Entertainment

When you're a famous rapper promoting your latest album, it's hard to say whether having pugnacious Dallas Cowboy Adam Jones steal the spotlight by fighting with his bodyguard is a good thing or a bad thing.

The Cowboys and the NFL will continue looking into just what went down at the Joule hotel late Tuesday night-early Wednesday. But three-time Grammy-winning rapper Ludacris had come to the Joule to preview music as well as video footage from his new album, Theater of the Mind, for music industry execs and friends.

The event was in the Joule's very chic subterranean nightclub, PM. Dallas Stars goalie Marty Turco and Dallas Cowboys Terrell Owens and Roy Williams were among the guests who were not at the center of a morning-after investigation.

Sources at the hotel report that whatever did or did not happen with Mr. Jones and his bodyguard Tommy Jones did not happen in PM.

So far, film director Joe Camp loves the fifth season of HBO's Entourage – or he would if he had seen any of it. "We haven't had a TV in the house in nine years," says the creator of the Benji the dog movies. At the height of the Benji craze, Joe ran the dog-film empire from the Dallas office of his Mulberry Square Productions.

Entourage is riffing on the Benji phenomenon with its current story line about the main character, Hollywood hottie Vincent Chase. He has become such box-office poison that his only route to avoid bankruptcy is to accept $3 million to star in Benji Goes to Alaska.

In short, his career appears to be over.

Like many things in Entourage, this has a real-life parallel. Way back when, Chevy Chase got $1 million to star opposite Benji in Oh Heavenly Dog. "And that was for about two weeks' work," says Joe.

Joe's younger son, savvy screenwriter-producer Brandon Camp, clued his dad into the Entourage story line and it's gotten a lot of laughs in the family. "I haven't seen it, but Brandon says that it's really funny and everyone in Hollyweird watches it."

The director left Dallas a few years ago and now lives near San Diego. But when I found him, he was visiting New Hampshire with the current incarnation of Benji – the original movie came out 34 years ago – for an animal adoption fundraiser. Joe spends most of his time these days with his horses and is the author of the Random House best-seller, The Soul of a Horse: Life Lessons From the Herd.

But when the phone rings for Benji to join the Entourage gang, Joe is ready. "If Vincent Chase is getting three mil, then you can imagine what the real star is going to get. But we're going to lobby for a change of location. Benji in Tahiti would be nice."

Print it | Discuss it | E-mail it to a friend