It's all but official:  Sarah Palin wants to be Oprah. Or at least Tyra.
 
A TV talk show would be deliciously remunerative and also provide the forum she craves to air her point of view . She's even spent time with Rupert Murdoch, among others, exploring her media potential.
 
So given her ambition (and her appetite for big bucks) , what direction should Palin take in mobilizing her TV career? I asked several top agents and producers in the talk show arena for their advice.
 
Here's the upshot:
 
To begin with, Palin needs a war council and that may not be easy. Two top agents told me they'd refuse to represent her on ideological grounds.  "She's too dumb," said one, who didn't want to be quoted because, if asked, he probably would be delighted to be her rep.
 
"I'd work with her in a minute, provided she downplayed her politics," said a producer. "She should give advice to small town people about small town life."
 
Scott Sternberg, who produces talk shows with Bill Shatner and Chris Isaak, advised Palin to study the dynamics of TV talk.
 
Top talkers, he observes, have cool hair like Tyra Banks, loud laughs like Kelly Ripa and can even cook like Rachael Ray.  Palin can learn all the basic precepts, he believes.
 
I, too, believe Palin can work on TV with certain provisos.
First, she needs a good writer--the guys who helped her at the Republican convention should be on retainer and the guys who wrote her resignation speech as governor should be canned.
 
Next, she should spend a little time with Larry King, who somehow looks interested in his guests, even though we know he isn't. She should be a guest on Chris Matthews, to observe how a host does not have to listen to his guests but can still motor-mouth his way through interviews.
 
She'd even do well to drop by Dr. Laura, to learn how a host can manufacture instant moral indignation, even when she's heard the same stupid tales of woe thousands of times.
 
"Sarah will make millions," one agent told me. "But I'd shoot myself if I had to watch her."

Hollywood insiders last week found themselves invoking the name of a man they've never met and whose opinions remain obscure to them.

Jeffrey R. Immelt is the man who rules General Electric and hence bears ultimate responsibility for key decisions involving the future of NBC Universal. It's Immelt's man, Jeff Zucker, who again shuffled the deck at NBC last week and thus focused attention on the malaise gripping the entire corporate landscape, encompassing film and TV.

In granting Ben Silverman his exit visa, Zucker dealt directly with a management issue at the network. But indirectly he also raised the bigger Immelt question: Does GE want to stay in an industry — entertainment — that has proved so uniquely inhospitable?

It was Immelt, of course, who decided to acquire Universal, thus running counter to Jack Welch's dictum that GE should only buy the No. 1 entity in any industry. Welch also felt that Hollywood was too unpredictable.

Consider the following: At a time when GE was already suffering severe recession pangs, NBC Universal reported a 41% decline in second-quarter profits. Vivendi, the enigmatic French conglomerate that owns 20% of the company, is making noise about running for the exits. Rival companies both in old and new media are indicating an appetite to feast off NBC Universal assets.

So how does Jeff Immelt assess his life in showbiz? No one really knows, beyond his spokesman's periodic assurances that "NBC Universal is a business we like.”

On the surface, Immelt is a genial, extroverted man who came out of sales and who makes eye contact when he speaks to you. But he is unique among the mavens who rule the global media conglomerates in that he's never had a tie to any aspect of the business. Sony's Sir Howard Stringer was once a newsman, Viacom's Sumner Redstone was an exhibitor, Time Warner's Jeff Bewkes ran HBO. But Immelt's world was one of nuclear reactors and jet engines.

A recent Charlie Rose interview provided insight into the world according to Immelt: There will be more attention paid to the "infrastructure markets” (energy, health care, etc.) and less to financial services, Immelt said. GE would like to start building nuclear power plants again as well as wind farms. "My future really depends on the ability to play in every corner of the world,” said Immelt.

The most painful moment for the exec was cutting the GE dividend for the first time since 1938. If you're a CEO these days, he confessed, "you're sleeping less, you're worrying more, you're working your team harder. What makes a cycle like this so hard is that it's just so relentless.”

