To celebrate the long-awaited opening of the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills, fashion house Salvatore Ferragamo will sponsor a black-tie inaugural gala alongside cochairs Brad Pitt, Robert Redford, Jamie Tisch, and Wallis Annenberg. The evening will not only play host to a star-studded crowd, it will also shine light on a series of events including a performance on the Goldsmith Theater stage and an exclusive showing of Ferragamo’s Spring 2014 collection.

The new cultural hub transformed an entire Beverly Hills city block, with the historic 1934 Beverly Hills Post Office and new Goldsmith Theater integral parts of the transformation. And with Ferragamo’s deep-rooted ties to Los Angeles — the iconic shoe designer opened his first shop in Hollywood almost 100 years ago — and a worldwide commitment to the arts, it made perfect sense to sponsor the inaugural gala.

The gala is scheduled for mid-October, but the festivities have already started. A look at Ferragamo’s cocktail preparty plus a sneak peek at the center here.

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Exclusive: Marc Forster’s “World War Z,” which cost well over $200 million and stars Brad Pitt, doesn’t open until June 21st. But on Tuesday in New York and Los Angeles there will be a couple of early tastemaker screenings. They’re designed to “test the water” with friends and celebrity fans of Forster and Pitt. These are hot hot tickets. The whole “WWZ” debacle is chronicled very nicely in the current Vanity Fair.

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Brad Pitt is due to arrive in Moscow in June to promote his new film World War Z at the Moscow International Film Festival, the festival’s general producer has said.

The 35th film festival will kick off with the premiere of the upcoming apocalyptic horror film, World War Z, to be attended by producer-star Pitt and film director Marc Forster.

World War Z, the big-budget adaptation of Max Brooks’ 2006 zombie-horror bestseller, is produced by Hollywood studio Paramount in partnership with Pitt’s Plan B production company.

“The Moscow Film Festival has proved itself as a good launching platform for movies,” Leonid Vereschagin told reporters at the Russian Pavillion in Cannes on Saturday.

The Moscow International Film Festival will be held on June 20-29.

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Just hours before a Tuesday afternoon interview with USA TODAY, his partner Angelina Jolie revealed in a New York Times op-ed that she has undergone a double mastectomy and reconstruction after learning she carried the BRCA1 gene mutation, which doctors estimated gave her an 87% chance of developing breast cancer.

How is Pitt feeling? “I’m quite emotional about it, of course,” said the World War Z star. “She could have stayed absolutely private about it and I don’t think anyone would have been none the wiser with such good results. But it was really important to her to share the story and that others would understand it doesn’t have to be a scary thing. In fact, it can be an empowering thing, and something that makes you stronger and us stronger.”

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“This is a happy day for our family,” the star says.

Brad Pitt has issued a statement to London’s Evening Standard on partner Angelina Jolie’s decision to have a double mastectomy.

“Having witnessed this decision firsthand, I find Angie’s choice, as well as many others like her, absolutely heroic,” Pitt said in the statement. “I thank our medical team for their care and focus.”

“All I want is for her to have a long and healthy life, with myself and our children,” Pitt continued. “This is a happy day for our family.”

In a New York Times op-ed story written by Angelina Jolie and titled My Medical Choice, the star, 37, explained that she spent the last three months undergoing and recovering from a double mastectomy.

Jolie, who lost her mother to ovarian cancer, writes, “My chances of developing breast cancer have dropped from 87% to under 5%,” Jolie writes. “I can tell my children that they don’t need to fear they will lose me to breast cancer.”

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When I met Brad Pitt the day after Easter, he was so tired that he was perhaps more reflective than usual. He had just finished a week of spring break with his family. He had camped out with them the night before on his property north of Santa Barbara, and he had woken up, he said, too early, as well as too wet. They had slept in tents, four of his six children, along with two of their friends, and then he had gotten all of them in a van and driven them down to LA.

“Angie too?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “Angie too.”

I told him that I’d met her a few years before, when I profiled her for Esquire. She was making a movie about the wife of the murdered journalist Daniel Pearl, and the thesis of my story was that while 9/11 was supposed to make us all better — a better country and a better people — it only worked for Angelina Jolie. The story has won a kind of immortality as “The Worst Celebrity Profile Ever Written,” and when I told that to Angelina Jolie’s partner, he at first laughed and said that he hoped Esquire would use that as the title of the profile I was writing about him. Then he got serious. “But you were right,” he said. “You were right, you were right. Angie is….the best person…..”

Read more. Tom Junod’s profile of Brad Pitt will appear in the June/July issue of Esquire, which is on newsstands at the end of the month.

LADIES, cancel all dates for Sunday, June 9.

That’s when Brad Pitt will walk the red carpet at the Australian premiere of his film World War Z.

Pitt is set to attend the event in Sydney with director Marc Forster and producer Dede Gardner.

A post-apocalyptic zombie movie, World War Z stars Pitt as United Nations employee Gerry Lane, who’s thrown into a race against time to stop a pandemic that’s toppling armies and governments and threatening the very future of humanity.

* World War Z releases in Australian cinemas on June 20

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MY MOTHER fought cancer for almost a decade and died at 56. She held out long enough to meet the first of her grandchildren and to hold them in her arms. But my other children will never have the chance to know her and experience how loving and gracious she was.

We often speak of “Mommy’s mommy,” and I find myself trying to explain the illness that took her away from us. They have asked if the same could happen to me. I have always told them not to worry, but the truth is I carry a “faulty” gene, BRCA1, which sharply increases my risk of developing breast cancer and ovarian cancer.

