Dave Chappelle didn't want "reverse Kramer" situation (Reuters)

NEW YORK (TheWrap.com) – Dave Chappelle appeared on a San Francisco area radio program Friday morning to promote a weekend concert, but spent much of the interview explaining his sometimes contentious stage presence, especially his demeanor during a July 22 charity performance at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Florida.

The reclusive "Chappelle's Show" star said that he didn't even get a chance to begin his routine that night because attendees in the front row began heckling immediately and that he was worried that it would become a "reverse Kramer" situation -- a reference to the bigoted tirade "Seinfeld" alum Michael Richards launched into at a comedy club in 2006. Instead, he stayed on stage for 46 mostly silent moments.

"Someone said I melted down or I had a nervous breakdown," said Chappelle. "I wasn't nervous at all. The thing is, it was an Indian casino and I felt that they were trying to get a reverse Kramer shot of me. In other words, I came out on stage and the YouTube extravaganza began -- everyone's pulling their camera phones out. And that's cool for the first couple of minutes. And then the whole front row starts heckling me and apparently the whole front row was the Seminole Indians, whose casino it was, so security didn't want to tell them to be quiet.

"Now, this obviously wasn't the whole audience -- there were thousands of people there. But in the front, I can see and hear everything. I was, like, okay, whatever. But at a certain point, you can't possibly expect me (to continue). There's got to be a little bit of cooperation."

The following night he apologized profusely for the incident, calling it a "wild night."

You can find Chappelle's radio interview here: http://www.thewrap.com/tv/column-post/dave-chappelle-explains-seminole-hard-rock-casino-reverse-kramer

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Piers Morgan to Paul McCartney: we didn't hack you (Reuters)

NEW YORK (TheWrap.com) – Piers Morgan has responded to countless allegations that he knew of, condoned or practiced phone hacking while editor of the Daily Mirror, but Monday night on Conan O'Brien he switched roles and became the accuser.

Morgan accused Heather Mills, the ex-wife of Paul McCartney, of hacking her former husband, the same charge Mills has leveled against Morgan.

"Paul McCartney is apparently now claiming someone hacked his phone," Morgan told O'Brien. "I suspect it was Heather Mills because in the divorce, if you study the divorce papers, Paul McCartney accused Heather then of hacking into his phones and passing information to the papers."

The conversation started when O'Brien asked Morgan about the hacking charges, to which Morgan said: "I kind of thought when Heather Mills poked her head up above the parapet, the whole thing got completely ridiculous."

Morgan then recounted how he introduced Mills and McCartney, eventually costing McCartney $50 million in settlements. Morgan said Mills should thank him, and added if there was anyone he should apologize to, it is Sir Paul.

You can see the clip here: http://www.thewrap.com/media/column-post/piers-morgan-apologizes-paul-mccartney-conan-29921

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James Franco says he didn't want to host Oscars (Reuters)

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap) – Remember that disastrous Academy Awards show back in February?

Well, it wasn't James Franco's fault that he was a lousy host. In fact, he didn't even want the gig and acted dull on purpose.

Four months after a brief Twitter-fueled tiff in which he criticized Oscar writer Bruce Vilanch (and then made up with Vilanch the next day), Franco is in the August issue of Playboy magazine with his first in-depth comments about what was widely seen as a debacle of an Oscar show, with Franco's listless performance drawing near-unanimous scorn.

And there's nary a mea culpa to be found in Franco's comments, which repeatedly circle back to the same theme: I didn't write that stuff, and I did what I could with substandard material.

Oscar observers could be forgiven for thinking that Franco in fact did what he could to sabotage lackluster material by appearing dazed and confused while co-host Anne Hathaway was unnervingly chipper.

After the show, one staffer told TheWrap that Franco had been even more lethargic during rehearsals, leading staff members to hope that he was "saving it for the show" -- while others said that the actor's performance was the object of some serious 11th-hour discussions among top show staffers, who knew his detached style presented a huge problem.

To read Franco's comments in Playboy, though, he was simply a victim of bad writing, and a loyal deckhand who figured there was nothing to do but go down with the ship.

In fact, he uses that exact metaphor at one point, after saying that he considered himself "trapped" by the material.

"I felt, this is not my boat," he told Playboy's Stephen Rebello. "I'm just a passenger, but I'm going down and there's no way out."

Other tidbits from Franco's interview:

* He didn't want to do the show, but he thought it'd take some of the pressure off Fox Searchlight's push to get him a Best Actor Oscar for "127 Hours," because "at the time I thought no one had won an Oscar the year they hosted the show." (He was mistaken: David Niven had.)

* He figured he could handle the gig even though he was attending Yale and couldn't show up in L.A. until a few days before the show, because the Oscar host doesn't really have all that much to do. "They knew I could rehearse only on weekends because of school, but how much do you have to rehearse?"

* After first seeing the material, he told the show's producers, Bruce Cohen and Don Mischer, "I don't know why you hired me, because you haven't given me anything. I just don't think this stuff's going to be good."

* He acted blase on purpose. "I thought, Okay, Anne is going the enthusiastic route. I've been trained as an actor to respond to circumstances, to people I'm working with, and not to force anything. So I thought I would be the straight man and she could be the other, and that's how I was trying to do those lines."

* He tweeted during the show as a "cutting-edge" way of reminding people that he didn't write the stuff he was saying.