Clearly, Immelt must find the problems surrounding his media ventures to be equally relentless. The audience for NBC's primetime programming has declined 13% in the past two years. About 60% of NBC Universal's profits are now generated by cable not broadcast. Ad rates for the coming season are being rolled back as advertisers cut costs.

On the film side, Universal insists it has retained profitability despite being caught in a down cycle. Strong grossers like "The Fast and Furious” sequel were diminished by flops like "Land of the Lost.”
Ironically, some of the biggest underperformers on the slate were smart, sophisticated films — "State of Play” and "Duplicity,” for example.

To a degree, the same applies to NBC U's corporate executives. Immelt's appointees, by and large, are smart, talented people who are willing to take chances.

But these are tough times, and Immelt is not getting enough sleep. With everyone feeling the pinch, there is less tolerance for intriguing experiments like Silverman who, as NBC's top programmer, exhibited great flair but an absence of managerial talent. His successor, Jeff Gaspin, is widely regarded as a solid corporate player.

So the questions remain: Given the range of company-wide problems, will there be still other changes in the NBC Universal cast of characters? Indeed, will the stresses and strains trigger further shifts in corporate ownership?

Inevitably, the answers to these questions reside with the man no one knows. At some point, Jeff Immelt may have to think more about prosaic things like movies and TV shows and worry less about his reactors.

Disney is on the verge of putting Rob Marshall in as director of a fourth installment of “Pirates of the Caribbean,” a move that puts the film on track for a 2010 production start, with Johnny Depp back as Captain Jack Sparrow.

There hasn’t been a director at the helm of the pirate ship since April, when Gore Verbinski stepped out to focus on a movie version of the vidgame “Bioshock” for Universal (Daily Variety, April 7, 2009). Though that film’s lost some momentum, Verbinski has moved on to other directing and producing projects.

Producer Jerry Bruckheimer and Disney have been meeting with a number of directors in recent weeks, because the studio wants to pull the “Pirates” film together and have Depp star in it before he does “The Lone Ranger” for the producer and the studio. While Marshall’s involvement wasn’t immediately confirmed, sources said things look good enough that the studio has begun casting new characters that will appear in the picture.

It is big business for Disney, as the “Pirates” trilogy grossed $2.6 billion worldwide with Verbinski at the helm. Sources say unless things break down at the last moment, Marshall will be steering the pirate vehicle’s next installment.

Marshall, who made his feature directing debut with the Oscar-winning musical “Chicago,” most recently completed another musical, “Nine,” which stars Daniel Day-Lewis, Penelope Cruz, Marion Cotillard, Judi Dench, Nicole Kidman, Kate Hudson and Sophia Loren. The film will be released November 25 by The Weinstein Co.

CAA reps Marshall.

20th Century Fox is resuscitating its “Alien” franchise. The studio has hired Jon Spaihts to write a prequel that has Ridley Scott attached to return as director.

Spaihts got the job after pitching the studio and Scott Free, which will produce the film.

The film is set up to be a prequel to the groundbreaking 1979 film that Scott directed. The action will precede Scott's classic, which began as the crew of a commercial towing ship returning to earth was awakened and sent to respond to a distress signal from a nearby planetoid. The crew discovered too late that the signal generated by an empty ship was meant as a warning to stay away. The rest is classic cinema.  

Spaihts has become a go-to-guy for space thrillers. After Keanu Reeves became attached to his Warner Bros. sci-fi script “Shadow 19,” Reeves hired Spaihts to write the space journey epic “Passengers,” which is berthed at Morgan Creek. That script got Spaihts the meeting with Fox and Scott Free, and he won the job with an “Alien” reboot take that the studio and Scott loved.

Fox has separately hired him to rewrite “The Darkest Hour,” which Timur Bekmambetov to produce with Tom Jacobson. Spaihts is currently writing “Children of Mars” for Disney and Scott Rudin, and he will follow by rewriting “St. George and the Dragon” for Sony and Red Wagon.

