Dennis Cozzalio reports from L.A.'s Beverly Grindhouse series.

While George Clooney stepped up and issued a public denial that he had any role in circulating the I Heart Huckabee videos that have been running around the web, he is taking a quieter approach to boosting the Barack Obama for president campaign, writes the LAT. Clooney's friendship with Obama is well-known. When Clooney accepted the American Cinematheque's 2006 tribute, Obama sent in an hilarious video dissing Clooney's issues with dating and commitment.

While tub-thumping in London for Wild Hogs, John Travolta, who owns five private jets, was still promoting the good fight against global warming:

His serious aviation habit means he is hardly the best person to lecture others on the environment. But John Travolta went ahead and did it anyway.

The 53-year-old actor, a passionate pilot, encouraged his fans to "do their bit" to tackle global warming. But although he readily admitted: "I fly jets", he failed to mention he actually owns five, along with his own private runway. Clocking up at least 30,000 flying miles in the past 12 months means he has produced an estimated 800 tons of carbon emissions – nearly 100 times the average Briton's tally.

Travolta made his comments this week at the British premiere of his movie, Wild Hogs. He spoke of the importance of helping the environment by using "alternative methods of fuel" – after driving down the red carpet on a Harley Davidson.

Blades of Glory, which Nora and I thoroughly enjoyed and instantly forgot as soon as we left the screening (it's plenty funny enough to score at the boxoffice) has earned a "generally favorable" 63 average from metacritic. In case you were wondering how they filmed those amazing skating shots, the LAT's Sheigh Crabtree explains it all:

It's all lifts and giggles until someone breaks an ankle.

That's what happened to Jon Heder during training just days before he and costar Will Ferrell were scheduled to start filming the male-bonding, figure skating comedy "Blades of Glory," which opens Friday.

One minute Heder was up in his skates moving into a spin and the next he was sporting a hairline fracture and ordered to stay off the ice for three months. And that's when sheer panic set in for "Blades' " first-time feature film directors Josh Gordon and Will Speck.

"It was probably one of the darkest days in the last couple years for us," Gordon said. "Everybody was really not wanting to look each other in the eye and go, 'Oh, God, this is really serious.' "

In a sense, Heder's injury was just the tip of the iceberg in a series of production hurdles that included creating 30,000 digital extras, massive prayer sessions, rubber dummies and a global search for ice skating stunt doubles with physiques to match their actors. Over the 12 months of production, Gordon and Speck found themselves performing triple axels of their own.

"How do we even move a camera along a wet surface while two grown men lift each other in an impossible position?" Gordon recalled thinking. "What you start to realize is you have to just imagine what it is you want and somehow solutions present themselves."

Coming out of the Paramount commissary Friday after lunch I stopped and gasped as orange plumes of smoke spewed off the crest of the Hollywood Hills to the North. KNX radio did their usual excellent onsite reporting as I drove back to the office. The Oakwood Apartments and The Hollywood Sign were threatened. The Mt. Sinai and Forest Lawn cemeteries were halting funeral services. It was an area that had not been burned in recent memory, so there was lots of brush. There were no easy access roads. It's very dry here. We're in the middle of a long drought. Luckily, it's not a gusty day, and a western wind flow from the Pacific is expected Friday night.

Here's Variety's coverage:

Staffers at Warner Bros. and Universal Studios are keeping a close eye on a brush fire above in the hills above Forest Lawn Drive that is blanketing Burbank and Universal City area with smoke. The blaze sent flames close to the famed Hollywood sign. The fire broke out around 1:15 p.m. near the Oakwood corporate housing complex that sits on the hill along Barham Boulevard, according to broadcast reports. As of 3 p.m., the fire was not endangering the Warner Bros. or U studio lots, as the flames headed east and away from both lots, according to reps for U and Warner Bros. A Warner Bros. spokesman said fire officials specifically asked the studio not to evacuate employees to avoid congestion on Forest Lawn Drive and nearby streets. Warner Bros.' gates 7, 8 and 9 along Forest Lawn Drive have been closed, along with the stretch of Forest Lawn Drive that runs from Barham Boulevard, past the Forest Lawn cemetery to a 134 Ventura freeway onramp.

