While Hollywood projects have never been more heavily scrutinized than right now, the latest production supervised for most of the past year by Universal Pictures production president Donna Langley is getting rave reviews.

Langley gave birth Monday night to Paolo Lucca Shamshiri, a 7 pound, 3 oz., 22 inch baby boy. He's the first child for Langley and husband Ramin Shamshiri.  

Congrats to the family!

A restructuring at Paramount Pictures has led to the exits of head of physical production Georgia Kacandes, senior vice president of production Ben Cosgrove, executive vice president of production Dan Levine, head of casting Gail Levin, Paramount Vantage topper Guy Stodel, senior vice president of visual effects Kim Locasio, and Aimee Shieh, head of Paramount's New York literary office.

The bad news was delivered early Tuesday, and move came shortly after the exits of John Lesher and president of production Brad Weston, and the appointment of Adam Goodman to president of Paramount's film group.

Goodman sent out a memo to employees that discussed the number of layoffs but not the specific casualties. Goodman, who attributed the move to a need for "streamlining the leadership of the production organization," wrote in the memo that 31 people were cut from the production workforce. The timing of the layoffs coincided with the end of Par's fiscal quarter, sources said. The cuts were accomplished with a "mix of job eliminations, layoffs and reorganizations in creative, casting and physical production, as well as the Paramount Vantage label," Goodman wrote in the memo.

Some streamlining was inevitable. When DreamWorks got its divorce from Paramount, Goodman was named to be president of production, the same title Weston held. The studio developed parallel production divisions, with Goodman initially focused on percolating a multitude of projects that Paramount kept in its custody settlement with DreamWorks. Among those projects are "Matt Helm," which is being scripted by Paul Attanasio and produced by Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci.

Goodman, who was hands on with the studio's blockbuster "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" when that film took shape as a DreamWorks/Paramount co-production, is consolidating his own team. Not surprisingly, the exiting execs were aligned with Lesher or Weston.

For instance, Lesher brought in Kacandes to replace Mark Bakshi, and he also was aligned with Levin and Vantage's Stodel, the specialty film shingle which Lesher ran before being promoted 18 months ago.

Cosgrove and Levine were closely aligned with Weston, who is negotiating to become a producer on the Par lot. Both production execs are well thought of in the community.

Paramount Pictures is shutting its Gotham literary office.

Insiders said film group prexy Adam Goodman broke the news to the lit staffers in New York this morning. The office was established nearly 20 years ago to help the studio scout for promising book properties and other potential source materials.

Aimee Shieh, veep of lit affairs, took the helm of the office last year when longtime Par lit scout Patricia Burke retired. Also let go as part of the closing of the office are Mac Hawkins, director of development, and Megan McIlroy, an assistant to Shieh.

A number of studios have New York outposts but Par’s was considered to be the most successful. During Burke’s tenure, the studio got the early jump on such hot literary properties as “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider” and “Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events.”

The timing of the closure coincides with the end of the studio’s fiscal quarter.

-- Michael Fleming

Columbia, which is still trying to make “Moneyball” work with Brad Pitt and Steven Soderbergh, is hardly the only studio grappling with the budgets of star-driven films in the new economic realities for Hollywood.

Fox is going through the same budget-scrutinizing process on “Unstoppable,” the Tony Scott-directed drama to which Denzel Washington (pictured right) and Chris Pine are attached. The picture, in which a young conductor and a veteran engineer chase a runaway train filled with toxic chemicals, had originally been pegged to start production in August for a summer 2010 release.

Studio insiders said the film isn’t yet greenlit, but the studio is wrestling hard with the cost of mounting a big-scale action pic plus the star salaries of Scott, Washington and Pine, who chose this film as his first since his breakout role as Captain Kirk in “Star Trek.”

Fox is optimistic that it will get the film off the ground, but fall is now a more realistic starting point.

First it was the Gosselins, “Jon and Kate Plus Eight.” Then along came the Michael Jackson saga.

The gossip industry is in full flower. Magazines like People and US Weekly seem to be stronger than ever – People Magazine counted some 43 million weekly readers, two-thirds of them women, according to a report in the Economist last week. The world of gossip blogs and tweets is going strong, too.

And Michael Jackson added the perfect kicker. TMZ, the celebrity website, broke the story of Jackson’s death, as it did Mel Gibson’s anti-Semitic rant in 2006. TMZ.com has an estimated monthly readership of 4.1 million, according to the Los Angeles Times.

But the Times also asked another pertinent question: Does TMZ break journalist ethics by paying sources for its scoops?