My doctors estimated that I had an 87 percent risk of breast cancer and a 50 percent risk of ovarian cancer, although the risk is different in the case of each woman.

Only a fraction of breast cancers result from an inherited gene mutation. Those with a defect in BRCA1 have a 65 percent risk of getting it, on average.

Once I knew that this was my reality, I decided to be proactive and to minimize the risk as much I could. I made a decision to have a preventive double mastectomy. I started with the breasts, as my risk of breast cancer is higher than my risk of ovarian cancer, and the surgery is more complex.

On April 27, I finished the three months of medical procedures that the mastectomies involved. During that time I have been able to keep this private and to carry on with my work.

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FYI. You can also visit Breastcancer.org and The American Cancer Society to learn more and perhaps donate.

Logan Lerman is joining Brad Pitt and Shia LaBeouf in Fury, the WWII tank thriller that David Ayer wrote and is directing for QED and Sony Pictures. Lerman will play Norman Ellison, an Army typist and the youngest and most inexperienced member of the crew who is thrust into being a tank gunner.

Sony Pictures won the right to distribute domestically and in most of the world, with some territories belonging to QED, whose Bill Block took a big risk by paying $1 million for Ayer’s spec, and then watched it pay off quickly when Pitt committed to the $80 million film. QED will produce with John Lesher and his Le Grisbi Productions banner. Ethan Smith, Block and Lesher are producing and they are eyeing a fall production start. The action takes place in 1945 as the Nazi regime collapses and the five-man crew of an American tank called Fury battles a desperate German army.

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With James Gray pretty much finished with “The Immigrant,” packing his bags and getting ready to head to France for its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, he’s beginning to look at what might be next on his slate. When we spoke to the helmer last year, his brewing thriller “The Gray Man” was something he said could very well be his next picture. “It really depends on Brad Pitt’s schedule and it depends on my schedule and how quickly I finish up this current movie and budget and all of those kind of boring factors. But it definitely may happen, and in fact it is more likely than not to happen,” he said. Now, it seems that while the movie may move forward, it will need a new lead.

Jeff Sneider of The Wrap tweeted last night: “BRAD PITT no longer attached to star in THE GRAY MAN for New Regency. Director James Gray seeking new leading man…” As folks may know, the pair were originally slated to work together on “The Lost City Of Z” before it fell apart, and while this is certainly a bummer — we think Gray and Pitt would be a great duo — the material is still pretty fascinating stuff. Based on the book by Mark Greaney, and penned by Adam Cozad (“Jack Ryan”) the film follows a former CIA operative-turned ultimate assassin, targeted by a powerful multinational corporation, who must fight his way across Europe and past special forces teams from around the world in order to save the life of his handler and the handler’s family.

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An an eight time Oscar nominee — winning for “The Lion King” in 1995 — recent years have seen Hans Zimmer mostly in blockbuster mode. For Christopher Nolan, he’s tuned up “Inception,” “The Dark Knight” trilogy and the forthcoming “Man Of Steel,” and he’s given Captain Jack Sparrow some bounce in three of the four “Pirates Of The Caribbean” movies. This year alone he’s already delivered music for the hit mini-series “The Bible,” with work on “Rush” and “The Lone Ranger” around the corner. But a slavery drama? We didn’t see this coming.

Indeed, Zimmer will be scoring Steve McQueen’s “Twelve Years A Slave,” adding another intriguing ingredient to what is already a very anticipated film. The talent is as great as it is extensive: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender, Scoot McNairy, Benedict Cumberbatch, Paul Giamatti, Paul Dano, Sarah Paulson, Garret Dillahunt, Ruth Negga, Taran Killam, Adepero Oduye, Alfre Woodard, Quvenzhané Wallis, Dwight Henry, Michael K. Williams and Brad Pitt all feature in the true story of Solomon Northup (Ejiofor), a free black man who is tricked back into slavery, faces grueling life under several owners and has to go to court to reclaim his status.

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Terrence Malick is notorious for deleting subplots and even entire characters during the editing process, but for a director’s cut of The Tree of Life he’s going to put some of that extra footage back in. Malick’s longtime editor Billy Weber recently revealed that the filmmaker is working on a new edit that’ll include some scenes that wound up on the cutting room floor.

But that’s not the only thing Malick has on his plate right now. In addition to Knight of Cups and another, untitled feature, Malick’s also been putting the finishing touches on his documentary Voyage of Time, and Weber says we could see that film as soon as next year. Hit the jump to get the details.

Weber discussed Malick’s plans for The Tree of Life while speaking with The Playlist.

“I don’t even know the total [amount of footage that was shot], it was a huge amount of film, because he shot so many scenes. And I’m pretty sure he’s doing a director’s cut DVD of Tree Of Life, and that will have some of those scenes deleted [placed back] in. But for the theatrical release, he really thought that it was going to be too much, and he just couldn’t put it all in.”

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“He took me through how excited he was when he read the book, what was exciting for him, the geopolitical aspect of it,” screenwriter Damon Lindelof tells Vanity Fair contributor Laura M. Holson in the June issue of Vanity Fair of meeting Brad Pitt to discuss the star’s troubled zombie project, World War Z.

Lindelof says Pitt explained, “‘But when we started working on the script, a lot of that stuff had to fall away for the story to come together. We started shooting the thing before we locked down how it was going to end up, and it didn’t turn out the way we wanted it to.’” The actor asked him to watch an edit, and told him, “The thing we really need right now is someone who is not burdened by all the history that this thing is inheriting, who can see what we’ve got and tell us how to get to where we need to get.” Lindelof tells Holson the ending was abrupt and incoherent, but more importantly they were missing a large chunk of footage.

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