Bulletin from the Emmy red carpet: Carolina Herrera has announced she dressed Best Actress in a Drama nominee Mariska Hargitay in a “marigold double chiffon asymmetrical gown with ruffle detail with Fred Leighton jewelry and Manolo Blahnik shoes.” This is what passes for breaking news from the Emmys!

For those keeping score, J. Mendel is dressing two nominees: Sally Field and Laura Linney. Take that, Carolina Herrera!

Oh, and Bulgari has announced Supporting Actress in a Drama nominee Sandra Oh is “expected to wear” Bulgari emerald cut diamond earrings (5.5 carats each). “Expected” makes it sound like the Bulgari folks are not entirely convinced she will wear them - perhaps Sandra may reach for the paste at the last second. (Well, these things are expensive!)

– Matt Carey, CNN Entertainment Producer

The five co-hosts for tonight’s Emmy telecast are walking the red carpet now - Heidi Klum of “Project Runway," Jeff Probst of “Survivor," Ryan Seacrest of “American Idol,” Howie Mandel of “Deal or No Deal” and Tom Bergeron of “Dancing with the Stars.”

Usually the network airing the Emmys (it rotates yearly between the big four) recruits one of their own stars to host, but ABC is doing something unusual by turning the show over to these five. It’s a gamble, because none of them is particularly known for their comedic skills (with the exception of Mandel, who started in standup).

It could be a sign of desperation as the Emmys tries to drum up interest in a show that had its second-lowest ratings ever last year. The five are also competing tonight in the category of “Best Host for a Reality or Reality-Competition Program.” I guess if Probst loses he will have to immediately leave the tribal council, pack his bags and go home.

– Matt Carey, CNN Entertainment Producer

The Emmy red carpet area outside Nokia Theatre in downtown Los Angeles.

It wouldn’t be the Emmys if it wasn’t boiling on the red carpet. The temperature is about 80 degrees just as the arrivals lines are getting under way in L.A. for the 60th annual Primetime Emmy Awards, so if you like your stars hot to the point of melting, you’re in luck. (For those of you in southern climes, 80 degrees may not seem hot, but in temperate L.A., on a red carpet, surrounded by lights and photographers and equipment, it's positively scorching.)

You will notice as the arrivals continue that the greasepaint starts to smear a bit and celebrities begin to look a little bedraggled as they inch toward the Nokia Theatre. This is the sweaty underside of the glamorous business of entertainment.

Stars have been known to Botox their underarms to avoid perspiring profusely in these conditions. The wonders of science!

– Matt Carey, CNN Entertainment Producer

Got my 75th-anniversary issue of Esquire in the mail a few days ago, and I’m looking forward to plunging in. The issue’s theme: the 75 most influential people of the 21st century, which turns the backward-looking theme of the magazine’s 50th-anniversary issue - “50 Who Made a Difference” - on its head.

Looking at that 50th-anniversary issue - a 616-page giant dated December 1983 (which, yes, I saved) - showcases some of the remarkable cachet Esquire has maintained. The focus then was as much on the writers of the essays about the 50 notables as it was the notables themselves, and what writers: Saul Bellow, Roy Blount Jr., Truman Capote, Alistair Cooke, Frances FitzGerald, Richard Ford, David Halberstam … and I’m not even halfway through the alphabet.

That’s the thing about Esquire. Though it has occasionally flagged, the magazine has remained devoted to good writing (and smart art direction, too). Its 1960s heyday alone offers enough for an entire run of other magazines; during that era, the magazine published Norman Mailer’s “Superman Comes to the Supermart,” Gay Talese’s “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” Tom Wolfe’s “The Last American Hero Is Junior Johnson, Yes!” and John Sack’s “M.” And those George Lois covers - amazing.

Most readers (including me, sadly) don’t have the patience for several-thousand-word profiles anymore - and the occasional celebrity profile can be embarrassing (what was with that Mike Myers piece a few months ago?) - but Esquire is still well worth reading, thanks to a masthead that includes Tom Junod, Charles P. Pierce and Thomas P.M. Barnett.

The writing remains strong, the fashion tips impeccable, the Answer Fella amusing and the women still worth loving. So is Esquire.

Happy 75th, Esky.

– Todd Leopold, CNN.com Entertainment Producer

David Foster Wallace was brilliant, infuriating, hilarious, sobering. He was everything you wanted in a writer - sometimes too much, given his digressions, his rich language, his determination to get every single observation right and in context. He was like a painter who kept creating masterpieces, even if he sometimes couldn’t let his brushstrokes alone - or, for that matter, couldn’t stop obsessively adjusting the frame on the wall.

And now he’s gone.

He drove me crazy with his footnotes and his footnotes-upon-footnotes. He dazzled me with his essays and magazine articles on talk radio, pornography, pleasure cruises and - especially - John McCain. (Regardless what you think of the GOP presidential candidate, you should read “Up, Simba,” his piece on following McCain and a shameless press corps for a week during the 2000 presidential campaign. Here's the shorter version published in Rolling Stone.) I never got through “Infinite Jest,” his 1,000-page Pynchonian masterwork. I couldn’t put down “Consider the Lobster,” a collection of his nonfiction work.

He was so very obviously talented, so very obviously special, that love him or loathe him - or both - you couldn’t deny his ability.

But he wrestled with it, daily.

In a tribute in Monday’s Chicago Tribune, Mark Caro quotes Wallace’s 2005 Kenyon College commencement address. “Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think,” Wallace said. “It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.”

With Wallace’s death, we’ve lost somebody who thought intensely. Right now, I feel totally hosed.

– Todd Leopold, CNN.com Entertainment Producer

Jerry Reed didn’t just leave a legacy of fine songs and some entertaining acting. He also contributed to Elvis Presley’s 1968 comeback.

In September 1967, Presley was at a low ebb. He was still hitting the Top 40, but his hits were flabby, formulaic songs from his flabby, formulaic movies (which weren’t hits at all). According to Peter Guralnick’s definitive biography of Elvis’ later years, “Careless Love,” Presley had taken a shine to a middling hit by Reed, “Guitar Man.”

But the crack Nashville studio crew couldn’t get the sound Elvis was looking for, and so the call was put out for Reed himself. Here’s Guralnick: “It soon became apparent that there was no way they were going to get the Jerry Reed sound without Jerry Reed himself. … When he arrived, he looked, said [producer] Felton [Jarvis], ‘like a sure-enough Alabama wild man. You know, he hadn’t shaved in about a week, and he them old clogs on - that was just the way he dressed. He come in and Elvis looked at him and said, “Lord, have mercy, what is that!” ’ ”

What “that” was, was the sound of Elvis’ new record, “the kind of churning, driving rhythm that has characterized Elvis’ music from the first,” writes Guralnick. Because of a publishing snafu, “Guitar Man” wasn’t released until January 1968 and - surprisingly, in retrospect - peaked at just No. 43. But its Reed-penned follow-up, “U.S. Male,” cracked the Top 40, and - better still - “Guitar Man” gave the writers of a planned Elvis TV special something to put at the show’s center.

You know the rest: A rejuvenated Elvis put his all into the TV special, it aired December 3, 1968, and suddenly Elvis was hot again.

As Elvis sang in the special: “I’m gonna get myself back on the track / I’ll never, never ever look back / I’ll never be more than what I am / Wouldn’t you know / I’m a swinging little guitar man.”

You bet. Thanks, Jerry.

– Todd Leopold, CNN.com Entertainment Producer