My hunch is Catherine Hardwicke's movie of Twilight is going to be huge. The Stephenie Meyer book is a vampire young adult phenom all over the world. And Kristen Stewart is the star.

Of all the Vanity Fair flavors-of-the-month, she's the one I've been watching. Jon Favreau cast her in Zathura, and she popped. You also saw her in Doug Liman's Jumpers, Sean Penn's Into the Wild and she's coming up in Barry Levinson's What Just Happened? Twilight is the tenth pic she's made since Zathura, and it will make her a star. Summit will release December 12. And sequels are already in the offing.

Ordinarily, you'd expect to see on the fall fest circuit Sam Mendes' Revolutionary Road, which stars Mendes' wife, Kate Winslet, and Leonardo DiCaprio, together for the first time since Titanic.

But the Scott-Rudin-produced adaptation of the Richard Yates novel won't be finished in time for Telluride, Toronto or New York because Mendes has been shooting the Focus Features comedy tentatively called Farlanders this summer, a road movie set for 2009 release co-written by Dave Eggers and his wife Vendela Vida, starring John Krasinski and Maggie Gyllenhaal SNL's Maya Rudolph as a young couple seeking the perfect place to bring up their new baby. Maggie Gyllenhaal also stars.

Mendes will return to the editing bay around Labor Day to do the final mix on Revolutionary Road, which DreamWorks/Paramount Vantage will open at year's end. Mendes wanted to squeeze in a pre-strike movie because he has two BBC Shakespeare productions to direct back-to-back in London.

Mendes' next feature film is Andrew Davies' adaptation of my favorite work of literature, bar none: George Elliot's Middlemarch, for DreamWorks.

And Eggers' (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) other upcoming movie is his adaptation of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, for director Spike Jonze, which has been pushed back to 2009.

Wall-E has earned a consensus of reviews that will be hard to beat for best-reviewed pic of 2008. Until Wall-E, Iron Man had 93 % fresh reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. Wall-E has 97 %.

The tsunami of love pouring over Wall-E is leading some to wonder if the pic might not be competitive enough to go for a best picture Oscar. Pixar has had many releases in this best-reviewed category over the years. What would make this one any different?

Meanwhile, Hitsville runs down various critics who are are avoiding dealing with what happens to the human race in Wall-E. Bill Wyman seems to be missing the fact that some critics decided to keep back some of the reveals in the last part of the movie. What happens to humans in Wall-E was a big surprise for me. Going in, I didn't know that part of the story, so I was delighted and amazed by much of what I was seeing.

Critics do not have to tell their readers every detail of the movie. UPDATE: Nor do trailers have to reveal every plot twist.

Another Wall-E factoid: Fred Willard is the first live actor to be included in a Pixar movie. He's on video, scratchy and wobbly, but is he technically animated? He is utterly recognizable as Fred Willard.

Sci-Fi Wire posts a never-before-seen interview conducted with the late great sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Childhood's End. The interview was conducted in 2001.

Warner Bros. is not releasing The Women in the fall. Picturehouse is.

Outgoing Picturehouse exec Bob Berney persuaded the studio to give him a bigger budget to take The Women wide on September 12 in 1500-2000 situations. "The trailer gets great response," says Berney, who wants to create a Sex and the City-style "bring your girlfriends" opening weekend femme event.

Here's the trailer:

What do the movies Wanted and Eagle Eye have in common? They're fish-out-of-water scenarios that posit that an everyday schmuck --James McAvoy in one, Shia LaBeouf in the other--gets caught up in something exciting and scary involving a lot of action and danger and guns. It's the oldest trick in the book.

But the commercial recipe here is also to take a star with cred with the young male demo that opens movies (In Wanted's case, it's actually Angelina Jolie) and add them to the thriller genre mix with an older star (Wanted's Morgan Freeman, Eagle Eye's Billy Bob Thornton).

DreamWorks took this story idea by Steven Spielberg, got it written by John Glenn & Travis Adam Wright, Hillary Seitz and Dan McDermott, and when Spielberg didn't want to direct, added their Disturbia star-on-the-rise LaBeouf to the mix with his director, D. J. Caruso.

Here's the trailer for Eagle Eye, due in September.

DreamWorks should only dream that Eagle Eye does as well as Wanted--a great match of strong narrative and fab visual style that raises it above the ordinary--otherwise it's just another formula thriller.

