Best-selling author Michael Crichton, who wrote such novels as “The Andromeda Strain” and “Jurassic Park” and created the popular long-running NBC TV drama “ER,” has died unexpectedly of cancer at age 66.

Crichton, a medical doctor turned novelist and filmmaker whose books have sold more than 150 million copies worldwide, died on Tuesday in Los Angeles after what his family described as a “courageous and private battle against cancer.”

Steven Spielberg, who directed “Jurassic Park” said:

“Michael’s talent out-scaled even his own dinosaurs of ‘Jurassic Park. He was the greatest at blending science with big theatrical concepts, which is what gave credibility to dinosaurs again walking the Earth. Michael was a gentle soul who reserved his flamboyant side for his novels. There is no one in the wings that will ever take his place.”

With rumors circulating about the eminent demise of Bob and Harvey Weinstein’s namesake company floating around, its hard to wonder if the engorged bros Weinstein aren’t finally paying the karmic debt for eating all those babies – supposedly the only foodstuff on Earth capable of providing them with the nutrients they need to continue wheeling, dealing, and plotting the overthrow of our world’s governments for the coming of their planet’s gelatinous god/emperor, Volgar the Inconceivable. Or maybe it’s the result of their constant control-freakish dicking around with not only release dates of the films on their slate, but the films themselves. Fanboys makes for an excellent case in point: The trailer below hypes what appears to be a harmless little low-budget lad comedy – on the scope and scale of say the recent Love Drive – not the Apocalypse Now-esque auteur epic that in days of yore would’ve warranted the bickering, editing room battles, and multiple release date changes we saw coming from the Weinstein camp. Hey Harv, why not work a little harder on controlling your food intake, and ease up on trying to control every other non-baby thing that lands on your desk?

Garth Ennis’ romance comic book about a lovelorn small-town preacher who explodes his own grandmother and travels the land with his loveable band of sidekicks – a vampire, a chick with big boobs, a seven foot tall zombie/death personified in a dirty duster, a dude with an asshole for a face, the retarded great-great-grandson of Jesus, and God – has been drifting up and down development hell’s River Styx almost as long as Lindsay Lohan’s been a dirty whore (she’s 21 now and has been sucking cock since she still had baby teeth, so you do the math).

Fans of the groundbreaking funny book relinquished any festering hopes of seeing Reverend Custer’s wacky high-jinx in anything more than a two dimensional artist’s rendering when it was announced last year that Mark Steven Johnson – the man responsible for turning Frank Miller’s Daredevil into a creepy date-rapist who fakes blindness to ingratiate himself to his victims – would develop Preacher as a series for HBO. Because there’s NO way that could possibly fly, right? Well thankfully it didn’t, because when Johnson’s vision of the series was deemed “too hardcore” (in other words it was gut-wrenchingly bad and no one had the sack to tell him the truth) HBO’s execs dropped the project and Johnson was left, well — holding his Johnson.

But just like that colored fellah on all the pseudo-Che Guevara bumper stickers in the Whole Foods parking lot, Columbia Pictures delivered a message of HOPE yesterday, by announcing they’d be developing Preacher as a feature with American Beauty helmer Sam Mendes attached to direct. Okay, admittedly Mendes’ last dalliance with the darker side of comics - Road to Perdition - bored me into the arms of Morpheus, but as a Preacher fan this is still good news. With the project finally in the hands of a capable director hopefully some killer cast will jump on board and this thing will see the light of day. I want to live in a world where I can see an ass-kicking man of God using the Good Word to make another man ass-bang himself. I want to live in that world HARD.

Hopefully Reverend Custer himself will stop in and give us his thoughts on this nipple-erecting news. Stay tuned.

According to /Film they are. What a wonderful tribute to the recently passed Julius Cary, who played “baddest mofo” ghetto shogun Sho’nuff in the 1986 original (Samuel “anything for a paycheck” Jackson was the painfully obvious pick to fill his shoes in the redo). I guess they’ll save digging up his rotting corpse and sodomizing it while his children watch for the DVD extra features. Look! He’s got the glow! No, wait… that’s his jheri curls cindering after Sam Jackson flicked a lit cigarette at him. Besides, everyone knows dead people don’t glow.