* Contrary to rumor, he wasn't high.

* He didn't want to come onstage in drag, and in fact was so mad about that that he once planned to deliberately trip and fall when he came onstage. "Me in drag is not funny," he said.

* When it comes to the writing staff, "there were a lot of cooks who shouldn't have been cooking." And Judd Apatow wrote some funny stuff for the show that wasn't used.

* But afterwards, Cohen told him that Steven Spielberg had called it "the best Oscars ever!"

That last comment reminded me of Allan Carr, who produced the even-more-disastrous 1989 Oscar show, and afterwards defended his own debacle by announcing that Ronald Reagan had called it "the best television show I've ever seen."

But the scariest part of the Franco interview isn't the Oscar material -- which, after all, is old news at this point.

The unsettling thing is that Franco starts hitting many of the same notes when he talks about his upcoming film "Rise of the Planet of the Apes."

He says he "doesn't feel the same way" about the film that he feels about "Milk" or "127 Hours"...that he doesn't think of "Apes" as showing off his creativity...and that reshoots pushed the film in the direction of more action and less character development.

"I was just doing my job," he says, and later adds, "I was an actor for hire."

And then he adds, "critics will be out to kill this movie and blame me for it."

Hear that, critics? "Rise of the Planet of the Apes," it seems, belongs in the same category as the last Oscar show: if it isn't good, it isn't James Franco's fault.

The entire interview is available at Playboy.com.

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James Franco says he didn't want to host Oscars (Reuters)

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap) – Remember that disastrous Academy Awards show back in February?

Well, it wasn't James Franco's fault that he was a lousy host. In fact, he didn't even want the gig and acted dull on purpose.

Four months after a brief Twitter-fueled tiff in which he criticized Oscar writer Bruce Vilanch (and then made up with Vilanch the next day), Franco is in the August issue of Playboy magazine with his first in-depth comments about what was widely seen as a debacle of an Oscar show, with Franco's listless performance drawing near-unanimous scorn.

And there's nary a mea culpa to be found in Franco's comments, which repeatedly circle back to the same theme: I didn't write that stuff, and I did what I could with substandard material.

Oscar observers could be forgiven for thinking that Franco in fact did what he could to sabotage lackluster material by appearing dazed and confused while co-host Anne Hathaway was unnervingly chipper.

After the show, one staffer told TheWrap that Franco had been even more lethargic during rehearsals, leading staff members to hope that he was "saving it for the show" -- while others said that the actor's performance was the object of some serious 11th-hour discussions among top show staffers, who knew his detached style presented a huge problem.

To read Franco's comments in Playboy, though, he was simply a victim of bad writing, and a loyal deckhand who figured there was nothing to do but go down with the ship.

In fact, he uses that exact metaphor at one point, after saying that he considered himself "trapped" by the material.

"I felt, this is not my boat," he told Playboy's Stephen Rebello. "I'm just a passenger, but I'm going down and there's no way out."

Other tidbits from Franco's interview:

* He didn't want to do the show, but he thought it'd take some of the pressure off Fox Searchlight's push to get him a Best Actor Oscar for "127 Hours," because "at the time I thought no one had won an Oscar the year they hosted the show." (He was mistaken: David Niven had.)

* He figured he could handle the gig even though he was attending Yale and couldn't show up in L.A. until a few days before the show, because the Oscar host doesn't really have all that much to do. "They knew I could rehearse only on weekends because of school, but how much do you have to rehearse?"

* After first seeing the material, he told the show's producers, Bruce Cohen and Don Mischer, "I don't know why you hired me, because you haven't given me anything. I just don't think this stuff's going to be good."

* He acted blase on purpose. "I thought, Okay, Anne is going the enthusiastic route. I've been trained as an actor to respond to circumstances, to people I'm working with, and not to force anything. So I thought I would be the straight man and she could be the other, and that's how I was trying to do those lines."

* He tweeted during the show as a "cutting-edge" way of reminding people that he didn't write the stuff he was saying.

* Contrary to rumor, he wasn't high.

* He didn't want to come onstage in drag, and in fact was so mad about that that he once planned to deliberately trip and fall when he came onstage. "Me in drag is not funny," he said.

* When it comes to the writing staff, "there were a lot of cooks who shouldn't have been cooking." And Judd Apatow wrote some funny stuff for the show that wasn't used.

* But afterwards, Cohen told him that Steven Spielberg had called it "the best Oscars ever!"

That last comment reminded me of Allan Carr, who produced the even-more-disastrous 1989 Oscar show, and afterwards defended his own debacle by announcing that Ronald Reagan had called it "the best television show I've ever seen."

But the scariest part of the Franco interview isn't the Oscar material -- which, after all, is old news at this point.

The unsettling thing is that Franco starts hitting many of the same notes when he talks about his upcoming film "Rise of the Planet of the Apes."

He says he "doesn't feel the same way" about the film that he feels about "Milk" or "127 Hours"...that he doesn't think of "Apes" as showing off his creativity...and that reshoots pushed the film in the direction of more action and less character development.

"I was just doing my job," he says, and later adds, "I was an actor for hire."

And then he adds, "critics will be out to kill this movie and blame me for it."

Hear that, critics? "Rise of the Planet of the Apes," it seems, belongs in the same category as the last Oscar show: if it isn't good, it isn't James Franco's fault.

The entire interview is available at Playboy.com.

Yahoo! News