Universal threw yet another Westwood block party premiere Saturday night, this time for $100-million summer sequel Hellboy 2: The Golden Army, the closer of the Los Angeles Film Fest, which lured some 100,000 attendees, up from last year. Hellboy 2 director Guillermo del Toro handed out two jury prizes worth $50,000 each to documentary filmmaker Darius Marder (Loot) and feature director Sean Baker (Prince of Broadway).

His "insanely ambitious movie" Hellboy 2, Del Toro said, "comes from an exotic country inside my brain and my gonads. People think I do two types of movies: strange little Spanish films and big studio movies. This movie comes from a different place. It's the first of those big movies that belongs to the same world as Pan's Labyrinth. The imagination in it is unbridled."

True enough. Hellboy 2 is a hybrid of those two things. And thus some moviegoers, especially the core fanboys who loved the Dark Horse comics and the first installment, will embrace Hellboy 2's fantastic eccentricities, while others will be left behind, scratching their heads. I doubt the visually sumptuous pic will break out into wide acceptance, especially given the stiff summer competition. The first Hellboy was not a global hit in 2004 (it topped out at $98 million worldwide) but sold well over the years on DVD.

At the party, Del Toro admitted that the film's war between the ancient magical underground universe and modern humans is far from black-and-white. Like Del Toro himself, red-skinned warrior Hellboy (Ron Perlman) is ambivalent, caught between the rich primal forces that spawned him and his powerful human masters. Here's the trailer:

No matter how well this movie does, Del Toro is about to enter a new fantasy portal that will take four years of his life: J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. Working closely with producers Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh, phase one will involve writing for three weeks in L.A., one week in Wellywood, phase two will reverse that (one week in L.A., three weeks in Wellywood) and then the directing and post-production phases will take Del Toro to New Zealand full time.

Here's the filmmaker's two-part Q & A at LAFF.

For his part, critic John Anderson likes Hellboy 2 a lot:

But the reason the movie plays so well has nothing to do with the leading man's paternal instincts; rather, it's rooted in del Toro's rococo instincts for the stylishly creepy and crawlingly macabre, his clockmaker's preoccupation with detail, and a flair for combining state-of-the-art technology with his taste for the antique, the gothic, the Catholic. Not to disparage the f/x guys, but what's onscreen in "Hellboy II" is all about the seismic eruptions in del Toro's head. Comparing his work to most fantasy cinema is like comparing cave drawings to the Cathedral of Cologne.

Jack Lechner, an occasional contributor to this blog, wonders if anyone else has ever matched Pixar's nine-for-nine winning streak. Every Pixar movie has now opened at No. 1.

Wall-E, which earned a 97% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes and scored the third-highest opening for a Pixar picture this weekend, could even give Iron Man a run for the number-one summer blockbuster crown. (UPDATE: So far it's not pulling little kids in the numbers it would need to accomplish that.)

Here's Lechner's query. Readers, any ideas?

Having seen and loved WALL-E, I find myself wondering whether anyone else in the entire history of cinema -- a production company, a studio, a star, a writer, a director -- has ever made nine great movies in a row; nine big hits in a row; or, especially, nine great movies in a row that were also hits.

Every one of my personal cinematic heroes -- Wilder, Bergman, Altman -- had a strikeout now and then. Woody Allen never made nine winners in a row; nor did Hitchcock, Ford, Truffaut, or Godard. Even Mr. Consistency, Eric Rohmer, never made nine greats in a row, at least to my taste. (If you take "The Decalogue" as ten separate movies, then Kieslowski's streak is off the charts -- but since only two of the ten episodes can function as stand-alone feature films, I don't think it counts.) I've never seen AIR FORCE; if it's great, then Howard Hawks at least ties Pixar with a nine-film streak from BRINGING UP BABY to RED RIVER. But if it isn't, then all bets are off.

In recent years, Alexander Payne has made four great movies in a row -- but can he keep it up for another five? Rob Reiner's first seven films were all aces in my book -- but then there's NORTH. I know Armond White will readily testify on behalf of Spielberg's last nine films (which would take us back to AMISTAD) -- but I hated WAR OF THE WORLDS as much as I loved MUNICH. Tom Hanks had a twelve-film streak of massive hits from A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN to CAST AWAY, if you don't count THAT THING YOU DO -- but why wouldn't you? And then there are the actors -- Jeff Bridges snaps to mind -- who give consistently great performances in film after film, but not always in great films.

Unless you or your readers can come up with a rival, I'm betting that Pixar is having the single most impressive streak of all time.

