The day after North Shore-raised Vince Vaughn returned from entertaining the troops in Iraq, he began another risky road trip.
The 37-year-old comic actor had no experience in the raw world of live stand-up, but he ventured into the American heartland as the traveling impresario to four up-and-coming comedians, putting on a show in a new town every day for a month and making a movie about it.

It was a tricky proposition. Producer Vaughn believed the four comics were funny, but as any traveler knows about the open highway, fate can undo the best of plans.Mother Nature almost did. The one-two punch of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita of 2005 detoured their bus ride through the Deep South, but the diversion led them to a camp of evacuees living out of their RVs, a tragicomic encounter incorporated into the movie.

Vaughn’s vision for the film was ambitious, with some uncertainty: Create a film that mixes road trip, live bits before diverse audiences, documentary moments backstage and a crapshoot for an emotional arc (eventually provided by comic Sebastian Maniscalco, who was raised in Arlington Heights where his parents continue to live).

“Part of the thrill is that you don’t know exactly what it’s going to be,” Vaughn said.

The Vaughn standard

If audiences in the film are any indication, the foursome and their host deliver plenty in “Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show: 30 Days and 30 Nights — Hollywood to the Heartland,” which opens this weekend. The other funnymen are Ahmed Ahmed, John Caparulo and Bret Ernst. Also featured are Jon Favreau, Peter Billingsley and Keir O’Donnell.

The four jesters find humor in personal experience without being self-indulgent — the Vaughn standard.

“I wanted to give these guys a chance to be seen by people,” he said.

“It makes me respect them more that they had some humility — versus being like so, ‘Ah! This matters more than anything and it’s so profound that no one understands me.’ They would have stuff that’s extremely painful, and their point of view is that everyone understands me, and I’m not the only one, and there is something funny about it.”

For example, Ahmed’s story includes his coming of age as an Arab-American (his family left Egypt a month after his birth) in the post-9/11 era. He was even wrongly jailed in Las Vegas where an inmate thought he was a terrorist who could blast their way free.

Raised in Buffalo Grove and Lake Forest and now a resident of North Michigan Avenue, Vaughn contends his latest work is as provocative as was his “Dodgeball” (few thought the grade-school game was worthy of a full-blown feature), “Wedding Crashers” (one of the first R-rated blockbuster comedies in years), and “The Break-Up” (a romance in which the boy and girl don’t end up together).

“Every one of them, including ‘Wild West’ in its own way, are all kind of pioneering and different than what was existing prior to it,” Vaughn said.

The latest movie, he said, is a revival of “a traveling comedy variety show.”

Not that the actor is reinventing himself, though he likens his master-of-ceremonies role to a modern-day Buffalo Bill bringing an itinerant show to provinces bypassed by the big acts of New York and Los Angeles.

“I wish I had a master plan, but I don’t,” he said. “The arts are meant to be childlike. They’re a place of imagination. Whatever seems interesting or fun to me, I try to go and work hard at and do my best.”

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the 6-foot-5 performer has visited Afghanistan once and Iraq twice, including Baghdad, Abu Ghraib and Fallujah, to show American soldiers his then-new flicks “Wedding Crashers” and “Dodgeball.”

“A lot of them already had the movies on bootleg DVDs,” Vaughn said. “The troops … start asking me to sign their DVD copies. … I’m like, what’s going on?

“They sell these down at the black-market huts and you can buy them. This is crazy. What they are, someone in America films them on a video camera, and so there’s someone’s head in the way, so they’re not even good copies.”

The last stop in “Wild West” is the Vic Theatre in the North Side’s Lakeview neighborhood, just a few miles from Vaughn’s condo.

At home in Midwest

It’s a fitting ending because Vaughn calls the Midwest home.

While growing up in the north suburbs, he used to drive to Chicago for acting classes and even boxed at Portage Park – “just to stay in shape, just to learn, just for fun, nothing serious. I never fought in any tournaments,” he said. Today, he still has an Illinois driver’s license and likes to participate in Chicago Public Schools‘ Principal for a Day, where the “kids blew me away,” he said.

“The other big thing for me is to have a sense of humor about yourself. I think that is a Midwestern quality too — to be able to not take yourself seriously,” Vaughn said. “That has always served me well in life.”

As Vaughn riffed on those values, he was sitting in an office of his production company, where his older sister Victoria is one of the executive producers on “Wild West.” An energetic talker, Vaughn was staring in the direction of a framed poster for “The Break-Up” featuring the studio photo of Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston in bed, estranged.