TMZ maintains people offer stories because they want to see the information get out there. But Harvey Levin, the TMZ guru, told the New York Times that the site has paid “tip fees” which ultimately have led to stories, but not for the stories themselves. The distinction is a fascinating one – Levin has never deigned to explain it.

Meanwhile the TMZ TV show is producing a profit with its own gritty coverage. TMZ is a joint creation of AOL and Telepictures, both divisions of Time Warner, which also publishes People and Time – publications that presumable do not pay for tips of stories.

Gossip is clearly a unique side-show to the journalistic game – a growth industry within a shrinking industry. There are five gossip TV shows in the network spectrum, up from three, ten years ago. And every one seems linked to various online aggregators. The ubiquitous Perez Hilton leads an army of gossip bloggers and all of them have mobile phone alerts.

It’s unclear whether the recession is playing a part in all this – depressed consumers decide to tune into celebrity fantasies because their own fantasies are being demolished. In any case, the trend seems here to stay. And those desiring pay for TMZ tips can form a line to my right.

The corporate “deal chatter” has become more intense lately – a phenomenon that usually signals approaching mergers and acquisitions.

The nagging question: Which of the rumors will emerge as reality?

Two prime sectors of speculation focus on DreamWorks Animation and NBC Universal.

Insiders say Time Warner is exploring a bid to acquire DreamWorks Animation, the publicly-owned company that presently distributes its very successful films through Paramount. An “out clause” would permit DreamWorks Animation to terminate its Paramount deal next year provided it paid $150 million to that company or that one-third of DWA were acquired by another entity.

A Warners bid might prompt a counter-offer from Disney, which has now digested the DreamWorks features unit – that entity is now fully funded after an exhaustive round of talks with bankers.

Of course, Viacom, too, could be motivated to bid for DWA to protect the flow of distribution revenues to Paramount – three major animated features will be released in 2010. Relations between leaders of Paramount and the DreamWorks players have been marred by animated animosity, however. David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg have controlling stakes in DWA, with the presence of Steven Spielberg always looming in the background.

GE, meanwhile, must re-assess its attitude toward NBC Universal given the probability that Vivendi will sell its 20% stake in that company. Purchase of the French company’s stake could represent a $4 billion-plus commitment for GE, which in the past has weighed the option of exiting the entertainment business.

GE, lately, has given indications it may hold onto NBC Universal, which means it may try to defer or re-negotiate the Vivendi deal – always a problematic situation with the French.

DreamWorks has acquired screen rights to “I Am Number Four,” the first of a six-book science fiction book series that has “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” director Michael Bay aboard to produce and possibly direct.

DreamWorks is working on a high six-figure deal, sources said.

The real surprise in the deal, though, is the identity of one of the two authors. Though WME began shopping the book Thursday under a pseudonym, sources said one of the writers is James Frey, best known for writing “A Million Little Pieces.” Neither the agency nor the studio would confirm.  

The deal puts Bay right back in business with DreamWorks and Steven Spielberg and Stacey Snider. It is expected that Steven Spielberg will be as active in a behind the scenes capacity similar to the godfather role he has played in the “Transformers” franchise. The sale comes as “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” takes a run at the record books this weekend, after setting records on its first two days in theaters.

The franchise is about a group of nine earthbound alien teens who escaped their planet just before it was destroyed by a hostile species. While the high school-aged kids assimilate, the title character discovers that he is being hunted by the enemy that blew up his planet.

Both the publishing rights and the screen rights were shopped simultaneously, with Bay taking it into DreamWorks/Disney, Columbia and Universal; J.J. Abrams's Bad Robot for Paramount; Bryan Singer for Fox, and BenderSpink for New Line and CBS.

Frey recently became a client of WME when his agent, Eric Simonoff, joined WMA from Janklow-Nesbit.

Frey established himself as a literary sensation for his addiction memoir “A Million Little Pieces,” only to have it turn sour when it was revealed he embellished incidents in the book. Warner Bros. and Brad Pitt’s Plan B had made a pricey deal to turn the book into a film, but that stalled after a scandal that reached its peak with a mea culpa appearance on Oprah Winfrey’s daytime show, and a lawsuit against publisher Random House by readers who felt duped.

As Michael Bay’s “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” chases box office records after grossing $60.6 million on opening day, the filmmaker took time out to talk with BFD about the business of blockbusters, the impact of piracy, and the virtues of sharing risk with studios.

BFD: How do you spend opening night? 

Bay: I always go to Mr. Chow’s for dinner with my producers, studio and marketing execs, my agents and lawyers. We get our first numbers there and then we hit the theaters. You’ve got to go there. And hope you see happy, smiling faces walking out. Last night, I tried to sneak in the side, but somebody noticed me and then they’re lining up for pictures. At the Arclight, somebody yelled “speech!” and I found myself talking to 900 people. 