Smoke from the fire was visible on the other side of the hill in Hollywood, Beverly Hills and the Miracle Mile area. The blaze was the subject of much conversation Friday afternoon among industryites.

UPDATE: And here's the later story in the LA Times.

Stephen Schaefer covers HBO's New York Sopranos premiere at Radio City Music Hall:

Without giving away any plot details, the “Sopranos” finale seems destined to struggle with the Big Issues even as it curdles and cackles with the blackest humor. Even in a family retreat far from New Jersey’s mean streets violence, “Sopranos” observes, disruptive, physically and psychologically demeaning violence, is never far. Nor is execution-style murder.

Carmela and Tony can have sex, exchange gifts but can they really comfort each other? As the song goes, Why was I born? Why am I living? What do I give? What am I giving?

As he celebrates his 47th birthday Tony (James Gandolfini) ponders, broods about his legacy. The cops and the Feds hover. A mob boss is dying and the void must be filled – but in these times who, really wants to be boss, the capo de capo? Christopher (Michael Imperioli) loses interest in the family business to make horror movies inspired by you-know-who with family money. As for the movie itself, Who’d have guessed Daniel Baldwin could ever be better than Ben Kingsley?

With little interest in his only son A.J. (Robert Iler), Tony curses how his chosen “son” Christopher has missed all that he’s tried to pass on to him. Rueful, ruminative and explosive, “Sopranos” is not going quietly into the night. But will Tony go? Really go?

Here's Variety's Steven Zeitchik on the HBO party. And here's a link to Vanity Fair's online Sopranos coverage. The in-depth April cover story on David Chase and the history of the show by Peter Biskind is one of the best magazine reads I've had in a long time. UPDATE: Here's Time's feature story.

OK, I'm an Anglophile with a jones for the Royals, in this case The Tudors. Check out this trailer, which is actually a tad risible in the way it edits the multiple beddings of Henry VIII (Jonathan Rhys Meyers):

If you don't want to wait until April to watch it on Showtime (or you don't subscribe, and don't want to wait for Netflix), you can see Henry VIII "as Hot, Sexy Monarch -- For Free!" on Amazon Unbox. Right now!

Here's this weekend's Fandango Five, from web ticketseller Fandango.com:

Weekly Ticket Sales (as of 3/30/07 10:00 a.m. PST)

Movie Fandango User Rating* % of Fandango’s Sales

Meet the Robinsons “Go” 35%

Blades of Glory “Must Go” 34%

300 “Must Go” 15%

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles “Go” 4%

Shooter "Go” 2%

And here's Fandango Weekly Poll (as of 3/30/07 10:00 a.m. PST):

“Which of the following sports comedies is your favorite?”

Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story 45%

Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby 29%

The Longest Yard (2005) 13%

Nacho Libre 7%

Kicking and Screaming 3%

The Bad News Bears (2005) 3%

The Tribeca Film Festival has boosted ticket prices for the festival this year to $18, reports Indiewire:

At most other big city international film festivals in the United States, such as those in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Seattle, the price for a festival ticket is typically quite close to the cost of seeing a movie at the local cineplex. By comparison, tickets for the 42nd Chicago International Film Festival were $10 with a $2 discount for members, while the Los Angeles Film Festival organized by Film Independent offers tickets for reguar screenings for its members for $10 and $11 for non-members. Festivals typically charge more for higher profile special programs and gala events. At the upcoming Seattle International Film Festival, tickets are priced at $10 before member discounts in a city where the top ticket prices around town are at about $9.75, according to festival organizers.

North of the border, tickets to the Toronto International Film Festival for a walk-up attendee run about $16 ($18.75 Canadian). A Toronto rep noted today that the festival also sells tickets for about $7 CAD each for attendees who buy using bulk ticket books. The cost of attending a regular multiplex movie in the Canadian city is just over $10 ($11.95 CAD).

