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 great Denver monthly, 5280, clearly the days of long reported movie features are over. From NPR's Kim Masters, who has started a Slate blog, and ESPN's Chris Connelly, to Christine Spines of EW and People's Oliver Jones, who posted live from the Emmies, the pressure is on to write shorter and faster, and get it up on the web ASAP. Premiere.com lives on.

The Hollywood Reporter's film business editor Nicole Sperling is taking her unflappable reporting prowess to Entertainment Weekly, where she will start as an L.A.-based senior writer in several weeks. This leaves yet one more hole for publisher John Kilcullen to fill at THR, and will not help sagging morale at THR's Wilshire offices. Kilcullen is already seeking a new editor to replace Cynthia Littleton, who starts at Variety on Monday. And film editor Gregg Kilday, who finally hired tech writer Carolyn Giardina to replace Sheigh Crabtree after she went freelance (she's under contract at the LA Times, which ought to put her on staff), will now be looking to fill two senior film department slots.

Jane Smiley's Ten Days in the Hills is getting mixed advance buzz from my book group. I haven't cracked it yet. I tend to want to read things that have NOTHING to do with Hollywood in my spare time, but we all chose Smiley because we loved her searing feminist riff on King Lear, 1000 Acres. Here's one take. That Little Round Headed Boy compares her to Christopher Isherwood, which is high praise:

Full disclosure: Smiley's novel is apparently based on a 1353 Italian book I've heard of but never read, Boccaccio's The Decameron. That book was about a group of people walling themselves off from the plague; Smiley's novel concerns a group of Los Angelenos who, the day after the 2003 Oscars, gather in a film director's spacious home and try to shield themselves from the Iraq war, even as raging debates break out among the characters.

I do have my favorite Hollywood novels. They include Carroll and Gerritt Graham's Queer People, Budd Schulberg's What Makes Sammy Run? and Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust. Here's more:

Larry McMurtry's All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers, a semi-autobiographical young man's novel about leaving Texas for Hollywood after publishing his first novel, which he adapted for the movies. (It was Horseman Pass By, which became Hud. As a novelist and or/screenwriter, McMurtry has had a long and successful relationship with Hollywood, from Hud to Last Picture Show, Terms of Endearment, Lonesome Dove and other TV westerns, and most recently Brokeback Mountain, with Diana Ossana.)

The Player, by Michael Tolkin (as close to the bone as it comes), and its mighty sequel, Return of the Player.

Force Majeure, by Bruce Wagner--the original short story, not the novel. While all his (very funny) novels are set in Hollywood, of his cell phone trilogy (including I'm Losing You and Still Holding), the best is the Dickensian I'll Let You Go.

David Freeman's short story collection A Hollywood Education is also better than his novel, A Hollywood Life.
And F. Scott Fitzgerald's Pat Hobby stories are better than The Last Tycoon.

Play it as It Lays by Joan Didion.

The Deal: A Novel of Hollywood, by Peter Lefcourt. Hilarious.

White Hunter, Black Heart by Peter Viertel, a thinly disguised tale of the making of The African Queen, which was made into a movie by director Clint Eastwood, who played the role of John Huston.

Jeff Wells went to see Grindhouse Friday night; I'll report back from the Monday premiere.

I cried at Cathy Seipp's funeral on Friday, but I was also laughing and delighted by the way her family and friends eulogized her. (Typically, Seipp left clear instructions on how she wanted the event to go.) Her former editor at Buzz, Allan Mayer, recalled asking himself after one particularly cantankerous encounter, why he kept having lunch with this woman? But he always went back. Sandra Tsing Loh, also fighting back both tears and chuckles, described how large numbers of Team Cathy members drove hospital staffers crazy. I chose not to whip out my tape recorder and notebook. But Luke Ford has it all here. And what will happen with the blog Cathy's World, which built a huge following? Without her singular energy, it's unlikely that it could keep it going. As Ray Richmond put it, "Cathy was a phenomenal human -- one in a million." But I'd eagerly read an aggregate "National Review-Corner-style" blog which offered an ongoing interchange among her writer pals.