The deal gives Fox another chance to keep the “Alien” franchise alive. There were three sequels to Scott’s original, but it is the first time the director has set his mind on directing one.

No studio works its franchises as hard as Fox. After making two “Predator” films, the studio launched two profitable “Alien vs. Predator” films, and now is rebooting the “Predator” franchise with the Nimrod Antal-directed “Predators,” based on a script that Robert Rodriguez wrote years ago. Rodriguez will produce.

Fox also has spun off its “X-Men” franchise with the summer hit “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” and the studio is percolating spin-off films for the characters Magneto, Deadpool and Gambit, and is prepping the mutant academy origin tale “X-Men: First Class.”

Spaihts is repped by Paradigm and Circle of Confusion.

 While Universal chairmen Marc Shmuger and David Linde have weathered a tough spring and summer, their extension of bedrock comedy director Judd Apatow to three more comedies was just one of three important deals made this week, pact that lay the groundwork for future success. 

Apatow, whose “Funny People” opens Friday, will direct his next three pictures for Universal, the studio where he made his 2005 directing debut “The 40-Year Old Virgin,” which grossed $177 million worldwide, and its 2007 followup, “Knocked Up,” which grossed $219 million worldwide.

Earlier in the week, Illumination Entertainment, the U-based family film unit that Shmuger and Linde hatched by wooing Fox Animation chief Chris Meledandi, scored its biggest coup so far when Meledandri closed a deal with Audrey Geisel for the 3-D CG animated feature “Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax.” Meledandri, who bonded with Geisel over the Fox Animation hit “Horton Hears A Who!,” gives Universal a potential blockbuster that is already slated for release on March 2, 2012. The picture will feature much of the creative talent behind Illumination’s first film, “Despicable Me,” which Universal will release July 9, 2010, with a star cast headed by Steve Carell. It is evidence that Universal has, for the first time, a real shot at the family film audience that has proven so lucrative for studios like Disney and Fox.

While they wait for Paul Greengrass to figure out the fourth installment of “The Bourne Identity,” Shmuger and Linde took a major step toward another Robert Ludlum thriller vehicle when they set Ron Howard to direct and David Self to adapt “The Parsifal Mosaic.” This is a another big male star-driven vehicle that pairs Imagine’s Brian Grazer with Captivate Entertainment partners Jeffrey Weiner and Ben Smith, who control the rights to Ludlum’s thrillers.

Shmuger was feeling particularly bullish Thursday night after landing Apatow for three more films.

“We’ve all grown up with him, and we’re watching as he matures as a filmmaker,” Shmuger said. “The partnership between Judd and Universal is one of the great filmmaker-studio partnerships in our business, and it’s exciting to us to be in busness with him for the long term, and to know that the next three films he directs will be done here. It’s a vote of confidence to our entire organization, from production to domestic and international distribution, to home entertainment. Judd is so intimately involved in every department here, and he has been so collaborative.”

Given that Apatow is a final cut director and there has been a pre-occcupation with the two hour and 26 minute run time of the film, the collaboration comment seems somewhat surprising to me. The fixation on running time—which began with a column written by L.A. Times’s Patrick Goldstein where he admonished Apatow to cut a film that the journalist hadn’t even seen—is something that sets Shmuger’s teeth on edge.

“This film has been a totally collaborative process, and the noise about length started with a report by a journalist who ha never seen the film, and it just snowballed from there,” Shmuger said. “This is emblematic of this crazy media frenzy we are all experiencing. If you ask an audience about the length of the film, and believe me, we’ve asked over 10 audiences in an extensive research screening process, they love the movie and the running time was not a hold back for them. They overwhelmingly expressed their affection for the film and a willingness to recommend it. Judd is a fearless filmmaker, who looked at this screening process as a laboratory, where he took the information seriously, and discussed it in great detail with us.”

Apatow turned a corner in delivering a film that tackles more serious issues than a 40-year old who gets laid for the first time, or a slacker who knocks up a lover on a drunken one night stand. Sandler plays a standup comic facing what he believes is a death sentence.