Producer Ted Hope has sent an email to friends begging them to go to see Hawk is Dying (which truth be told, inspired some walkouts at Sundance). If they go to see it and don't like what they see, he promises, they can get their money back, reports Anthony Kaufman on his Indiewire blog. ".... If you go and aren't truly glad you went, I will personally refund your money. Just send me your ticket stub at This is That in New York. I promise." I suspect that Hope is directing this to the recipients of his email--who may share his refined taste--and not the entire moviegoing public.

There are four trailers in Grindhouse. One, whose director is uncredited (it's Rodriguez) is in front of Rodriguez's Planet Terror, and three more from Rob Zombie, Edgar Wright and Eli Roth, are between Terror and Tarantino's Death Proof. The trailers were where the action was with the MPAA. Here's more on the trailers from the LAT's Mark Olsen:

The filmmakers enlisted the likes of Rob Zombie ("The Devil's Rejects"), Edgar Wright ("Shaun of the Dead") and Eli Roth ("Hostel") when it became clear they were too bogged down with finishing their features to take on the trailers as well.

Rodriguez recalled Zombie's pitch: "He goes, 'It's called 'Werewolf Women of the SS.' I said, 'Say no more. Go shoot it.' "

And shoot he did. While all three trailers were shot in just two days apiece, Wright and Roth essentially shot only what ended up on screen. Zombie estimates that he had enough footage to make a solid half-hour movie and was particularly pained to whittle it down.

Zombie assembled quite a cast for his mini-movie, including Udo Kier and Sybil Danning, B-movie character actors Bill Moseley and Tom Towles, and his wife, Sheri Moon Zombie. Best of all, however, is an appearance by Nicolas Cage as Fu Manchu.

How exactly one gets from Nazi scientists to topless superwomen, machine-gunning werewolves to Fu Manchu remains delightfully obscure in the trailer, and that confusion is not only intentional but, as Zombie explains, a tip of the hat to exploitation convention.

"I was getting very conceptual in my own mind with it," he says. "A lot of these movies, they would be made cheaply. The real famous Nazi-type movie, 'Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS,' was made on the leftover sets from 'Hogan's Heroes.' That's why that movie, for a cheap exploitation film, it looks pretty nice.

"A lot of times these movies would be made like, 'Well, you know, I've got a whole bunch of Nazi uniforms, but I got this Chinese set too. We'll put 'em together!' They start jamming things in there, so I took that approach."

Wright created a trailer that is a pastiche of English haunted house pictures and super-stylized European horror films. The very title of Wright's faux film is the central punch line for the trailer (and so it will not be revealed here).

Viewers with a deep knowledge of British acting talent will be able to spot not only "Shaun" stars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, but also such faces as Jason Isaacs, Matthew Macfadyen, Georgina Chapman, Lucy Punch, Stuart Wilson and Katie Melua. The uproariously paced narration was done by "Arrested Development" star — and voice of GMC truck ads — Will Arnett.

To get the necessary 1970s look, Wright used vintage lenses and old-style graphics. During editing, he scratched some of the film with steel wool and dragged it around a parking lot to make it appear neglected by wayward projectionists.

While growing up in Massachusetts, Roth loved the holiday-themed slasher films — "Silent Night, Deadly Night," "Halloween," "April Fool's Day," "My Bloody Valentine" — but there was always one day that seemed to be overlooked. The result: "Thanksgiving."