The trick here is to recognize that Pixar thrives on teamwork, much as the old studios did. But Pixar releases one movie a year, which takes about four years to make. The entire team works on every movie, even if one or two people get director credit. Wall-E's Andrew Stanton also wrote and directed Finding Nemo. Here's animation expert Peter Debruge's Pixar story for Popular Mechanics.com.

Remember Michael Arndt, the screenwriter who delivered Little Miss Sunshine right off the bat? He went to work for Pixar because they boast the best writers of original screenplays in the film business. John Lasseter understood from the start that story had to be wed with huge entertainment value, family-friendly accessibility, great characters, as well as huge craftsmanship on the animation side.

Go up to visit Pixar--as I have several times, since my first feature in EW on Toy Story--and you see toys and bicycles and gizmos and artwork everywhere. It is a magical fun place. They work hard and play hard.

Hollywood could learn from them. The current thinking about the studios' future involves cutting back on production. Frank Price, the ex-studio head at Columbia and Universal, once said you couldn't produce and release more than fifteen quality movies a year. Disney is doing better since it cut back on production.

Lasseter has long been compared to Walt Disney. Did Disney ever have as long a winning streak? Perhaps the Disney studio in its prime under Walt?

Wall-E may replace Finding Nemo as my favorite Pixar film. Maybe it's because I love dystopian sci-fi, Charlie Chaplin, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and a fine musical romance. Wall-E reminds us of how much we humans have to lose. Plucky robot trash compactor Wall-E, at the start of the "silent" section of the film (sound magician Ben Burtt gives him a voice), has become the collector of human valuables after we have abandoned our garbage-pile planet.

One Variety colleague told me that she was trying to figure out why the movie moved her so much. She decided that the love between the robots was so pure, that it reminded her what love really was. When was the last time a movie did that? And the movie musical Hello Dolly! is the agent of their romance!

Here are links to past reports from Debruge:
from Comic-Con 2007, where Burtt made a presentation.

Pixar Exclusives.

[Photo Ben Burtt courtesy LAT]

Mike Jones took his flip phone to the LAFF Q & A with Guillermo del Toro while I went to an HBO doc party (Sheila Nevins! The Reeler! Sasha Alpert! Marina Zenovich!).

Here's Part One on Hellboy 2:

Here's Part Two on The Hobbit:

Documentary filmmaker, screenwriter and blogger A.J. Schnack strikes back at John Horn's recent death to docs piece in the LAT.

The indie crisis continues as U.K. distrib Tartan Films is shutting down. UPDATE: This distrib released many of the edgier pics out there, including one of the best films of recent years, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (below), which few people ever saw.

Here's Variety:

U.K. distrib Tartan Films has finally shuttered. Sources told Variety that Tartan employees found the London office doors closed Thursday June 26 and were then informed later in the day by Tartan topper Hamish McAlpine the company was closed for business.

Speculation over the future of Tartan has been rife for several months. The distrib was believed to be in takeover talks with David Bergstein of the Capco Group, the firm that owns ThinkFilm, a stake in I.M. Global as well as the U.K.'s Capitol Film and has itself been plagued by rumors of financial troubles, for much of last year before negotiations broke down following disagreements over Tartan's financial worth.

Last October Tartan announced it had received a cash injection of £3 million ($6.2 million) in the form of a convertible loan from a private investor and also had restructured its Brit operation, with managing director Laura De Casto ankling. The company's theatrical and home entertainment departments, previously run out of separate London offices, were also merged into one entity based at Tartan's head office.

Tartan USA, the company's U.S. arm, announced at this year's Cannes that it was being foreclosed. Film print and advertising financing company Palisades Media Corp. has since bought the U.S. rights to its library.

UPDATE: McAlpine is a hard-driving, colorful figure who once inspired director Larry Clark to deck him one in London in 2002. Here's the LA Weekly. Presumably the Tartan Asia Extreme library was also sold to Palisades. Here's Cinematical.

ThinkFilm faces an uncertain future. While David Bergstein, the embattled financeer also behind Capco, Capitol Films in London and foreign sales company ThinkFilm International, has been expecting to close a bridge loan with Britain’s Aramid Entertainment Fund, ThinkFilm prexy Mark Urman is weathering a storm of negative PR from angry vendors and filmmakers who have not been paid and have gone public with lawsuits.

