In an exclusive interview with EW, veteran music producer Evan Rogers (Christina Aguilera, Kelly Clarkson), who discovered Rihanna in Barbados and has worked closely with her ever since, is speaking out for the first time since the alleged incident with Chris Brown.

EW: What do you make of everyone from Katie Couric and Oprah Winfrey to Tyra Banks and Dr. Phil attempting to get through to Rihanna on their shows? Do you think it will help or is it just a circus?
EVAN ROGERS: I think that everyone has good intentions and means well, but it turns up the heat in terms of it seeming like the whole world is telling her what to do. At the end of the day, people forget that at 21, your perspective is very different. These kinds of things can happen to anyone, whether you're a celebrity or not.

EW: As someone who knows Rihanna and is close to her, do you think she's taking their advice into consideration? Has she been watching those shows and following what public figures like Oprah are saying about her?
ER: I think she's very aware of everything that's going on. Just like anyone else, she watches TV, she goes online. And I think that it matters to her, but there's a line that she walks between being human and caring when you hear these kinds of things, and separating your personal life from your professional life. She's doing the best she can and this is a very difficult time that she's going through right now and she's going to learn a lot from it.

EW: What effect could all of this have on Rihanna's young fans?
ER: It obviously concerns her a lot. But at the end of the day, I think that most people still see her as the victim in this situation. You'll always have a lot of haters who talk negatively about artists all day long on the Internet. But I think that when the dust settles, she's going to be fine. The bottom line is Rihanna is a superstar and like other artists, the reception from her fans will mostly depend on how good an album she makes next time out and how great the songs are. As long as all that is taken care of, she'll be fine and everything will take care of itself. She just needs to get in [the studio] and make a great album.

EW: Last week, reports surfaced that Rihanna and Chris Brown recently recorded a duet for his next CD...
ER: There's no duet that's been recorded other than the one [called "Bad Girl"] that was a bootleg track from months before. Those were just rumors.

EW: Is Rihanna recording any new music?
ER: She's just getting started now. source

It's not a charity show, it's not a fundraiser ... Taylor Hicks concert tickets have now been reduced to a whopping $0.00 -- and it still hasn't sold out. Soul Patrol!

The season five "American Idol" winner was originally scheduled to perform at The Roxy on Sunset tomorrow night -- for $36.50 a ticket. But in the last few hours, a bunch of tickets wound up on goldstar.com -- a website which claims to offer ticket discounts because, "Not every show sells out, so instead of letting seats go empty, venues list them with us to sell to our members."

Now, instead of offering the usual half-price discount, Hicks tix are being given away for nothing ... nada .. zip ... zilch ... except an $8.75 service fee.

Still too much? source

Is it important for entertainment journalists to write nice things about movie stars? Do they even read their own press? Or are they so much in their own world that they just let their publicists tell them what’s going on in the world.

Once, Warren Beatty, whom I do consider the smartest guy in Hollywood, told me: “The biggest mistake you can make is to think no one’s reading what you write.”

But that’s Warren, he’s in a different league, and he knows everything going on around him.

Not so Julia Roberts, apparently. Mother now of three kids, she probably doesn’t have the time to read anything. She certainly doesn’t read this column. When she saw me last night at the premiere of her sleek new thriller, “Duplicity,” Roberts didn’t hesitate to cut me dead. She was rude, downright nasty, and dismissive. She snubbed me in front of other people to make her point, and later cut in between me and director Tony Gilroy to make her point. Her behavior was unexpected and chilling.

So what was the problem? Her officious publicist, Marcy Engelman, said: “She knows you broke the embargo on her play and wrote bad things about her.”

Indeed, a top agent at the party said, “Julia said, 'that’s the man who writes bad things about me.'”

Wait: you’re thinking, even if that were true, would a gracious person do such a thing in public? That’s something to consider.

In any case, another producer, a long time friend of Julia’s, then proceeded to tell me she’d absolutely remembered me writing something terrible about Roberts. “I know you did,” she said.

