we’re gonna perform this for the crew?’ And all of a sudden there’s this grass skirt in the trailer, with a coconut bra.”

“I was Caiaphas, so I got to sing really deep,” chips in Tom Hanks, busting into song. “Tell the rabble to be quiet/We anticipate a riot/This coming crowd/Is much too loud.”

I found it incredibly bonding experience,” says Davis. “It was a very friendly, comforable, nice atmosphere. I think women are good at that kind of thing, really supportive.”

Relations with that other co-star, Madonna Louise Ciccone, while cordial, were less intimate.

“We never got close,” says Davis. “We didn’t hang out togher or anything. She’s had a different life than the rest of us. She’s just lived her life in public.”

The daughter of a civil engineer and a teachers’ aide in Wareham, Massachussetts, Virginia Elizabeth Davis grew up shy, tall and beautiful. At her local high school, her graduation yearbook shows a thoroughly normal pupil, albeit one whose future plans “are to go to the big city and become a famous movie star”, a process which began, like so many before her, with a spell on the New York model circuit, even appearing for a while as an animated mannequin in a SoHo storefront. At six-foot, Davis was officially two inches too tall to grace the Manhatten catwalks. It was, however, these extra few inches that won her the walk-on role of a half-dressed starlet in Dustin Hoffman’s dressing room in Sydney Pollack’s Tootsie. With this one credit under her belt, she packed up and headed for Hollywood.

A brief period in all the usual sitcoms gave way, in 1985, to her second movie role, that of the kiss-obsessed vampire in the high-camp Transylvania 6-5000. It was a skimpy part in a skimpy movie, but it was here that Davis first met Jeff Goldblum, the man who was to become her second, now ex-husband (her first, to a New York restaurateur, had been shortlived). The two went on to appear as the star-crossed lovers in The Fly, the onscreen partnership later reprised in Julien Temple’s utterly hip but financially ill-fated Earth Girls Are Easy. In between, Davis played opposite Alec Baldwin in Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice, then opposite William Hurt in The Accidental Tourist, eating off stiff competition from Michelle Pfeiffer and Sigourney Weaver to pick up her popular if unexpected Best Supporting Actress Oscar at the 1988 Academy Awards. And from there, via Bill Murray’s Quick Change, to Thelma.

“I thought it might be controversial,” says Davis of one fo the most talked-about movies of the 90s to date. “But I thought it would be more about the ending. I guess I didn’t expect the level of male-female debate that arose out of it. But that film certainly helped solidify a process that’s been going on for a long time, that hopefully will continue, where I just more and more want to be in charge of myself.”

Now, with her Genial production deal at Fox, Davis has the chance to supervise a number of projects, with around a dozen scripts currently vying for her attention.

“It’s an embarrassment of riches,” she says, clearly thrilled with the material coming her way. “I guess Bigmalion (a reverse Pygmalion where a woman being civilised by a man ends up civilising him is my favourite. That’s the one I’ve done the most one and it was my original idea.”

For now, though, the fledgling producer’s most immediate concern is Stephen Frears’ Hero, with Davis as the big-time TV news reporter playing opposite Dustin Hoffman and Andy Garcia. With strong advance word on the project already circulating, Hollywood’s newest queen seems set for the kind of year dreamt of only in the imagination of the most optimistic and long-suffering sports fan.

“We were shooting a scene one day where the camera was far away,” she says, flashing back to last summer and A Leage of Their Own. “We were losing the light, and it was a big rush thing, and nobody was quite clear about what they were supposed to do. The camera started rolling, and I was the first to bat. I’m just hoping I hit something – and I hit a very decent, solid line drive towards second base. And then I see something weird going one : there’s a girl down on the ground, and people are running to her. And I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God, have I hit her? What the hell’s happened?’. Anyway, they say ‘Cut!’ and everybody’s congratulating me. And it turns out we were shooting a part in the script where I’m supposed to hit a line drive that hits the second baseman in the face. Unbeknown to me, I had done the absolute perfect thing. And I thought, ‘Man, I am a genius!.”

Thanks to 77517, the entry about Geena’s Emmy outfit has now been updated. Below is another interesting story that she’s made me aware of, on how to copy Geena’s hairdo from the event.

Steal Geena’s Sizzling Red Carpet Ponytail

Since the ultimate goal was to create a fresh, clean, sleek, long look, Robert Hallowell, Geena’s hairdresser, wanted to make Geena’s hair sleek and slicked back off her face to avoid any type of clash with those gorgeous gems she wore around her neck and in her ears.

Hallowell also pumped up Geena’s “red hues” to a right orange red with woodsy undertones right before the event: “Geena has gorgeous creamy white skin which works better with red hues that have an bright orange base. Geena’s skin clashes with the reds that have a blue base. Anyone thinking about going with a red color should definitely pay attention to how the color would work with the skin tone”.

He first applied his straightening balm (The Flat Factor) to Geena’s towel blotted damp strands. Then he dried her hair stick straight using a boar’s head brush (Mason Pearson) and a blow dryer (Hallowell uses his own Kitchen Beautician products on Geena’s hair – which he has been doing since he first created the product line). He directed the air-flow of the dryer down the shaft of her hair from the roots to the ends.

Once Geena’s hair was 100% dry he used a flat iron to make sure that all of her strands were perfectly straight. He applied his Dream Cream styling cream to the sides of Geena’s hairline to give the hair a slightly textured but sleek look. Hallowell created a “teeny tiny part on the left side measuring approximately 2 1/2″ long from her forehead”.

He pulled the ponytail very high making sure that the crown was perfectly smooth and wrinkle free. After he had finished creating the pony he applied a few drops of his applied a few Love That Shine Drops to the balms of his hands and fingers. He then carefully raked through the finished pony with the Shine Drops to add a glassy shimmer to the strands.

See the animated 360° video of the figure below, see more pictures here.