“This film doesn’t fit into the dramedy word, because that usually means it’s a comedy that’s not funny,” Shmuger said. “This is explosively funny, but it has serious things on its mind as well. I don’t know what to call this film, other than to say that it has the same racous elements of Judd’s other comedies, plus a lot of character and emotion. I’d call it the continuing maturation of a great filmmaker.”

Shmuger and Linde made their deal with Apatow, having no idea what his next film will be.

“His next project will be to take a vacation, after working his ass off,” Shmuger said. “He has been been promoting the hell out of the movie, after working so hard on post-production. The man deserves a break, and then he’ll come back and see where his muse is. We can’t wait to be there to support him.”

Warner Bros. has set Michael and Peter Spierig to direct and John Brownlow to write a new version of “Captain Blood,” the 1935 swashbuckler pirate classic that starred Errol Flynn as a wrongly imprisoned British doctor who escapes to become a pirate in the Caribbean.

Jerry Bruckheimer and Johnny Depp have cornered the market on Caribbean pirates, and two pictures have been set up to deal with the current scourge of pirates hijacking cargo ships off the coast of Africa. How will the Spierigs siblings carve out their own pirate niche? 

They will set “Captain Blood” in space.

WB and producer Bill Gerber dusted off the library title and had Brownlow do a faithful first draft. Recently, they sought pitches from filmmakers. The Spierig siblings won the gig with a bold animatic presentation, Gerber said.

“At first, I felt like I was in that scene in `The Player,’ where Buck Henry pitches the sequel to `The Graduate,’” said Gerber. “But when I took a look at their animatic depiction of a pirate battle in space, it had such a distinctive visual look to it that, that I said, `Great, I get it.’”

Gerber said that despite the radical period and venue switch, the film will be fairly faithful to a plot in which the doctor, Peter Blood, joins up with a French pirate (played in the original by Basil Rathbone), only to clash with the buccaneer when the woman he loves (Olivia De Havilland) is captured by the pirate skipper.

“There are some things you don’t mess with, and that is as classic a movie storyline as you will ever find,” Gerber said. 

The Spierig brothers, who first got notice for their 2003 pic "Undead," wrote and directed “Daybreakers,” the vampire film that stars Willem Dafoe, Sam Neill and Ethan Hawke and will premiere in the Friday Midnight Madness slot at the Toronto Film Festival before Lionsgate distributes it January 8. They are repped by WME and Lou Pitt.

What do you do if you finance a film and can’t find distribution?

Tough guy actor Danny Trejo feels he has salvaged some good out of a bad situation by giving his action film “Vengeance” away for free, and giving speaking roles in a sequel to the wannabe actors who serve as the film’s de-facto distributors.  

Trejo, best known for playing villains in movies like “Heat” and “Con Air,” plays a framed cop-turned-vigilante in the Gil Medina-directed film. Thanks to the "Vengeance Army''--a group of kids who are giving the picture away free--with $5.99 for shipping and handling--Trejo and Medina said they have 74,000 orders. About 40,000 kids are giving away the DVDs, hoping to be among the handful who get significant screen time in "Vengeance 2." 

“Gil and I scraped together the funding, finished the movie and took it to AFM, where we saw my face on eight other movies being sold there, some I’d forgotten I’d even made,” said Trejo. Later, while he and Medina were driving back from Las Vegas, they picked up a guitar-carrying teen hitchhiker, headed to L.A. with big dreams and no connections. As they dropped him off near Hollywood Blvd,--where homeless showbiz wannabes congregate--Trejo and Medina figured out what to do with "Vengeance."   

“We thought, how would we give a guy like this a chance, and then we decided to give the movie away, and give a break to a few of those who gave away the most copies,” Trejo said. “They would get a good speaking role, one they could put on a reel. They won’t get a SAG card, but sometimes being in one movie gets you to the next. If they want to be a director, they can co-direct a scene. We'll take three kids from this movie, to start."  

