NEWSMAKERS

NEWSMAKERS

Cuba Gooding Jr. sought on warrant

NEW ORLEANS

New Orleans police say an arrest warrant has been issued for actor Cuba Gooding Jr. after an incident at a Bourbon Street bar.

Police said in a news release that a bartender told officers that Gooding was there at 3 a.m. Tuesday when he became upset with other patrons who started asking him to take photographs with them.

The bartender told officers that Gooding pushed her after she asked him to calm down, and again after she told him he needed to leave and police had been called.

Gooding left the bar before police arrived. Police issued an arrest warrant for municipal battery, a misdemeanor.

Gooding’s publicist declined to comment. The actor is in New Orleans filming “The Butler,” a movie about a White House butler who serves eight American presidents.

Scout Willis gets community service

NEW YORK

Scout Willis, the daughter of Demi Moore and Bruce Willis, is set to do community service to resolve her New York City public-drinking and fake-ID case.

A Manhattan judge agreed Tuesday to close Willis’ case without jail time or probation if she does two days of service.

The Brown University student didn’t have to be in court or enter any plea.

Her lawyer, Stacey Richman, says prosecutors “took a logical approach to assessing the situation.”

Willis was arrested last month. Police said she was sipping a beer in Union Square in violation of an open-container law.

Police said she also gave them phony identification — a misdemeanor. She was 20 then and turned 21 this month. Scout is the second of Moore and Willis’ three daughters together. They divorced in 2000.

Easy win for NBC in the Nielsens

NEW YORK

The weekly television ratings competition was no competition with the start of the Summer Olympics.

Friday’s opening ceremony drew more than 40 million viewers for NBC, numbers that were about the same as for the Grammy and Academy awards ceremonies this year, and far more than anything else on U.S. television this summer, Nielsen said.

The first two nights of competition that followed had NBC getting bigger audiences than they had in the Beijing Olympics four years ago, Nielsen said.

For the week, NBC averaged 19 million viewers in prime time (10.4 rating, 18 share). CBS was a distant second, averaging 4.6 million (3.0, 5), Fox had 3.6 million (2.1, 4), ABC had 3.5 million (2.3, 4), ION Television had 1 million (0.7, 1) and the CW had 620,000 (0.4, 1).

Vindicator wire reports