But he didn’t want to talk about the co-star, his former girlfriend. “I thought this was the Tribune, not Star magazine,” he cracked.

 VISIT Disney’s California Adventure — a 55-acre theme park next door to the fabled progenitor of the modern amusement Mecca, Disneyland — and you will find a noisy reminder of what happens when a company loses its focus and cuts corners.The Walt Disney Company built the park on the cheap in 2001, and many rides are copies of familiar carnival workhorses like the Ferris wheel. A lack of landscaping can leave guests sweltering. Outdoor shows were borrowed from other Disney properties. And the theme, built around tributes to California, is modest except for an occasionally unintentional ghost-town atmosphere: The park draws about 6 million visitors a year, a trickle compared with the 15 million who swarm Disneyland.Now, Disney is embarking on a $1.1 billion, five-year effort to get California Adventure on track. The blueprints call for ripping out ho-hum rides and adding elaborate new ones, rebuilding the park’s entrance — a hodgepodge of turnstiles, a miniature Golden Gate Bridge and pastel tile murals — to shift the focus to Disney iconography.In June, Disney will unveil a glimpse of the shoot-for-the-moon bet it is making on California Adventure’s makeover, with the introduction of a ride called Toy Story Mania. More than three years in the making, and estimated to cost about $80 million, the attraction essentially puts guests inside a video game.Riders, wearing 3-D glasses, board vehicles that career through an old-fashioned carnival midway, operated by characters from the popular “Toy Story” film franchise. Vehicles stop at game booths — 56 giant screens programmed with 3-D animation from Pixar — and riders play virtual-reality versions of classic carnival games.But much more is riding on the attraction than a complex turnaround of just one theme park. Toy Story Mania, which Disney is also installing in Florida, reflects the larger pressures and challenges facing the company’s $10.6 billion parks and resorts business. To stay relevant to younger, digitally savvy visitors while also delivering growth to investors, Disney, the company that invented the modern theme park, knows that it has to devise a new era of spectacular attractions rooted in technology.One-upmanship increasingly drives this intensely competitive business, and Disney’s rivals are also trying harder to gain market share. Universal Studios, part of NBC Universal, has more than quadrupled its spending on new rides, introducing attractions in California and Florida that are based on “The Simpsons.” Universal is teaming up with Warner Brothers to bring a small Harry Potter-theme park to Florida in late 2009. Niche players like SeaWorld and Legoland are also muscling in on Disney’s territory.At its core, however, Toy Story Mania represents an effort to solve a puzzle that poses a much larger threat to Disney and the broader amusement park business. The quickening pace of daily living, advances in personal technology and the rapidly changing media landscape are combining to reshape what consumers expect out of a theme park, Disney executives say.Toy Story Mania, which carries a modest price tag compared with some other Disney efforts, demonstrates one way that the company is fighting back, said Jay Rasulo, the chairman of Walt Disney Parks and Resorts.“Bigger and more expensive is not necessarily the answer,” Mr. Rasulo said. “You want people leaving thinking, ‘Wow, only Disney could do that.’ ”Consumers’ fixation on instant gratification and personalization has been reshaping the entertainment industry for some time, but it has finally caught up to the theme park business in visible ways. For instance, Disney has spent much more effort — and money — developing ways to entertain people as they stand in line for Toy Story Mania.An animatronic figure with an estimated $1 million price tag will sing songs and interact with guests as they wait. Employees dressed as “Toy Story” characters will stroll among the crowds.“There’s an erosion of patience,” said Bruce Vaughn, the chief creative executive for Walt Disney Imagineering, the company’s development group. “People’s tolerance for lines is decreasing at a rapid rate.”Mr. Rasulo said that younger visitors, in particular, expect customized entertainment. So Toy Story Mania’s computers will accommodate riders of various skill levels.“Guests are pretty much no longer interested in being passive viewers,” Mr. Rasulo said.

Sean Combs and design darling Marc Jacobs squared off Friday night with head-to-head Fashion Week-ending parties. The winner: Combs, by a long shot.

This came as no surprise to Diddy, of course.

“I’m a big fan of Marc’s, you know, and with the parties, competition is nothing. I know at least, at least with the parties, I have one up on Marc Jacobs,” Diddy told us after his runway show.