After I saw 300, I knew that Zack Snyder's movie version of the Frank Miller graphic novel would change the face of movies—from its mix of live action and CG to its simple, over-the-top cartoony style—but I didn't realize that it would piss off and threaten so many people.

Michael Blowhard does a terrific job of laying out the reasons why this film is both fabulous and dismaying.

It sounds like Mel Gibson had every reason to be annoyed by a heckler at a Cal State Northridge Q & A session last week. But even if he felt the support of the students in the room, it was unwise to unzip his mouth in this internet age. It only takes a few clicks to add fuel to the flame and wind up on TMZ.com.

Director Ingmar Bergman has admitted his fascination with the Nazis and Hitler in the past. He elaborates here:

The maker of Fanny and Alexander and The Seventh Seal retained his admiration of Fascism right up to the end of the war.

"When the doors to the concentration camps were thrown open, at first I did not want to believe my eyes."

"When the truth came out it was a hideous shock for me. In a brutal and violent way I was suddenly ripped of my innocence."

Nora and I both love this Gap ad. Patrick Wilson (who has musical theater chops and survived The Phantom of the Opera to play the Prom King in Little Children) engages delightfully with Claire Danes, who has studied ballet for years. (That's Ethel Merman singing "anything you can do I can do better.") Much as I defend Romeo + Juliet, Shop Girl and Family Stone, this TV spot captures the Danes I fell in love with in MTV's My So-Called Life. As we wait for this smart talented girl to break out in movies, catch a glimpse of her radiance:

I always thought Gerard Butler would make a good James Bond. He's no fool. Word is, he knows he's scored with 300, and he's willing to raise his price by playing the Snake Plissken role made famous by Kurt Russell in John Carpenter's iconic Escape from New York. (I was on the set of that movie. I'll never forget the late great producer Debra Hill boating a group of us over to Liberty Island one night to watch the filming.) Butler can write his own ticket. He's a brainy, well-trained, versatile actor who can play a romantic lead (see Dear Frankie) or an action hero (300). Phantom of the Opera wasn't his fault; no one could have carried that mess. Coming up next is the thriller Butterfly on a Wheel, and he stars opposite Hilary Swank in Richard LaGravenese's romantic mystery P.S. I Love You. It remains to be seen if Butler will go forward with the Euro indie adaptation of Therese Raquin.

On the verge of their April 6 release, after several key snips the Weinstein Co. have earned an R rating for the Quentin Tarantino/Robert Rodriguez double feature, Grindhouse, reports the NYP. The two directors have been rushing to finish their lengthy two-movies-in-one in time for Monday's L.A. premiere.

Sony Pictures Classics has landed North American rights to Youth Without Youth, Francis Ford Coppola’s first film since 1997’s Rainmaker. Coppola adapted, produced and directed his return to personal filmmaking from the 1976 novel by Romanian-born religious historian Mircea Eliade.

After Coppola screened the film on February 22 for friends in San Francisco, he showed the picture to individual indies in New York, Los Angeles, and the Bay Area last Friday and over the weekend. Several distributors, including United Artists and Magnolia Pictures, pursued the project, which was shopped the old-fashioned way by Coppola attorney Barry Hirsch. He closed the deal with SPC this week.

Inspired by his daughter Sofia to make a low-budget personal film, Coppola opted not to take the festival route, preferring to fly under the radar. The indie-financed film, which Coppola shot last year in Romania, is set during World War II and stars Tim Roth as a 70-year-old professor who is struck by lightning, suddenly turns 40 and becomes brilliant. (He also sprouts a doppelganger.) His quest is to discover the origin of language and consciousness. By movie’s end he and his lady love (Alexandra Maria Lara) speak in tongues—sans subtitles. Bruno Ganz also stars, and Matt Damon makes a cameo appearance.

The movie has been compared to an arty Raiders of the Lost Ark. One distributor described it as “a stunningly photographed art film with amazing sound design from Walter Murch.”

