Worlds Collide

Cruising to victory: Actor Tom Cruise, right, gestures as new fiancee, actress Katie Holmes, left, looks on. Cruise, in France to promote the Steven Spielberg film War of the Worlds, proposed to Holmes earlier on at the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Photo Claude Paris. Courtesy AP Photo.

Following a high-velocity courtship and an even higher-profile proposal atop the world’s most romantic icon, the Eiffel Tower, the engagement of Tom Cruise to Katie Holmes was just one in a series of publicity stunts Friday afternoon in the massive promotional effort behind the new Steven Spielberg blockbuster War of the Worlds. Everyone from the director to the film’s production staff was sent to iconic locations around the world to expose the minutiae of their personal lives. It was all part of a far-reaching campaign to boost advance ticket sales by hyping the Hollywood personalities — famous and not-so-famous — who made the movie, proving that when it comes to a big-budget summer blockbuster, there’s no such thing as too much publicity.

Some of the highlights:

* Steven Spielberg told a press conference that he is switching from boxers to boxer-briefs. Shouting into a megaphone from the roof of the Fruit of the Loom textile plant in Donnegal, England, the famous director said, “I’ve been waiting to do this a long, long time. It’s not easy spending the whole day sitting in a director’s chair.” The co-founder of Dreamworks SKG, who rocketed to fame in 1978 with Close Encounters of the Third Kind — during which he wore a rotating set of refrigerated Harvey Woods tighty-whities — hailed the boxer-brief’s almost paradoxical mix of support and breatheability. “When I started in this industry, no one thought this day would ever come. You look at a film like War of the Worlds and you realize it could never have been made with regular underwear.”

* Standing in a concrete parking garage in Columbus, Ohio, Craig Evanson, who held a boom mike on the set of War of the Worlds, announced on Friday that his relationship with Willow Mursant, his girlfriend of four months, was over. The 24-year-old wannabe director made the announcement to his best friend, Josh Harris, over a cell phone, citing Mursant’s selfishness and “s--- taste in TV” as reason for the breakup. Mursant, reached at her parents’ home in New Canaan, Conn., claims that the relationship never existed and added that Evanson is a “loser” and that she is “thinking of getting out of film anyway.”

* Danielle Riva, a publicity assistant at Paramount Pictures, announced that she will be dying her hair bleach blonde tomorrow at Beverly Hills’ upscale Fernando Romero Salon, which she can barely afford. Riva, who recently sent out more than 200 press invites for the War of the Worlds opening-night gala, caused lunch-room chatter in February when she showed up at work with auburn highlights, even though they had gone out of style more than a year earlier. Riva made the announcement from the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the world’s most vain pedestrian walkway, and stated that she hopes her newer, edgier hairstyle will help her land a new boyfriend, adding that any prospective suitor “better drive a cool car.”

Mark Schatzker is a Toronto writer.