This poem--by anonymous-- is making the Hollywood e-mail rounds today. It is assumed by many to be written by one of Transformer's many producers, Angry Films' Don Murphy (who has called rival Transformer producer Lorenzo Di Bonaventura Skorponok on his blog, and has squabbled with DreamWorks production head Adam Goodman throughout production). But Murphy denies authorship. Here's the original link dated September 29 from Transformers Live. "It isn't by me," says Murphy, who got his first email of the poem at 4 AM this morning from AICN's Drew McWeeny, followed by 15 more. "It's a disgruntled fan. It was never on my website. It has nothing to do with me. I like the movie! I think it's going to be a big hit." While Murphy wishes this little ditty would just go away, it's going to be tough to put this cat back in the bag. UPDATE: Another Transformers producer insists: "Things are going great on the movie. My guess is it is an internet fan who was pissed at some creative decision. But I really could not be happier with the movie...promise."

The film is a wrap? Wow how about that! It’s still loads of crap. And the Stooges swallow this pap?

Murphy and Desanto lead the cheerleader charge
While Skorponok takes credit by and large.
The fact is today
There is nothing okay
The content of the film’s not fit for a barge.

Let your sugary friend answer the clamor
All you sweet kiddles want in on the drama?
The trouble beginning to end
Is named A-D-A-M Goodman

New studio head Snider
Decided him to fire
But then in a Hail Mary pass
Goodman kissed the right piece of ass

“Do not fire me, no do not please”
The chubby young Goodman said on his knees
I can do something you don’t want to do
I can control Michael Bay just for you.

New studio head Snider
Knew he’s a liar
But decided to stay out of the mess
“Sure Mr. Chubwon, you control Bay-san
And keep this boy’s movie shit off my dress”

Then dumb Mr. Goodman
As only a dunce can
Proceeded to hide in the sand
For the first time in history
It was a complete mystery
How one director had ALL of the power!!!!!!

The film is what it is and that’s all that it is
Most trufans will want to take a long whiz
And though valiant and Brave Tom Ian and Don slaved
Fact is Goodman gave the keys to the Kingdom to Bayed.

If you hate the dumb story
And realize the characters are a worry
And wonder how Bay could screwup so bad
Remember the missive that Sugarboy brought you
It wasn’t just Michael but Goodman too!

Here's the trailer:

In honor of Grindhouse, Rodriguez/Tarantino's hommage to schlock houses, Lou Lumenick tracks down the real deal: a NY grindhouse.

After all the Comic-Con build-up and rumors about length, rating and rushing to the finish line, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino delivered their salacious, leering, gross, disgusting, violent B-movie splatterfest in the nick of time to screen it Monday night at L.A.'s downtown movie palace The Orpheum. The movie hits theaters April 6.

The audience groaned and screamed and ducked in their seats with sheer pleasure throughout the three-hour running time. At the tent party afterwards the debates ranged on which trailers were best, was Rodriguez better than Tarantino, etc. It all depends on your own taste. You could argue that red-blooded males will love both, while more discerning males and women will vote for the Tarantino. But who knows?

The movie is broken into two 85-minute halves; one trailer (Machete) unspools in front of the first and three more (Rob Zombie's Werewolf Women of the SS, Edgar Wright's Don't and Eli Roth's Thanksgiving) in front of the second. Rodriguez's film, shot digitally, is a wild careening episodic crazy zombie flick with tongue planted firmly in cheek, artificially scratched and mauled to resemble the crap B-movies he and Tarantino are honoring. That the scene in which a mutating dripping gloppy Tarantino attempts to rape peg-legged femme fatale Rose McGowan (who comes off well in this flick, as does her stalwart gun-toting swain, Freddie Rodriguez) passed with an R-rating not only surprises me but Tarantino and Rodriguez as well. Check out their interviews on MTV.com. "Did you forget about the melting penis?" they ask incredulously.

As grungy and entertainingly gross as Rodriguez's Planet Terror is, Tarantino's Death Proof is sleek and 35 mm gorgeous, smartly written and paced. It delivers a satisfying female empowerment pay-off as Kurt Russell plays a bad guy who makes Snake Plissken look like a wimp and stuntwoman-turned-actress Zoe Bell (above, with the directors) delivers the goods in an extended (dangerous-looking) live-action chase sequence that leaves Thelma and Louise in the dust.

