Before hitting the red carpet for the L.A. premiere of “Inglourious Basterds” Monday night, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie stopped traffic outside of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, ambushed a tour bus, shook hands with fans and then dished about it.

“This is my neighborhood,” Pitt told me afterward, as the power couple headed down the carpet into Quentin Tarantino’s World War II flick. “I ride my bike up and down [Hollywood Boulevard] a lot, and there’s always fans and tourists out here, so I always try to give them a little wave.”

Heath Ledger as The Joker is an undeniably classic performance. And a tragic one. The Dark Knight landed in theaters only months after the actor’s death by accidental overdose and, thus, his role in the film became iconic in more ways than one.

But that wasn’t his final gig. Ledger died halfway through shooting his role in the whimsical Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, directed by Terry Gilliam. Jude Law, Johnny Depp and Colin Farrell stepped in to make sure his final work could be completed.

The movie hits theaters on Oct. 16.

Here are ten “new necessities” you might find you can downsize or even live without from BankRate.com. Average prices quoted are courtesy of Costhelper.com:

1. Daily latte — Brew your own and save $25 a week, or $1300 a year.

2. Cable TV — Dropping premium channels should save you about $25 to $30 a month, or $300 to $360 a year. If you’re more ambitious, you can save a bundle by dropping premium and basic service

3. Manicure/pedicure — Standard manicures average $10 to $15 at nail shops and $20 to $25 at spas and salons. If you only skipped one of each per month, you would save $50 to $110 a month, or $600 to $1,200 a year.

4. Bottled water — Some people consider bottled water a necessity, even though the perfect low-cost alternative is available from any faucet in their homes. Drink tap water and pocket the $25 to $40 monthly fee for bottled water delivery, based on online averages.

5. Second car — Hands down, a second car is the highest-ticket “new necessity” in America today. Forget this and you’ll miss the car payment, maintenance, license, registration, insurance fees and outlay for gas.

6. Cell phone — You can save $40 to $60 per month on average, or $480 to $720 per year, for every cell phone you eliminate. A prepaid plan used sparingly will save you money over a contract plan.

7. Lawn service — The average cost for weekly mowing, hedge trimming and leaf blowing is $65 to $90. It’s hardly a savings to shell out $260 to $360 a month, is it? Mow your own and save the dough. If you do enough lawn and garden work, you may even save the $35 to $40 you shell out each month for your fitness club membership.

8. Clothes — Where would retailers be if we only bought clothes we need? But satisfying your wardrobe jones with a measure of frugality can save a bundle.

9. Private school — You’re already paying for public school anyway, so go public and save anywhere from $8,000 to $35,000 per year.

10. Pet grooming/walking — The cost of grooming your dog averages $30 to $50 for small breeds, $50 to $70 for midsize breeds and $70 to $90 for large breeds. A pet walker on average runs $15 to $27 per walk. To save money, invest in a $25 set of electric clippers and learn online about how to groom your pet.

John Hughes, the popular, almost-mythic filmmaker who made teen angst hurt so good in biting comedies such as Sixteen Candles only to leave Generation Xers largely on their own as the Molly Ringwald-ruled 1980s ended, died after suffering a sudden heart attack during a walk Thursday morning in Manhattan. He was 59.

“John Hughes wrote some of the great outsider characters of all time,” Judd Apatow, the currently hot filmmaker from the Hughes mold, told the Los Angeles Times last year.

It probably would be quicker to list the 1980s movies Hughes wasn’t responsible for as either a writer, director or producer.

His credits included: Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink, all starring Ringwald; Weird Science, Some Kind of Wonderful and She’s Having a Baby, all quotable—and quoted—in their own right; and, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, the signature Matthew Broderick, if not Hughes, comedy.

Though most associated with the 1980s, the 1990s brought Hughes his biggest box-office hits via the Home Alone franchise. Hughes also produced the Michael Keaton hit Mr. Mom, the John Candy-Steve Martin hit Planes, Trains & Automobiles and the Chevy Chase blockbuster National Lampoon’s Vacation.

Born in 1950 in Michigan, Hughes’ writing career began in Chicago, the leafy suburbs of which served as future home to the Buellers, the Saturday-morning detention gang at Shermer High and nearly all his screenplay characters.

In 1979, the former ad copywriter and National Lampoon magazine staffer scored his first Hollywood credit on a short-lived sitcom spinoff of Animal House. Within five years, Hughes was in the director’s chair on Sixteen Candles.

”I stumbled into this business, I didn’t train for it,” Hughes told Entertainment Weekly in 1994. “I yelled ‘Action!’ on my first two movies before the camera was turned on.”

Actors whose careers were helped mightily by Hughes’ allegedly accidental one include Jon Cryer, Anthony Michael Hall, Emilio Estevez, Ally Sheedy, Judd Nelson and Home Alone revelation Macaulay Culkin. Some, like Sheedy, Estevez and Nelson, became members of the unofficial 1980s film society known as the Brat Pack. Some, like Culkin, featured in the Candy-starring Uncle Buck, worked on multiple Hughes films.

Hughes walked away from directing after the 1991 family film Curly Sue. And while he continued to produce and write (occasionally as Edmond Dantés, a pen name used on the Beethoven movies, Jennifer Lopez’s Maid in Manhattan and the Apatow-produced Drillbit Tayor), he abdicated his angsty crown.

Wrote Variety of Hughes in 2008: He “doesn’t give interviews, has no publicist and lives in Wisconsin.”