The rules are explained on the website Vengeancearmy.com.

Trejo said he can make back the money he's losing with one role in a big film, and while the spare change left over from the shipping and handling charge will defray sequel costs, the motivation is to give something back. While he often plays bad guys—his upcoming title role in the Robert Rodriguez co-directed “Machete” is an exception—Trejo is actually a reformed bad guy who now does a lot of good. He continues to be a drug counselor--his first job out of prison--and gives about three speeches per week at juvenile halls, offering his transformation from ex-con to movie actor as evidence that anyone can turn their life around. 

“I tell them, thugs are broke, gang-bangers go to jail, and people who help other people seem to have a good life,” said Trejo. “Every good thing that has ever happened to me came from trying to help someone else.”
 
He owes his film career to one such deed.  

“One of the kids I counseled who had 100 days straight, called me one night and said there was so much blow on his job site that he wasn’t going to make it,” Trejo said.

After driving through the night, Trejo found himself on the set of the prison film “Runaway Train,” where his client worked as a production assistant. Trejo, who'd never been on a movie set, hung around to keep his client straight, and his rugged looks and genuine penitentiary-issue tattoos got the attention of producers. He was asked to be an extra and when the film’s screenwriter—ex-con Edward Bunker—wandered by and remembered watching Trejo win two California State Prison boxing championships, Bunker asked Trejo to give boxing training to the film’s star, Eric Roberts. After director Andrei Konchalovsky saw how they bonded, he told Trejo he wanted him to fight Roberts in the film.   

Said Trejo: “Others said, `he’s not SAG, he can’t do it,’ and Andrei said, `Make him SAG!’ I turned to Eddie and said, `What just happened?’ Eddie said, `You just caught lightning in a bottle.’ My name instantly went from `Hey, you’ to `Mr. Trejo,’ and I’ve made about 180 movies since.”

Universal Pictures, which can’t get the fourth installment of its “Bourne Identity” series off the ground soon enough, now has another priority project in “The Parsifal Mosaic,” another espionage thriller based on a Robert Ludlum novel.

The studio has attached Ron Howard to direct the film and David Self to write the script. Imagine Entertainment’s Brian Grazer will produce with Captivate Entertainment partners Jeffrey Weiner and Ben Smith. Imagine’s David Bernardi will be executive producer.

Aside from the fourth “Bourne” installment that Universal is developing for director Paul Greengrass to re-team with Matt Damon, the studio is separately developing Ludlum’s “The Sigma Protocol” with Strike Entertainment.

“The Parsifal Mosaic” became the first major acquisition of Ludlum material after Universal set a producing deal for Captivate, the company that controls screen rights for the late author’s books. That pact gives the studio first crack at over 20 Ludlum novels that haven’t been exploited as movie properties.

“The Parsifal Mosaic” revolves around a CIA operative who thinks he witnessed the execution of his lover after she was fingered as a KGB double agent. He gets back in the game when he discovers she is still alive.

Self, best known for “Road to Perdition,” most recently co-scripted “The Wolf Man” for Universal.

Steven Spielberg is antsy about getting back to work as a director.

He is considering three or four scripts seriously and what is clear is this: The project he chooses could seriously impact the economics of DreamWorks, its new finance partner Reliance and the studio that owns the project. 

Paramount finds itself at the center of one such discussion, if the whispers are true and Spielberg has become serious about directing “Matt Helm,” a project that DreamWorks developed for several years before leaving it at Paramount as part of the divorce settlement.

A rewrite delivered last week by Paul Attanasio has Paramount brass feeling the project could launch a new franchise and sources say it has rekindled Spielberg’s interest to go beyond being the picture’s producer alongside Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci and Jerry Weintraub. But the ultimate question of whether Spielberg gets behind the camera goes beyond Paramount’s willingness to step up to his Spielberg-ian deal.  