Print reviews should start breaking by week's end.

[Photo by Wireimage]

The WSJ probes Netflix CEO Reed Hastings on how his DVD rental service plans to survive the download future (subscribers only). Here's a sample:

WSJ: Why does Netflix face a lot of questions from analysts about the sustainability of its business even though you're showing strong growth?

Hastings: That's easy. We're sure that we're going to be buying cars in 25 years, whereas renting DVDs through the mail in 25 years? For sure that's not going to exist. That's what creates the overhang -- there's a known obsolescence. Now we can argue about whether that's 10 years or 25 years [away]. Some people probably think it's five. I think they're wrong. It's probably more like 20.

WSJ: So it's a question of when, not if, DVD rentals will go away.

Hastings: That's exactly right. If one thinks of Netflix as a DVD rental business, one is right to be scared. If one thinks of Netflix as an online movie service with multiple different delivery models, then one's a lot less scared. We're only now starting to deliver the proof points behind that second vision.

WSJ: You've started letting some of your subscribers watch movies from your Web site. How seriously are you pushing into Internet-delivery of movies?

Hastings: We're taking it pretty aggressively. We're investing about $40 million into it this year. We feel that that's the appropriate size investment, given the size of the market. If you overinvest in a market, of course, a lot of the money is wasted.

If you underinvest, then someone else can get ahead of you. We'll be up to 5,000 films by the end of the year, open to all of our subscribers.

WSJ: Five thousand movies is still a lot less than the 75,000 you offer Netflix subscribers on DVD.

Hastings: Remember when DVD launched in 1997, and then we launched in 1999, we only had a thousand titles. It grew as the ecosystem grew.

Sacha Baron Cohen is taking his Sweeney Todd research seriously, reports Liz Smith:

SPEAKING OF cutting remarks, Sacha Baron Cohen is trying to cut his co-star, Johnny Depp, dead. These two are filming the Stephen Sondheim musical "Sweeney Todd" at Pinewood Studios in London -- wherein Cohen plays barber Adolfo Pirelli and Depp plays Sweeney Todd, the demon barber of Fleet Street. There is a competititon to see which actor can best shave another person with a straight razor. The "Borat" star put his own real life barber on the payroll as adviser and has had 16 hours of razor training. They say that Cohen has had problems with singing Sondheim's lyrics and that he has been given permission by the film's director, Tim Burton, to sing in a rap style. Cohen has to warble and shave customers at the same time in this film. But Depp has submitted to teasing by co-star Cohen. When Johnny said he might be going to L.A., Cohen said, "I have a lot of contacts and I will ask what they can do to help you." This from the man most people never heard of before "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan

James Cameron has been in pre-production on Avatar for a year or more--designing the picture's environments and characters and costumes and pre-visualizing its sequence of shots. In fact, Cameron is already in production, it's just that he isn't exactly filming, for lack of a better word. It's all in the computer. There will be live action photography in New Zealand later on, with real actors. Here's more from a firstshowing.net.

Former MPAA topper Jack Valenti is one of those people that seemed to have more energy than most people half his age. At age 85, Valenti was hospitalized last week at Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore after he was diagnosed as having had a stroke. He is recovering comfortably.

Kal Ho Naa Ho is Nora's favorite Bollywood film. This is a typically exuberant number, a take-off on Roy Orbison's Pretty Woman, starring the inimitable Shahrukh Khan. Nora listens to this soundtrack in the car and has watched the movie countless times.

Universal is giving away theater tickets to Peaceful Warrior, reports Slate's Kim Masters. I cannot think of an example when this has ever worked in the history of cinema. Audiences are inherently suspicious of anyone offering them something for free. UPDATE: According to a Universal spokesman, moviegoers have already bought $8 million-worth of tickets. But if the movie got a 21% Rotten Tomatoes rating, what kind of word of mouth will these people spread? Will it be good enough to generate more ticket buying, of the cash variety? That's Universal's gamble.