I was stunned. For the record: When Roberts was a week away from opening in “Three Days of Rain” on Broadway in April 2006, she was getting terrible advance buzz in the local newspapers. The gossip snipes said she looked bad, and couldn’t act. As an ardent fan of Roberts, I thought I’d go over and see what was happening. After mentioning the enthusiastic audience and the celebrities who’d already come to see her, I wrote:

“As for Julia: She was very good on Saturday afternoon. We heard her clearly in the last row. She has a strong stage presence and I suspect it will just get better and better as she warms up for opening night. She is funny and charming when appropriate, somber and grim with conviction too. She has all her lines digested and you cannot take your eyes off of her. She actually injects some life into that first-act character with some real Roberts sarcasm. It's most welcome. In the second act, though, she combines her best riffs from her performances in "Steel Magnolias" and "Ready to Wear," among others.

And she does not look thin, gaunt or unhappy. Quite to the contrary, she has a supple energy. Our audience went wild for her, with a standing ovation and cheering. So there.

As our usher said, she's already very good and by opening night, pow!

So retract those claws, kitties. And get ready. No, she's not Cherry Jones or Phylicia Rashad — yet. But she's a movie star and can act circles around anyone, and she's going to be a sensation in the papers on the morning of April 20.

My guess is this will open the door for her to alternate doing plays and movies, and that can only be a good thing.”

This may be the ultimate example of ‘a good turn will not go unpunished.’

Most reviewers, in fact, did not care for Roberts when the play opened. She got creamed by the regular theater critics. The morning after opening night I wrote:

“If anything, she seemed more relaxed on stage this time around, and significantly improved. It will be interesting to go see her at the end of the run in June ... When Roberts returns to Broadway in a couple of years — which she will undoubtedly do — I hope it’s in a romantic comedy or a farce where she can show off her real talents.”

I did think Roberts was brave to take on Broadway. And the fact is, the material was not suited to her. In the end, it may have been the same case that plagues many Hollywood stars who want to jump into the deep end on Broadway before learning to swim. Sometimes it’s better to do what Katie Holmes did in “All My Sons” this last year, and take a secondary role.

In any case, I wouldn’t have thought that what I wrote about Roberts in her play could have justified the scene at last night’s party. It was not pretty, and it was meant to be devastating. Her associates said, “This is what she was told.” And that’s even worse: to think that most people in Hollywood start many conversations with these words: “I was told you wrote (blank).”

Maybe it’s time to start getting better information.

As for “Duplicity”: Tony Gilroy is a great director. His “Michael Clayton” was superb. “Duplicity” looks terrific and moves effortlessly, even though the screenplay is often hard to follow. At one point, the characters arrive in Rome and no one knows what they’re doing there. But it looks splendid!

Gilroy brings along some of his fine “Michael Clayton” actors like Tom Wilkinson and Denis O’Hare. Paul Giamatti is spot on a crazy corporate chief. He replaced Billy Bob Thornton in the role, who was announced and then dropped out. I’m sure there’s a good story there.

“Duplicity,” if you can stick with it, concerns itself with corporate espionage. Clive Owen is perfect as a deadbeat spy who basically turns to a life of crime just because he can. Owen just gets better and better with every new movie. And Julia Roberts? Well, despite her misplaced anger towards this column, she’s a movie star. You can’t deny it. And even if the movie doesn’t always work, it’s nice to see big movie stars on the silver screen in a big studio movie with sumptuous locales and beautiful Italian hotel rooms.

My advice to Julia: get a new publicist, and a clipping service. source

I'm told NBC Universal spent a whopping $10 million on Sunday's two-hour opener for Kings and another $4 million per episode. That's a staggering amount of money to lavish on any drama series, especially one that's a bomb. By now you've seen the ratings reports about Kings pulling in horrible numbers -- a 1.6 rating/4 share in 18-49 demgraphics, and 6 million viewers overall. (ABC's heavy hitter Desperate Housewives was No. 1 from 9PM to 10PM.) Nor does Jeff Zucker have anyone to blame but himself for this disaster. Because I hear that Ben Silverman was hands-on. Remember, please, that Ben's predecessor at NBC Entertainment, Kevin Reilly, passed on it. But Ben picked up the script and ran with it. Some thought it should have been a mini-series, but Ben said no. Others thought the modernized Bible retelling should have had more backstory, and at one point Silverman ordered the writers to make it "more real world". So he told them to work up a cockamamie scenario whereby the Allies never won World War II, and America went bankrupt afterwards, which meant no oil out of the Middle East, so Mexico got rich, and then... Ugh, does anybody give a shit? It was scrapped anyway.

