CelebSpin! Celebrity News and Hollywood Gossip.

A showman even in death, James Brown drew thousands of fans to pay their final respects in the streets of Harlem and at a tribute inside New York City’s Apollo Theater on Wednesday.

The line to enter the Apollo, where the Rev. Al Sharpton was hosting the memorial, stretched across several city blocks. Among those hoping to gain entrance was actress Julia Stiles, who asked a police officer if she could skip the line – but he didn’t recognize her (another officer, who did know who she was, eventually let her in).

Jake Gyllenhaal battled hurricanes and tidal waves in The Day After Tomorrow, but on Wednesday he faced a real-life natural disaster: A fire at the California hotel where he was vacationing with his family.

Gyllenhaal, 26, and his actress sister Maggie, 29, were among the guests forced to flee Manka’s Inverness Lodge in the San Francisco Bay area when the two-story wooden inn caught fire around 2:30 a.m. Wednesday, the Marin Independent Journal reports.

Bring It On star Gabrielle Union just finished filming a movie called The Perfect Christmas, but right now her mind is on New Year’s Eve.

Her idea of the perfect celebration? “The way we’re doing it this year,” Union, 34, said at Mansion nightclub in South Beach on Wednesday. “Out of the country, hot and half naked.”

Specifically, she’s heading to the Dominican Republic with a group of male friends – but don’t expect the action to be that hot: “They’re all going to be cruising for chicks and I’m going to be home reading The Iliad,” she says.