Writer-director Scott Frank and a gaggle of studio executives and producers enjoyed the premiere of The Lookout last week at the Egyptian Theater. Studio writing star Frank (Get Shorty, Minority Report) admitted that he'd do another $15 million movie in a heartbeat, he had so much fun on this one. He seemed in no hurry to run back into the arms of mainstream filmmaking. (The LAT's Paul Cullum tells the story of how the movie got made, while Rachel Abramowitz rounds up some films from writers turned directors, from Mike White's Year of the Dog to Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche.)

The Lookout will break out two young actors—even if the cleverly off-beat picture doesn't cross over from the smart-house circuit. Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who impressed critics in Mysterious Skin and Brick, manages to make a brain-damaged loser --who was a big-man-on-campus hockey star before a nasty car accident--utterly winning. His nemesis is played by a surprisingly macho American-accented Matthew Goode, who is known for playing British twits in movies such as Woody Allen's Match Point and Imagine Me and You, and continues in that vein in the upcoming Brideshead Revisited. For his part, Gordon-Levitt plays a psycho-killer in his next, John Madden's Killshot, followed by the war movie Stop-Loss, the long awaited follow-up to Boys Don't Cry for director Kimberly Peirce. That's why Gordon-Levitt sported a shaved head at the premiere, along with a wrenched shoulder in a sling.

Hosting the event was Miramax's Daniel Battsek, who inherited the movie from big Disney when its budget shrank from studio-level down to indie size. Also on hand were Walter Parkes and Laurie MacDonald, who developed it at DreamWorks and let it go in turnaround, and Laurence Mark, one of the producers along the way, and Roger Birnbaum, who scooped it up and made it happen at Spyglass and Disney. It's easy to see why the movie was too unconventionally risky to be made as a commercial moneymaker. Finally it found the right route to a more discerning audience.

Veteran writer-director Lawrence Kasdan came to celebrate--he challenged Frank on his fear of directing over lunch, after which Frank finally pursued directing the movie after ten years of development. Kasdan himself is one of many studio directors wondering how on earth to get a movie made in these shifting times. The answer--don't get paid your old salary--is a tough pill to swallow.

At the party, another writer-director, Richard LaGravenese, was singing the praises of Hilary Swank, who starred in his labor of love about the power of writing, Freedom Writers. That experience changed his life, he said. He directed Swank again in P.S. I Love You, a romance in which she co-stars with 300's Gerard Butler. LaGravenese, along with Clint Eastwood, seems to have figured out how to pull the best from Swank, who's on a roll.

John Wells patiently ran through the innovative writers' deal that he forged with 19 screenwriters (including Frank) at Warner Bros; it took six long years to connect all the links, he said, working closely with his fellow WGA execs Nick Kazan and Tom Schulman. A-lister Steve Zaillian, one conspicuous omission on the list, has some outstanding issues to work out, said Wells, but he might yet join the writers' group. What will make the deal work, Wells says, is that the scripters are all expected to deliver one out of every four scripts they write to the confab over four years, about 20 scripts. So their output will be stretched out over that period, and they can still command top dollar for the other three. It won't work if the scripts are all delivered at once.

[Photo by Wireimage]

Over at The Reeler, Lewis Beale has a modest proposal for how to fix film criticism.

Still recovering from the shock of their magazine's demise, ex-Premiere employees are setting themselves up elsewhere. Premiere's recent west coast editor Tim Swanson is writing a book about HBO's Entourage and heading to Conde Nast Portfolio as a senior online writer, starting in mid-April. Premiere's star feature writer Fred Schruers is freelancing for places like the LA Times, where former Premiere staffers John Horn, Rachel Abramowitz, Chris Lee and wine-writer Corey Brown hang their hats these days. They all gathered last Sunday at a wake organized by Sean Smith of Newsweek and Nancy Griffin, Entertainment Editor at AARP Magazine, who hosted the event at her elegant Venice digs. While Max Potter is reporting in-depth non-entertainment stories at the g