Anthony Pellicano, the former investigator known as Hollywood’s private eye to the stars, goes on trial on Thursday in a case of wiretapping and skullduggery that is expected to reveal the dark side of the glitzy world of the movie industry.

Actors Sylvester Stallone, Keith Carradine and Farrah Fawcett, along with movie studio executives Brad Grey and Ron Meyer and former powerhouse talent agent Michael Ovitz, are among the 120 prosecution witnesses called to testify in a case that has kept Hollywood on tenterhooks for almost six years.

Pellicano, 63, is accused of illegally wiretapping the telephones of opponents of his powerful clients and of bribing police officers and telephone company workers to run illegal background checks on the targets of his investigation.

His original confession had the ring of truth: He was an illegal immigrant working on a renovation job in a Greenwich Village building when the imperious woman upstairs confronted him over construction noise.

They argued. She scratched him. Panicked that she would call the police and that he would be deported, he punched her and pushed her to the floor. Mistakenly thinking he had killed her, he hanged her from the shower rod of her bathroom, in a staged suicide.

But in a courtroom on Thursday, the construction worker, Diego Pillco, 20, told a very different story of how he killed the woman, Adrienne Shelly, a filmmaker, on Nov. 1, 2006. Ms. Shelly, who was 40 and the mother of a 3-year-old daughter, had just finished a film, “Waitress,” which opened to warm reviews after her death.

Mr. Pillco, a short, boyish-looking man, speaking softly through a Spanish translator, told a judge in State Supreme Court in Manhattan that the argument had not been over noise, but over a robbery.

He told the judge that Ms. Shelly had caught him stealing money from her purse after he had slipped into the apartment at 15 Abingdon Square that she used as an office.

When she picked up the phone to call the police, he said, he grabbed it and covered her mouth as she started to scream.

“When she fell to the floor I saw a sheet and decided to choke her, and that’s what happened,” Mr. Pillco said.

The judge, Carol Berkman, prodded him: “And you tied a sheet around her neck and strung her up?”

“Yes,” Mr. Pillco replied, “and I made it look as if she committed suicide on her own.”

It sounded like a straightforward confession to murder, which could have brought Mr. Pillco a sentence of 25 years to life in prison, if he had been convicted by a jury.

Instead, Mr. Pillco pleaded guilty to a lesser charge, first-degree manslaughter, and was promised a fixed sentence of 25 years in a deal negotiated with the Manhattan district attorney.

It was a hard choice dictated by the existence of the first confession, according to an official in the district attorney’s office, who was not authorized to speak on the matter and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

If he had gone to trial, the official said, Mr. Pillco probably would have stuck by his original story, which might have convinced a jury that Ms. Shelly’s death was merely reckless, even though the prosecution would have argued otherwise.

In that case, if convicted he could have received a maximum sentence of 15 years. It appeared that the defense may have feared the opposite outcome, that Mr. Pillco would be convicted of murder and sentenced to life. Mr. Pillco’s lawyer, Thomas Klein, of the Legal Aid Society, declined to comment on his strategy.

Ms. Shelly’s husband, Andy Ostroy, her stepdaughter and other relatives sat quietly in the courtroom during the hearing and declined to comment afterward.

But their grim faces conveyed what the judge said out loud: that their assent had been given reluctantly. “Well, I’m not going to ask whether they’re happy with this,” Justice Berkman said, after the lead prosecutor, Peter Casolaro, assured her that the family had agreed to the plea.

There was little about Mr. Pillco’s first confession that added up, according to prosecutors. He told detectives five days after the killing that Ms. Shelly had confronted him in the apartment where he was working. The floor of that apartment was covered in gypsum dust, the prosecutor said, yet Ms. Shelly’s shoes, socks and the hems of her pants were clean.

Rather, it was Mr. Pillco’s shoeprints, traced in construction dust on the toilet and the rim of the bathtub where Ms. Shelly’s husband found her hanging, that gave him away.

Mr. Pillco, an illegal immigrant from Ecuador, had come to the United States 8 to 10 months before the murder, the official said.

Ms. Shelly, who was born in Queens as Adrienne Levine, had just finished “Waitress,” a film about an unhappily married, pregnant waitress who finds joy in baking pies (and having an affair) that she wrote, directed and appeared in. The film was later shown at the Sundance Film Festival and then went into wider release.

Ms. Shelly was best known for her roles in Hal Hartley’s dark comedies “The Unbelievable Truth” and “Trust.” She also appeared in more than two dozen Off Broadway plays and in television shows.

In court on Thursday, after Justice Berkman asked, “What happened?” Mr. Pillco gave this account.

He had been returning from lunch in the basement of the building when he saw Ms. Shelly in an elevator. “The lady was coming up in the elevator,” he said. “So when I saw her, I decided to rob her.”

He waited on an upstairs landing and watched her go into her apartment. She left the door open, he said, and he slipped in, took her purse, and removed money; he did not say how much.