Filmmaker Alex Gibney (above), in particular, while he managed to get ThinkFilm to pay certain minimums and a $50,000 Oscar bonus for his film Taxi to the Dark Side, is now using the courts to try to win $1 million and distribution rights to his Oscar-winning torture doc. “Having won the Oscar we were perfectly positioned to make a national impact with a post-theatrical release,” Gibney wrote me in an e-mail. "But ThinkFilm utterly failed to capitalize on its success. We have since learned that Think didn’t have the financial resources to properly exploit the film.”

By all accounts, while library-builder Bergstein has long held a reputation for poorly managing “distressed” enterprises, ThinkFilm was “funky,” as one employee put it, ever since its formation seven years ago. When Bergstein bought it in October 2006 for $18 million plus $5 million in debt, the specialty distrib only got fudgier. When the Toronto office was shut down recently, four years of unpaid minimum guarantees on several straight-to-video films were revealed.

Bergstein has too many fingers in too many pies. He has plowed tens of millions of dollars that could have been used to pay ThinkFilm’s bills into such pictures as The Wendell Baker Story, which flopped, the Jennifer Lopez film Bordertown, which went straight to video, the genre film Bad Meat, Taylor Hackford’s Love Ranch, and David O. Russell’s Nailed, the film production from hell, which has been shut down four times for not meeting its payroll. “Millions of dollars go into the bank from The Devil Knows You’re Dead,” says one ThinkFilm exec. “Then it evaporates and we can’t pay our bills. All our money went to David O. Russell. The walls keep moving, the writing changing. We owe so many people so much money.”

Aramid or no Aramid, no matter how many times deal-junkie Bergstein has pulled money out of thin air, bankrupcy looms over the house of cards that Bergstein built.

What ThinkFilm has experienced—more money going out for minimum guarantees and prints and ads than comes back in—is typical of the indie sector, where you must wait years for ancillary revenues to trickle back. Frenchman Philippe Martinez came to Hollywood with an ambitious plan to release such films as David Ayer’s Harsh Times, but he crashed and burned. Businessman Sidney Kimmel has made some terrific movies, from Lars and the Real Girl to Synecdoche, New York, but he has reduced his production company by half, and made an unfortunate distribution deal with MGM, which is not equipped to handle delicate speciialty fare. Real estate mogul Bob Yari, who financed the sleeper hits Crash and The Illusionist but has been under financial duress since starting his own distribution company, is also expected to leave the film business. Whether he will pay all his bills is unclear.

That this state of affairs is allowed to exist in the indie world is astonishing. Vendors wait months if not years to get paid, knowing they will probably have to sue for their livelihood. One ThinkFilm vendor who hasn't been paid since last August is owed in the six figures. Gibney is outraged, trying to fight a broken system and win back rights to his film before it enters financial limbo.

On the other hand, it isn't every day that an indie company does everything right and wins an Oscar. ThinkFilm has done it several times. And it is highly unlikely that Taxi to the Dark Side would be able to earn much more than it did under the current dark moon hovering over the indie sector.

UPDATE: Gibney and other sources say there were plans to do a proper post-Oscar release, utilizing orgs like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, which would have enhanced the movie's video value. The movie ended up with a drastically curtailed brief booking in one theater, and ThinkFilm lost the film's website.

See also stories in New York Times and Indiewire. UPDATE: ThinkFilm is dropping out of distributing Momma's Man.

When Warner Bros. shuttered Picturehouse and Warner Independent, it allowed Picturehouse's Bob Berney to release all three of the films he had ready to go: this summer both Mongol and Kit Kittredge: American Girl are showing surprising b.o. strength. And The Women is coming up in October.

On the other hand, unfortunately for WIP, the parent studio is taking over the August release of Alan Ball’s emigre drama Towelhead, a coming-of-age film with challenging sexual content that will need delicate handling, as well as Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, which was scheduled for November.

Some WIP staffers have already left the lot; the balance are expected to exit on Aug. 15 (when WIP prexy Polly Cohen will likely open her own Warners prod shingle). Marketing head Laura Kim is working on the films for now (and fielding many inquiries about her next move). Warners will pick over the development slate, including such once-sizzling-hot projects as Tom Perrotta’s The Abstinence Teacher, with Little Miss Sunshine directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris attached, which will likely go into turnaround.

Here's the Towelhead trailer:

Todd McCarthy wrote his rave of Pixar's latest, Wall-E, late Wednesday night. Here's MCN critic Michael Wilmington. UPDATE: And Rotten Tomatoes rates the pic 97 % fresh. Wow.