LA Observed has been tracking the media story of the day, which is yet another sad example of how dangerous it is for a newspaper to get in bed with the people it's supposed to be covering. It was a silly idea for the LAT to give a Hollywood producer like Brian Grazer a shot at editing the Sunday Current section, especially if the idea came from a publicist. 42West PR man Allan Mayer says that he suggested Grazer, a frequent client, to editorial page editor Andres Martinez when he learned that the LAT was looking for an outside editor from Hollywood, and not his colleague, Kelly Mullens, the woman who has been dating Martinez. The beleaguered editor quit his job in protest after LAT publisher David Hiller ditched Grazer's Sunday Current section.

Here's Variety's take.

And here's a fascinating document from David Hiller:

Statement from the Publisher

This morning we made the decision to stop production of this coming Sunday's Current section that was to unveil a new "Guest Editor" program, with the debut edition headed by Oscar(tm) and Emmy(tm)-winning writer-producer Brian Grazer.

The reason for this decision is that a potential conflict of interest had emerged over a personal relationship between The Times' Editorial Page Editor Andrés Martinez and a public relations executive from a firm doing work for Brian. We believe that this relationship did not influence the selection of Brian as guest editor. Nonetheless, in order to avoid even the appearance of conflict, we felt the best course of action was not to publish the section. The trust our readers place in us, built over 125 years, is of the highest importance and we try never to do anything that would call that into question.

I want to underscore that nothing in this situation is, in any way, a reflection on Brian Grazer, who has been honorable and generous throughout. I'm sorry that he and the wonderful group of contributors he had assembled have been put through this. The fine contributors include Paul Ekman on lie detection; André Leon Talley on fashion and status; Eric Kandel on the brain and psychotherapy; Dalton Conley on political polling and bias; Shepard Fairy with a special illustration; Marty Singer on the increasingly brazen tabloids and paparazzi; and Sam Hall Kaplan on L.A. I want to thank them for their willingness to participate in this novel idea and hope there will be an avenue to bring these creative, thoughtful and insightful pieces to our readers in the near future.

Also today, Andrés Martinez has submitted his resignation and I have accepted it. I understand and respect his decision. I valued him as a colleague and thank him for his contributions to this great paper.

David D. Hiller

Publisher, Los Angeles Times

On a Future of Film panel this week and at lunch today with some folks from ILM, we keep debating the same issues. Will people watch big movies on small devices? (If it's a sidekick or a new iPhone, the answer is an enthusiastic yes.) But even with a low-res TV show on a desktop computer, the iTunes download experience is not ideal. I've been miserably slogging through an old episode of Lost on my PowerMac. It freezes and skips and moseys along of its own free will. I hate it. But Nora's new MacBook works much better.

Dave Kehr responds to last weekend's double take on the new digital movie universe from Tony Scott and Manohla Dargis, who didn't have much luck with downloading. Am I the only one who feels like they're getting around to this a tad late? Better late than never.

I myself sounded like an old fogey at DigitalMediaWire's Future of Film panel Wednesday morning, defending the role of movie theaters as the best way we have, for the moment, of not only experiencing movies but establishing a brand identity for a "product" that will be then sold in many different forms down the line. I've been arguing for the collapsed window future for some time--yet I am not yet a believer in the day-and-date paradigm, because movies do need at least a few weeks to establish themselves in individual markets.

Soon, the right movie with the right elements (not Soderbergh's The Bubble) will break through in different simultaneous formats and prove that there's a way to catch hold and make some money, too. So far Amazon, Google Video, First Take and other experiments in VOD, DVD and theatrical have yet to score big with audiences, possibly because the movies involved are so resolutely small. Many filmmakers and indie distributors have tried to marshall the power of MySpace and YouTube, which can be effective marketing devices on a mass scale, but seem less so with small-niche movies.

The Pay-TV issue is finally coming to the fore now that Starz is suing Disney. When will the studios be willing to break free from the Pay TV deals that provide them with millions in hand but are preventing them from pursuing the promise of the long tail on the web by making their entire libraries available for download?