Kings was supposed to move into the Thursday 10 PM ER slot (once coveted when the network was still Must-See TV) but has now been banished to Sunday at 8 PM where it can't do any harm since no one is watching NBC that night anyway. This latest failure follows NBC's derivative restaurant reality series The Chopping Block also receiving a pathetic 4 share in 18-to-49 demos for its debut Wednesday. No wonder Ben has less and less to do with programming -- which was why he was hired in the first place -- and more and more to do with liaising with advertisers. (Even though that job is well below his pay grade.) I have a thought: to improve his performance, NBC Universal should rebrand Silverman as Ben SYlverman. That's more likely than Zucker ever admitting he made a mistake hiring him in the first place. source

AS BEAUTIFUL and talented as she is, Natasha Richardson should have a much bigger film career.

But it's in her genes to shine brightest on the stage.

She is, after all, a member of the Redgrave clan, a theatrical dynasty that has held sway over theaters in London and New York for more than 75 years.

Her grandfather Michael Redgrave was one of the finest British actors of the 20th century, rivaled only by Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson. Her mother, Vanessa Redgrave, is arguably the greatest living actress in the English-speaking world today.

And her father, Tony Richardson, who died of AIDS in 1991, directed several of the most influential plays and movies in England in the 1950s, including "Look Back in Anger," "The Entertainer," "A Taste of Honey" and "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner."

Natasha, who was critically injured Monday in a skiing accident in Canada, made her London stage debut as Nina in "The Seagull" in 1985.

But it was on Broadway where she made her real mark.

In 1993, at age 30, she played the title role in Eugene O'Neill's "Anna Christie" at the Roundabout Theater Co.

It is one of most demanding roles in the American theater, and she played it brilliantly.

Her understudy, Angelica Torn, the daughter of actor Rip Torn, recalls watching her from the wings every night: "Her command of the audience was just awe-inspiring. Every time she made her entrance, there was goose-flesh everywhere."

Richardson returned to Broadway six years later to play Sally Bowles in Sam Mendes' gritty revival of "Cabaret."

She was not a trained singer, but she was determined to be a musical-theater star.

"She had been over to [composer] John Kander's house to learn the show, and we kept hearing rumors that she was terrible," says Joe Masteroff, who wrote the book for the musical.

"But the first time I heard her sing, I thought she was wonderful. And she was a terribly good actress. She just broke your heart."

Broadway fell in love, too, awarding her the 1999 Tony for Best Actress in a Musical.

She followed up "Cabaret" with another memorable performance, as a tough, sophisticated photographer in Patrick Marber's sexually-charged drama "Closer."

Those who know Richardson say she's a "whip-smart" actress with an impressive ability to analyze a scene intellectually and then play it to the hilt emotionally.

She can be prickly, especially around the press. I once met her at the bar at Chez Josephine, where she was hosting a party for the cast of "Cabaret."

She was the first to arrive, and we had a nice chat about her performance. But when I introduced myself as a columnist for The Post, steel shutters came down over her eyes. In very short order, I found myself banished to a table near the kitchen, far, far away from the "Cabaret" crowd.

No matter. It's when she's onstage that I want a front-row seat.

Just before her accident, Richardson was campaigning to co-star with her mother in a Broadway revival of "A Little Night Music." She wants to play Desiree Armfeldt, a grand stage actress who sings the show's best-known song, "Send in the Clowns."

That's a performance I hope to see. source

The American actress Betsy Blair, who rose from New Jersey chorus girl to become the teenage bride of Gene Kelly, went on to star in one of the classic Hollywood films of the 1950s, and later became a Londoner when she married the film-maker Karel Reisz, has died in London after suffering from cancer. She was 85. source