As Spielberg and Stacey Snider wrap up DreamWorks' financing with Reliance and Disney as catalysts, they would like nothing more than to have those partners be part of Spielberg’s next picture. In fact, Spielberg will only take his next directing assignment on a picture that can be co-financed with Reliance/DreamWorks money, and where Disney is either the domestic or international distributor.  

While some DreamWorks-developed projects left behind at Paramount give Spielberg and Snider the option to co-finance and co-distribute, “Matt Helm” isn’t one of them. The picture is 100% owned by Paramount. The studio often works with co-financing partners, but it isn’t obligated to cut in Reliance as an investor.  

If Spielberg’s interest is as serious as I’ve heard, Paramount brass has an interesting decision to make. The studio, which has made a concerted effort to cut back on first-dollar gross deals, might not want to step up to Spielberg’s traditionally rich deal and could save money by going with another filmmaker.

Then again, who better to create a franchise’s footprint than Spielberg, who launched the “Jaws,” “Jurassic Park” and “Indiana Jones” series as director, and godfathered the Michael Bay-directed “Transformers” films as producer?   

“Matt Helm” is based on a series of 27 novels written by Donald Hamilton about a government counter-agent whose mission is to take down enemy agents. While the novels were set in the post-WWII Cold War era, the current script is set in the present and the tone of Attanasio’s script is closer to “The Bourne Identity” than those campy Matt Helm films that Dean Martin toplined in the 1960s. 

The drama is expected to play out by week’s end. 

UPDATE: The drama played our more quickly than I expected. Spielberg has decided not to direct "Matt Helm," but will instead steer it as a producer. Paramount will go out to other directors. Spielberg is expected to finalize his choice shortly, and the film he chooses will have DreamWorks/Reliance aboard as co-financier and Disney as co-distributor.  
 

Universal Pictures and Illumination Entertainment are joining forces to turn the Dr. Seuss book “The Lorax” into a 3-D CG animated feature.

“Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax” will be co-directed by Chris Renaud and Cinco Paul & Ken Daurio, with Paul & Daurio writing the script.

Though published in 1971, “The Lorax” has a timely “green” theme. It is narrated by a greedy entrepreneur who, despite warnings from the tree-loving Lorax, strips a forest of its stock of Truffula trees to manufacture clothing. The results are catastrophic as all the animals leave and nothing’s left.  

The picture is targeted for a March 2, 2012, release, which falls on the  birthday of Theodor Geisel, who died in 1991.

Illumination topper Chris Meledandri will produce and Audrey Geisel will be executive producer. Illumination’s John Cohen and Janet Healy will also be involved in producing capacities.

“Ted Geisel was prescient in an uncanny way when he wrote the book and explored themes of greed and how that can lead to the destruction of the environment,” Meledandri told Daily Variety.

Aside from being the Dr. Seuss brand back to the Universal fold--the 2000 release "How the Grinch Stole Christmas!" grossed nearly $350 million worldwide--the deal allows Meledandri to continue a relationship with Geisel that began with “Horton Hears a Who,” the animated film that Meledandri put together when he ran Fox Animation. He left to form Illumination as a family film division for Universal.

“This is a big movie, but it’s also reflective of the company’s strategy, and the notion of collaborating with a creative team and building long term relationships,” he said.

Paul & Daurio, who wrote “Horton Hears a Who” and make their directorial debut on “Lorax,” have separately signed an exclusive four-year writing and directing deal with Illumination, a pact that comes after they wrote “Despicable Me,” which Renaud co-directed with Pierre Coffin. They also scripted "I Hop," the live action/CG film that Universal has set for March 4, 2011 release, with Tim Hill ("Alvin and the Chipmunks") directing, and Russell Brand providing the voice of the Easter Bunny.

Renaud makes “Lorax” the second film in a three-picture exclusive directing deal with Meledandri. 

Universal Pictures chairmen Marc Shmuger and David Linde, who brought Meledandri over to establish a family film stronghold for the studio, said they were sparked to see "Chris and Illumination continue to grow with this beloved, incredibly timely, classic. There is no one better to tell the tale of the Lorax than Illumination."