This is BIG NEWS. John Malone doesn't mess around. The inevitable has occurred as the studios play out their long-term hands on changing windows and video downloads. UPDATE: Variety's legal eagle John Dempsey talks to Starz about the lawsuit:

According to a Starz spokesman, Disney is publicly boasting that it will rack up $50 million-$70 million this year from the electronic sale of movies through iTunes. In its claim for damages, Starz asks Disney to turn over all of the profits it has pocketed from these electronic movie sales.

Starz is particularly worried by a new Apple box, now being shipped, that the suit calls "a small, inexpensive device that wirelessly transmits to the consumer's television the movies and TV shows electronically downloaded into the consumer iTunes library."

In the suit Starz says it has ponied up more than a billion dollars to Disney since the two parties first signed a contract for pay TV exclusivity in 1993. The companies renewed the agreement in 1999 and, for a three-year term, in 2005. Disney has an option to engineer another three-year renewal in 2008.

Starz interprets the contract as prohibiting Disney from selling any of its theatricals on the Internet until about 28 months after the movie makes its debut in U.S. multiplexes. That exclusive license period covers the 10 months before Starz takes title to the movie and the 18 months during which the pay TV exclusivity holds sway. Disney's offering of movies on the Internet for pay-per-view is not addressed in the lawsuit.

It's not John, Paul, George and Ringo, and they're not singing in English either. But these four mod moptops are rocking on Lennon and McCartney's "I Want to Hold Your Hand."

News Corp and NBC Universal are banding together, reports the LAT, to form their own internet content site to battle GoogTube:

News Corp. and NBC Universal plan to announce as soon as today that they are creating an online video site stocked with TV shows and movies, plus clips that users can modify and share with friends, according to people close to the negotiations.

The two companies enlisted help from some of Google's biggest Internet rivals. The News Corp.-NBC Universal partnership has deals with Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp., Time Warner Inc.'s AOL and News Corp.'s MySpace to place videos in front of their collective audience of hundreds of millions.

And here's more detail at Paid Content.

It's one of those weird things. Karma. Or something coming back to haunt you. Whatever. The internet is giving director David O. Russell a nasty spanking right now. Some of us at the office were looking at these YouTube clips that wouldn't die--after years circulating on the web.

Look at it this way. We all know George Clooney is a Very Good Guy. We wrote about what happened on Three Kings at Premiere and fact-checked the story to a faretheewell. Clooney stood up against Russell to protect the folks he thought he was abusing on the set. And Lily Tomlin is a Great Comedienne. In this video from the set of I Heart Huckabees, she protests the way she is being treated by her director, and he goes ballistic. And Russell? You fill in the blank.

Eddie Copeland reviews David Lynch's new book Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity:

Ostensibly, the book tells of Lynch's journey through creative life and how he's been helped by Transcendental Meditation, but it's hardly a how-to guide. As one might expect from one of the most idiosyncratic American filmmakers, it's more stream of consciousness, sharing anecdotes from his life and his work. I have an admission to make: I'm a sucker for books with short chapters. For some reason, if the chapters are shorter, I'll end up flying through the book faster than I would if the chapters were longer. I like frequent stopping points and Lynch's book provides ample opportunities for those, but its short bites create a pace that's so quick, it's easy to finish in one setting.

Bloggers blog. And that's what one of my earliest blogger friends, Cathy Seipp, did until the very end. She fought lung cancer, having never smoked, for a remarkable five years. Her chum Amy Alkon rounds up the blogs written Monday by Seipp's friends as they waited to hear the inevitable news. So does Nancy Rommelmann. UPDATE: Ray Richmond gets her just right. And Cathy Seipp tops Technorati's search list.

Seipp was a strong-willed, clear-headed, beautiful, opinionated, entertaining woman who was fiercely devoted to living, her 17-year-old daughter Maia, her many friends, writing well, and her blog. Her Cathy's World community is massive; it is not unusual for hundreds of people to comment on a post. Seipp thrived on that energy. In an entry posted by Maia at her mother's hospital bedside Monday, she wrote, "she was very happy with this blog." I suspect that for quite some time, along with Maia, it has kept Seipp alive. UPDATE: She passed away peacefully on Wednesday. A funeral service will be held Friday morning.