After describing the fight for the phone and the struggle that ensued, he stopped his recitation. After a conversation with his lawyer, he added one last sentence. Mr. Pillco’s final words to the court were, “I just want to ask forgiveness to her family.”

The judge replied, “I doubt that you will get that, sir.”

Hindsight is 20-20 for Lindsay Lohan. “When I look back on this last year, it’s like, what was I thinking?” the 21-year-old actress says in the March issue of Harper’s Bazaar magazine, on newsstands Feb. 19.

Lohan was arrested twice last year on DUI charges and pleaded guilty in August to misdemeanor drunken driving and cocaine charges. She served 84 minutes in jail as part of a plea deal, and checked into a rehab center in Utah.

“I’ve learned so much, though, like learning to live my life a different way … and I wasn’t taking the time to feel my feelings,” she says. “Being away and going to a place where I could learn about that and take the time with a clear mind to get back on the right track was nice.”

The “Mean Girls” star — who was shown on a video taking a swig from a champagne bottle while ringing in the New Year in Capri, Italy — says it’s hard to resist the urge to party.

“I have it in me to go, go, go,” Lohan says. “I’m still young. I love life. I love music and being around that. I love people, and I’m a very social person. But I also love being home, quiet and normal.”

You can see how Vh1’s Celebrity Rehab sounded like a great idea. It’s simple: combine America’s celebrity obsession with the current trend of self-redemption-themed reality TV shows, get yourself some B-level stars with substance abuse problems (no shortage of those), and put them through the recovery ringer with Dr. Drew Pinsky. It practically produces itself.

Genius, right? Only not really.

There are a number of flaws in Celebrity Rehab’s design, not the least of which is the fact that Dr. Drew might be the biggest celeb on the show. The rest of the cast includes Brigitte Nielsen, pro wrestling’s Chyna, the singer from Crazy Town, Kenicke from Grease, a porn star, a girl who was briefly on Family Matters, and the least famous of the Baldwin brothers.

Oh, and MMA fighter Ricco Rodriguez is also coming to the party late, hopefully with an explanation of why he tried to auction off his UFC heavyweight championship belt on Ebay (my money’s on cocaine).

In other words, when talking about this show with your friends you would likely put air quotes around the word “celebrity” the same way you do when talking about your cousin who is working as a “dancer” to put herself through “college”.

It begs the question: where does entertainment end and exploitation begin? Watching Celebrity Rehab is strangely compelling – the way watching people struggle with addiction often is – but it has little to do with the fact that these people are (according to a very broad definition of the word) famous. It’s more like a watered-down version of A&E’s Intervention.

The fact that this show features celebrities really only encourages us to revel in their pain and feel better about seeing their broken lives on display. To a degree, that’s understandable. Celebrities in our society make a deal with the devil. They receive money, undue adulation, a false sense of accomplishment, but in exchange they give up certain things, like their privacy.

The drug and alcohol-addicted celebrities on this show, however, are really just messed up people who may or may not be using their “recovery” as a way of revitalizing their careers. It’s like everyone is using everyone else in this sordid game. Maybe that’s why I feel a little dirty after watching it

By Jennifer Vineyard, with additional reporting by Todd Brown

After playing a waiting game all morning, Britney Spears showed up at court on Monday (January 14) for the afternoon session to try to regain visitation rights with her two young sons — only to leave just minutes later. The reason for her departure was unclear at press time. The singer was expected to explain what happened during a custody standoff on January 3, which ended when she was taken away by ambulance.

Kevin Federline, sporting a mohawk and a navy-blue suit, attended the morning session, in which a male Los Angeles police officer — one of the emergency respondents on the scene the night of January 3 — testified under direct examination but is yet to be cross-examined. Up to eight other witnesses from that night are expected to testify as well, according to a spokesperson for the court.

Federline gained temporary sole legal and physical custody of Sean Preston and Jayden James after an emergency hearing two weeks ago, after Spears was hospitalized at Cedars-Sinai and placed on an involuntary hold. If Spears were to regain visitation rights, legal experts said it would likely be at a place outside her home, where she would be monitored.

Members of the media were ejected from Monday’s proceedings after the judge granted a motion to clear the court. Gordon also granted one other motion to quash a subpoena, but there was no word who the subpoena had been issued to or what it involved.

Federline’s lawyer Mark Vincent Kaplan had issued a series of subpoenas for depositions from several former Spears associates, including manager Larry Rudolph, assistant Alli Sims and bodyguard Daimon Shippen. According to the last court documents filed about the matter, three more people were scheduled to be deposed throughout January, including former Spears bodyguard Anthony Barretto, former bodyguard Lonni Jones and former day-to-day manager Adam Leber.

Spears’ lawyers from the firm Trope & Trope — Sorrell Trope, Anne Kiley and Tara Scott — all continued to represent her on Monday despite their pending motion to be removed as her legal counsel. A hearing about that matter is scheduled for February 4