BFD: Salary deferrals have become commonplace, but not when you made “Pearl Harbor.” You made more money, but said, “Never again.”

Bay: Well, that was because of the way it came about. You work on the movie for nine months and then right before you shoot Joe Roth says, “Mike, I’m going to take away your fee.” It didn’t feel good.

BFD:  So you deferred on “Transformers” and the sequel, and the L. A. Times predicts you might make more than any director on a movie. How do you feel about these deals, which are becoming the new economics of Hollywood moviemaking?

Bay: Okay. I run my sets and my pictures tight and we came in $4 million under budget. There is so much waste in this business, directors who have big shows like this one, who keep a second unit for the entire time. We were able to make this for $194 million, instead of the $230-270 million that the average sequel of this nature seems to cost. I work with one of the best crews in the world, we work efficient 12-hour days. We don’t build $3 million sets and then the director walks in and says, “Fuck it, I’m not going to use that set.” The stories I hear from my crew members, of waste on other pictures, of directors shooting a six- or eight-hour day, it’s just staggering. Some directors will look a studio executive in the eye and say, “Sure I’ll come in at this budget,” and then they behave like terrorists. By then, you’re committed and screwed. The thing that “Pearl Harbor” taught me was you’ve got to become a partner with the studio and deferring makes you more invested in that. I think it’s important and I think you need to be honest with your partner.

BFD: You have final cut as director and producer, but that’s also going by the wayside. What leverage does it give you?

Bay: It’s a club you hide behind your back but you hope you never have to use. Final cut for some can be a defense mechanism and for others an extortion mechanism. I am not one of those people who hold out my final cut; I think that’s ridiculous. I can think of examples where it allowed me to put some comic moments in these films. The studios have always been very good with me and never demand I take anything out. They suggest, sometimes I say no and then we see if the whole audience laughs and I was right. You need more laughter in the summertime. Literally, I was told we shouldn’t have talking robots in the first film. But you’ve got to be able to listen to your audience and to producers who look at your movie and bounce things around with you. That’s the Don Simpson-Jerry Bruckheimer dynamic and any director needs those people because you are just too close to it. I still feel if I could have had two more weeks on “Transformers,” I could fix a lot of stuff. But I ran out of time. My philosophy on final cut is you protect the movie at all costs. At studios, you deal with people who have their own agendas and you have to keep this agenda-free and all about the movie and the experience.

A group of publishers and studios are staving off the pre-holiday material market slowdown to give a serious look to "I Am Number Four," the first of a six-book series about a group of earthbound alien teens who are being hunted by a hostile species. 

WME is shopping the book and the movie rights. The agency isn't telling suitors who wrote it, though the buzz is that the author is well-known. 

After an alien planet is destroyed by a hostile race, only nine young inhabitants escape and relocate on Earth, where they hide in human form. The protagonist of the first book is alien Number Four, a high school freshman who is just coming to grips with his own powers when he discovers that aliens One, Two and Three have been murdered. Since the race has to be killed in sequence, he realizes he's next and that the aliens that destroyed his planet are hunting him.   

A publishing deal is expected first, but the current studio fixation on sci-fi franchises with youth appeal has prompted WME-repped producers to carve up the town for studio submissions. Michael Bay is taking it to Columbia, Universal, DreamWorks and Disney; J.J. Abrams's Bad Robot is taking it to Paramount; Bryan Singer has it for Fox, and BenderSpink for New Line and CBS.    

Even though much of the love for the opening weekend grosses of “The Proposal” went to Sandra Bullock, Ryan Reynolds got himself the box office hit that was missing from his leading man resume with a romantic comedy that followed his villain turn as Deadpool in "X-Men Origins: Wolverine."

Instead of jumping right into another studio film, Reynolds will next test his acting chops by starring in an indie film where he spends nearly the entire picture buried alive in a coffin. "Buried" marks the English language debut of Spanish director Rodrigo Cortes (“The Contestant”). Financed by Spain-based Versus Entertainment, the film will shoot in Barcelona later this month.

Reynolds will play a kidnapped civilian contractor who awakens in a coffin planted under the Iraqi desert. With limited oxygen, he desperately tries to coordinate his own rescue, armed only with a cell phone, a knife, a lighter and a candle. The script by Chris Sparling goes even darker, as the contractor's captors order him to cut off his thumb, and videotape it, to prompt a ransom payment.

Whether the subject matter proves too unsettling for a mass audience or not, give Reynolds credit for showing some spine. Peter Safran and Adrian Guerra are producing. UTA put together the package.