[Photo by Emmanuelle Richard, LAist]

Theater, opera and film director Julie Taymor is an anomaly in Hollywood. She acts like an artist. She doesn't bend over for the studios. That image was given to me years ago by John Carpenter, who said that all directors who need money to make movies have to do it. I disagree. As Guillermo del Toro said recently, making better movies in Hollywood is all about having the stamina to just say no.

Taymor went toe to toe with Harvey Weinstein on Frida. She had Salma Hayek to back her up in that case. It will be interesting to see what happens on Taymor's Beatles movie, Across the Universe. The NYT's Sharon Waxman breathlessly reports that Revolution Studio's Joe Roth has edited his own version of Across the Universe, against Taymor's wishes. He's trying to get her to shorten it. She's resisting. This is not the first time, nor the last, that this will happen. But it's never a good idea to cross a director who's willing to fight in public.

In his NYT media column, David Carr asks if professional journalism can gain wisdom from crowdsourcing:

The idea is to apply to journalism the same open-source model of Web-enabled collaboration that produced the operating system Linux, the Web browser Mozilla and the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

“Can large groups of widely scattered people, working together voluntarily on the net, report on something happening in their world right now, and by dividing the work wisely tell the story more completely, while hitting high standards in truth, accuracy and free expression?” Professor Rosen asked last week on Wired.com.

That may not seem like much of a revolution at a time when millions are staring at user-generated video on YouTube, but journalism is generally left in the hands of professionals.

Assignment Zero will use custom software to create a virtual newsroom that allows collaboration on a discrete, but open-ended, topic from the very start.

In this instance, the topic will be be crowdsourcing, so the phenomenon will be used to cover the phenomenon itself. Citizens with a variety of expertise — the “people formerly known as the audience,” as Professor Rosen describes them — will produce work to be iterated and edited by experienced journalists.

“This is designed as a pro-am approach to journalism. I think I saw possibilities here that others did not, and you can only do so much writing about it,” Professor Rosen said. “There is so much up for grabs right now, and the barriers to entry, the costs of doing something have become low enough to where it seemed it was best to just give it a try.”

The Time redesign looks clean and bold. But man, some of the entertainment coverage is like reading haiku. Smart people like Time critic RIchard Corliss are putting their skills to work at writing short. It's harder than anything, but it seems to be what the people want. USA Today had it right.

I finally caught up with this potent Barack Obama ad, apparently not created by his campaign, based on Apple's 1984 TV spot. It's all over YouTube:

And MySpace has set up a presidential section. Variety's Ted Johnson, who writes a terrific blog on Hollywood politics, lays out the candidates here.

Robert Evans is recording an audio track of his new book, Kid Notorious, reports Moovy Boovy. The book-on-tape of The Kid Stays in the Picture was a cult hit, thanks to Evans' entertaining growly-voiced delivery. The ex-Paramount chief, who backed both Chinatown and The Godfather and married his Love Story star Ali MacGraw, is one great storyteller.

It's hard to believe that Spike Lee is 50. And he's coming off a great year in features and docs: both Inside Man and When the Levees Broke were hits. Starz Inblack, in honor of Lee's birthday on March 20, will pay tribute to him with an all-day marathon of his films, spiced with interviews with the filmmaker. As time goes on, no matter what you think of Lee's politics, the movies stand up damn well, from Do the Right Thing and Malcolm X to Crooklyn and 25th Hour. These are my faves, along with Inside Man. Yours?

UPDATE: Ckrush Entertainment, Inc. has recruited Lee to serve for two years as an advisor, helping the production company to select film projects, which he will occasionally executive produce. Lee worked with Ckrush when he served as a judge on the “LiveMansion: The Movie” director competition. LiveMansion.com is the company's social network.

In a bold move to change the role screenwriters play inside the Hollywood production hierarchy, John Wells has formed a writers' co-op of 19 top scribes at Warner Bros., writes Variety's Michael Fleming. The co-op would forgo the lucrative upfront salaries that such writers as Ron Bass, Robin Swicord and Michael Tolkin command in order to function like a producer. That way if a movie gets made, the company would get a say in production decisions and a share of the gross.