Jacobs’ celebration has long been the coveted ticket, but his fete at 24 Fifth fell flat. The stars: Marc, Rachel Zoe and Padma Lakshmi, who did a sort of hipster booty dance in a corner to ’90s techno-pop. At least Lil’ Kim showed up later.

Across town at his Cadillac-sponsored bash at Tenjune, Diddy had producer Jerry Bruckheimer, Ellen Pompeo, Tyson Beckford and Denzel Washington among the boldfacers slinging back Ciroc cocktails and tearing down the house until about 2 a.m.

Both parties had one thing in common: Serious sexual tension. Even though Diddy had flown in model Natassia Malthe from L.A. to be his date, ex Kim Porter, mother of his twin baby girls, arrived at the bash about 11 p.m. Awkward.

And then there was Jacobs’ sometime fiancé Jason Preston, who found himself face-to-face with ab-rific porn star Erik Rhodes. All three of them got dirty on the dance floor and in a banquette. It was Jason touching Erik and Erik touching Jason and both of them touching Marc all night long.

When we asked Eric about his relationship with Jacobs, he just lifted his shirt to reveal a 12-pack. Guess we had our answer.

 celebrity and heiress Paris Hilton expressed sympathy for her friend Britney Spears while at the premier of her new movie The Hottie and the Nottie. Paris felt bad that Spears, who is currently in hospital, was not able to attend the event. “I feel bad for Britney, she’s a lovely girl,” the New York Post reported Paris as having told PageSix.com.”I wish she was here tonight. I hope she gets well soon!” she added. Adrian Grenier, who was Paris’ man for the night, also added his sympathy for Britney. “Hollywood” is a tough town. Britney’s has it tough I feel sad for her,” he said. However the pair did not let Brit’s no-show damper their spirits for long and they were soon seen grooving on the dance floor.

Though she might have ceded the headlines, Anna Nicole Smith is hardly forgotten on the one-year anniversary of her demise.

The 39-year-old Playmate turned reality star died unexpectedly Feb. 8, 2007 in a Florida hotel room. Her death came just five months after the equally surprising death of 20-year-old son Daniel, a loss that came three days after the birth of her daughter Dannielynn. 

And while it may have taken a full 12 months before those left behind have been given any semblance of peace, the passing of time hasn’t healed all wounds.

“Anna Nicole Smith, I love you and hope you are proud of our beautiful baby girl,” Larry Birkhead posted on his Website Friday. “Please watch over us and guide us on our journey through life. We miss you.”

The message, the first to be added to the site in more than three months and accompanied by both a photo of a lounging Smith and a backdrop of Smith’s signature color, bright pink, was signed: “Love, Larry and Dannielynn.”

Smith’s longtime sidekick Howard K. Stern also paid tribute Friday.

“Today is extremely difficult for those of us who were close to Anna Nicole, and we ask that the media please respect our privacy,” he toldEntertainment Tonight.

In memory of his once constant companion and her late son, Stern has created the Anna Nicole and Daniel Smith Charitable Foundation, which will benefit causes championed by Smith during her life, chief among them children, elderly and the prevention and treatment of AIDS.

“Hopefully it will grow, help more people each year, and eventually be headed by her daughter Dannielynn.”

Smith, born Vickie Lynn Hogan in Mexia, Texas, led a life of watercooler highlights—teen bride, stripper, high-profile model, wife of octogenarian mogul, gazillionaire widow at 27, tabloid train wreck, reality star.

A coroner ruled last year that Smith’s death was caused, like her son before her, by a lethal combination of prescription medications, triggering an ongoing criminal investigations into several of her  doctors, some of whom issued multiple prescriptions in fake names.

Her death was also followed by months-long legal battles in Florida and the Bahamas over the paternity of her sole surviving child. While both former lover Birkhead and Stern claimed fatherhood—claims also echoed by a revolving door of less-likely Z-listers—a DNA test finally proved in April that Birkhead was the papa.

Despite their conflicts, Birkhead and Stern remained surprisingly cordial in the wake of their courtroom drama, a geniality that led to salacious reports of the duo’s relations, followed by a massive libel suit, over Rita Cosby’s Blonde Ambition: The Untold Story Behind Anna Nicole Smith’s Death.

Birkhead retains custody of Dannielynn to the chagrin of Anna Nicole Smith’s estranged mother, Virgie Arthur. Stern remains the executor of Smith’s estate and has been laboring in Los Angeles courts to have Dannielynn named as Smith’s sole heir. A hearing in that case will take place Mar. 14.