Gene Simmons shows his parenting skills in new series

Pasadena, Calif. – By night, Gene Simmons goes to work wearing makeup and spitting blood in the heavy metal band Kiss. By day, he’s got some downright normal ideas about parenting.

Simmons, his partner, actress Shannon Tweed, and their children – 17-year-old Nick Tweed-Simmons and 14-year-old Sophie Tweed-Simmons – let cameras into their home for the new A&E series “Gene Simmons Family Jewels.”

“Our responsibility is to protect our kids, supply the money and the structure and the love,” Simmons, 56, said this week at the Television Critics Assn.’s summer meeting.

“Their job is to do well in school and behave, period. This notion of parents having to go negotiate with their children who just learned to wipe their butts is out of the question.”

Simmons said he lives by the same rules he applies to his children.

“I’ve never been high, drunk, never smoked in my life,” he said.

Mr. T takes off gold chains after Katrina destruction

Pasadena, Calif. – Mr. T has given himself a makeover.

After witnessing the destruction from Hurricane Katrina, the former TV action star shed the piles of gold chains that were his signature look.

“As a spiritual man, I felt it would be a sin against my God for me to wear all that gold again because I spent a lot of time with the less fortunate,” the 54-year-old actor said Thursday at the Television Critics Assn.’s summer meeting.

“I saw some, I call it ‘sorry celebrities.’ They’ll go down there and hook up with the people to take a photo-op. I said, ‘How disgusting.’ If you’re not going to go down there with a check and a hammer and a nail to help the people, don’t go down there.”

Screenwriter files suit over ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’

Los Angeles – A screenwriter filed a lawsuit claiming Walt Disney Co. and others behind the 2003 blockbuster movie “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl” pillaged drawings and characters he had created for an earlier project about supernatural swashbucklers.

Royce Mathew filed the copyright infringement suit July 7 in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles against Disney, Buena Vista Home Entertainment, Jerry Bruckheimer Inc. and other defendants.

Mathew alleged that beginning in the 1980s, he “created and wrote a number of original works including drawings, screenplays, outlines, blueprints, storyboards and other original materials” for what he termed a “Super Natural Pirate Movie.”

Material filed with the U.S. Copyright Office included drawings depicting a pirate ship named Black Pearl, the suit claimed, adding the material also was pitched in Hollywood.

Disney denied the allegations.