In the past it has been challenging for similar bands of artists to give up personal short-term gain for the good of the group. But if this paradigm were to prove successful, it would likely provide the studios with far better projects than they get now via their usual development methods. I think many studio execs know that the old development mill doesn't work and that studio moviemaking economics are dysfunctional. While many of the best movies are made from original screenplays, the studios prefer to lure the best writers with cash to not stay home and write their passion projects, but to labor in the studio mines on big-budget commercial fare.

I admired producer Lindsay Doran's deal with Zach Helm on Stranger than Fiction, one of my favorite indie sleepers last year. They worked together for quite some time with no money changing hands. When the script was ready to be financed and packaged, they attracted scores of actors and directors who wanted in on the movie, and then they made a pick-up deal through Mandate Films and Sony.

Writer Jonathan Lethem is offering a new way to handle movie options on his work, reports Filmmaker. Here's his blog for more details.

The annual theater convention in Las Vegas, Showest, is a ritual that I usually enjoy. You get a peek at some footage from upcoming movies, schmooze with theater owners from around the country along with studio marketing and distribution honchos, check out some panels and screenings and enjoy a party or two from the studios that are riding high and feeling an obligation to share the love. The big lunch extravaganza with show-reel was mounted by indie Lionsgate this year, which tells you something about the state of things. It's fun to gauge reactions, figure out what's going to play well, and what looks weak.

Thanks to moving to my new gig, I didn't go this March. But as Variety's Michael Speier reports, the highlight of the convention was clearly New Line Cinema's musical version of Hairspray:

In front of a bouncy 3,000-plus crowd at the main Paris hotel ballroom, the minimajor showed off several scenes from the upcoming remake of John Waters' film and knocked it cleanly out of the park. Everything's there: a bright, colorful look, a joyous spirit, a kitschy cast (who all showed up) and, most importantly, Marc Shaiman's Tony award-winning tunes. This one feels like a counterprogramming gem to all the pirates, Transformers and Spider-men coming down the pike.

And the LAT's Sheigh Crabtree and Rachel Abramowitz also covered the waterfront, including a summer preview:

Ask execs at Fox why they lost their Borat star Sacha Baron Cohen's follow-up movie Bruno and they'll answer that they weren't willing to make such an expensive deal on a character far less likable than Borat. Meanwhile the folks at Universal--who have been making many pricey deals lately--are cheering their coup. Who's right? NPR's intrepid Kim Masters, who has turned her intermittent Slate postings into a blog called Hollywoodland, explains it all:

The eventual deal with Universal was all the sweeter for Cohen because at the time that it was struck, the research tracking audience interest in Borat looked a little wobbly and Fox—figuring that the movie needed to build a little word-of-mouth in the heartland where no one had ever heard of Cohen—cut the number of theaters in which the film would open. None of that sat well with the star. And Fox did not respond to the opportunity to make the Bruno deal with the alacrity that Cohen or his representatives deemed appropriate.

For its $42.5 million, Universal got rights to the movie in English-speaking countries, Germany, Austria, and let us not forget Belgium and the Netherlands (but apparently not Kazakhstan). Our Endeavor source tells us this is a bargain. Cohen's Ali G movie did $15 million in the United Kingdom in the pre-Borat days, he says, and Borat pulled in almost $40 million there. So (he argues), it made sense for Universal to wager that Bruno can pull in enough money even in its limited territories—one of which is the United States, after all. (Bear in mind that studios get to keep about half of those grosses. But the Endeavor source says Universal cannot lose money on the movie even if it's terrible.)

This source says the studios are annoyed simply because they were backed into a corner. "People say, 'We're never going to work with you again—fuck you,' " he says cheerfully. "Two months later, there's something they want. … The studios are getting less powerful, not more. Did we do the right thing for our client? That's a no-brainer."

UPDATE: Masters also introduced the involvement of Media Rights Capital, a company partly owned by the Endeavor Agency which reps Cohen, in the Bruno deal. Is this another case of an agency trying to wriggle out of its prohibition on producing movies? Here's Monday's NYT follow-up.