National Geographic

Sixteen year-old aspiring country singer Courtney Stodden has married actor Doug Hutchinson, 51, whom you may recall played the weasely Percy Wetmore in The Green Mile. The happy couple plans a champagne toast to their nuptials in five years when the bride reaches drinking age.

(Tipped by JMG reader Blair)

The Associated Press reports:

Matt Dillon, the mythical marshal of Dodge City, stood tall — all 6 feet, 6 inches of him — on "Gunsmoke" from 1955 to 1975. He outlasted dozens of other Western heroes while making history on TV's longest-running dramatic series, a record that held until NBC's "Law & Order" tied the CBS Western's record in 2010. Through all those gunslinging years, James Arness, who died Friday, kept Marshal Dillon righteous, peace-seeking and, most of all, believable.

I was never a fan of Gunsmoke, but I do fondly recall Arness for playing the monster in The Thing From Another World.

Now that the long run of Verizon's "Can You Hear Me Now?" campaign is over, actor Paul Marcarelli has come out and is talking about the anti-gay abuse he endured while playing the character known as Test Man.

Marcarelli has a home in Guilford, Connecticut, and five summers ago, kids in an SUV began driving past at night, yelling, “Can you hear me now?” Later, says Marcarelli, “they started screaming ‘faggot’ up at my house. It got progressively more profane as the years went by.” One night, it happened while some friends were over, and he decided to call the police. “As soon as I hung up the phone,” he says, “I realized that in order for them to do anything about it, it would have to become a report that would go into a police log.” Worried about the publicity—and the questions that might ensue if it came out that the actor playing Test Man was gay—he declined to file a report.

Marcarelli has produced and written a film titled The Green, which "centers on how a small town slowly turns against a gay couple when one of the men, a schoolteacher, gets ensnared in scandal." His movie is currently being pitched to film festivals.