Overwhelmed by Ozzy

The world’s obsession with Ozzy Osbourne and his family seems to have reached its peak this week. The motley clan’s MTV reality series “The Osbournes” (currently in negotiations for a second season) landed the family on numerous magazine covers and talk shows. They were everywhere. Ozzy and Sharon owned the spotlight at the White House Correspondents Assn. dinner Saturday in Washington, sending gossip mavens into overdrive. It was the British rock star’s first encounter with President George W. Bush. (At the sight of the president, Osbourne reportedly grabbed his own long locks and shouted: “You should wear your hair like mine!” Bush blushed and nodded.)

On Thursday, Pocket Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, announced a two-book deal associated with the show. A paperback that will be the show’s “companion book” is due out in November, and a hardcover memoir narrated by each family member (even the oldest daughter Aimee) is due out next spring. The deal was reported as being worth $3 million but Pocket Books spokesman Seale Ballenger said the figure is “not that high.”

Bantam Books, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, joined the fray as well, announcing Thursday that it plans to publish an authorized biography of the Osbournes that is due out July 23.

“You can’t turn on a TV or radio or a newspaper without seeing the Osbournes,” Ballenger said. “It’s such a sort of oddball mix of what the American family is all about .... It’s addicting.”

‘24’ Actress Makes Time for Vacation

In a part of the world where locals have so little interest in Western culture that the term “actor” is happily meaningless, actress Leslie Hope briefly stepped into daily life on the Amazon. She returned with an adventure traveler’s spate of tales describing tarantula-infested nights, monkey eyes peering out from the brush and rudimentary toilet facilities. This was Hope’s summer vacation.

The co-star of the critically acclaimed Fox series “24” spends her on-screen time as wife to Kiefer Sutherland’s character (she has been kidnapped and raped and has killed someone, discovered she was pregnant, confronted her husband’s ex-mistress and suffered from amnesia). In her free time over the last four years, Hope has left that kind of drama behind, traveling to out-of-the-way places in Cuba, Peru and Turkey. In two weeks, she is heading to China for a backpacking tour of Lhasa, Xian and Tibet. “I don’t travel high-end,” she said in a phone interview Wednesday.

Her Amazon adventure was part of a three-week trip to Ecuador last year with boyfriend actor Colin Ferguson, a week of which involved living with the Huaoroni tribe. To reach the village, the couple flew into a “tiny little town which makes Tijuana look like Paris,” Hope recalled. “It was a rough place.” Then they traveled in the rain for nine hours by motorized canoe, arriving to find a tiny community of about 70 residing in thatched huts and living off the yucca plant. Since most of the female villagers were topless, “it took them two or three days to realize that I was a woman,” Hope said.

For visitors, the villagers had arranged a special hut, elevated on a platform, and a toilet a few yards away, mounted on concrete and partially disguised by a garbage bag. Inside the hut, Hope and Ferguson slept in their tent “with tarantulas crawling all over it,” Hope said. During her late-night bathroom runs, armed with only a flashlight, Hope recalled, “You’d just see glowing eyes everywhere.”

Then, as abruptly as it had begun, the trip was over and, flashing forward a century or two, she found herself at the Ritz-Carlton in Pasadena “talking about a television show and [enjoying] cookies on plates and Evian. It was such a huge culture shock.”

Fans Making a Dash

for Dot Heads

What price Jerry Bruckheimer? Well, the bid on EBay Thursday morning had reached $20.50, with nine people vying for his dot head.

“Dot heads” are the small ink portraits that appear in the Wall Street Journal, in lieu of photos. The paper put the originals up for auction in April, and so far, Bruce Springsteen leads the bids at $272, ahead of Tom Cruise at $58, Jerry Seinfeld at $113.61, and even Elvis at $260.

For a while, “Lucille Ball was the top-priced head,” said Aaron Bedy, a spokesman for Dow Jones & Co., publisher of the Journal. “Now, Springsteen is leading the pack and should go for well over $1,000 ....Roseanne Barr is doing surprisingly bad.”

Earlier rounds of the online auction, which ends Monday, featured sports and business personalities. This week, it’s a selection of people in entertainment, except for one mistaken head: Michael Meyers.

“This isn’t the Austin Powers Michael Myers,” Bedy said. “I think this guy is a civil rights [advocate]. He was mistakenly pulled into the auction.”

The drawings, known within the Journal as “hedcuts,” take up to six hours to create, with artists rendering their drawings as closely as they can to a photo of their subject, said Noli Novak, a 15-year veteran of the style and one of the six illustrators.

Working from retouched photos (in which the person’s flaws or wrinkles have been removed) can be difficult.

“It’s not the face that’s challenging but the way the photo is taken,” Novak said.

But the photo is the only guide.

“We don’t know how people see themselves in the mirror.”

City of Angles runs Tuesday through Friday. E-mail: angles @latimes.com.