Nobody does it better than Pixar. I went to see it Tuesday night but the traffic around Hollywood Boulevard was so impenetrable that I had to give up and turn around. ARRGH! I'll see it this weekend. Fantasy Moguls predicts a boffo opening.

Here's Todd's bullet-graph:

Pixar's ninth consecutive wonder of the animated world is a simple yet deeply imagined piece of speculative fiction. Despite the decade-plus since its inception, "WALL-E" is a film very much of its moment, although in a cheeky, uninsistent way; it has plenty to say, but does so in a light, insouciant manner that allows you to take the message or leave it on the table. Adroitly borrowing from many artistic sources and synthesizing innumerable influences, Pixar stalwart Andrew Stanton's first directorial outing since "Finding Nemo" walks a fine line between the rarefied and the immediately accessible as it explores new territory for animation, yet remains sufficiently crowd-pleasing to indicate celestial B.O. for this G-rated summer offering.

Paramount Pictures will not be putting on any panels or bringing any stars to Comic-Con this year. They may do some viral stuff. But their big "geek" titles G.I. Joe, J.J. Abrams' Star Trek, Michael Bay's Transformers 2 and M. Night Shyamalan's The Last Airbender won't be released until 2009. Last year Paramount kicked off Iron Man at the Con, which played big there. "The timing was off this year," said one Paramount spokesman.

UPDATE: As Slashfilm points out, Paramount was a major presence at the 2007 Comic-Con, with not only Iron Man but Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Beowulf and Cloverfield.

Cinematical has more info on what the other studios are doing.

UPDATE: Paramount spokesman Mike Vollman just called me to say: "We have a vibrant and exciting schedule of activities planned for Comic-Con." The studio will be unveiling a number of marketing materials on these pics.

One interesting note on the 105 new members invited into the Motion Picture Academy this week: they include 72 men and 33 women.

As DreamWorks continues to seek financing for its planned reincarnation as a standalone independent company, two scenarios for the company’s future are emerging. Here's my Variety story.

Word is, DreamWorks is trying to raise $1 billion in equity and another $1 billion in debt so they can produce eight pictures a year. That would give Stacey Snider a bigger slate. And Dreamworks could allocate pictures to more than one studio, likely Paramount and Universal, so there'd be no nasty custody battle over the pics that were developed at Paramount.

What will happen, for example, to The 39 Clues, the new book DreamWorks just acquired, possibly for Spielberg to direct?

After Viacom bought DreamWorks SKG in early 2006 for $1.6 billion, Paramount and DreamWorks squabbled over credit for such hits as Dreamgirls, Norbit and Transformers. A sequel to the Michael Bay film is currently shooting, scheduled for release in summer 2009.

Raising more money would also mean that DreamWorks would not be solely involved with Indian company Reliance, whose topper, Anil Ambani (son of the industrialist on whom the Bollywood hit Guru was based), has expressed a desire for hands-on involvement with his Hollywood interests. That $500-600 million deal has not been closed. Some wonder if wily negotiator David Geffen has something else up his sleeve.

“Now India is owning DreamWorks?” asks one skeptical agency head, who questioned the idea that Spielberg would ever be willing to discuss his work with a Hollywood outsider.

Based on seeing Hancock the other night, I can tell you this. Todd McCarthy's early negative review will be one of many. The knives are out, and they are sharp. When this movie opens July 2, it will be eviscerated.

But because Will Smith is in what I call the Fluke Zone, the movie will open great over the 4th of July weekend (five-day estimates are from $80 to 100 million), and will do robust business. But it won't be one of the top-grossers of the summer, because it is unlikely to please everybody, or generate repeat biz. It could do better overseas.

It's a movie that tried to be smart and weird and interesting, with gifted filmmakers behind it: producers Michael Mann and Akiva Goldsman (who do cameos), edgy screenwriter Vince Gilligan (Breaking Bad), and director Peter Berg (Friday Night Lights, The Kingdom).

They created a fascinating damaged, alcoholic, homeless superhero, well-played by Smith, but their attempts to mix and match smart character-based drama (Charlize Theron and Jason Bateman also star) with superhero action adventure (VFX by Sony Pictures Imageworks) is a Frankenstein's Monster.

These are not cynical people. I don't know who to blame, so I'll start with the budget. If the movie cost, as I have been told, from $150 million (Sony's claim) to a rumored $180 million, then Sony and investor Relativity Media may have a tough time getting their money back. Studio-think dictates that you take elements like these filmmakers and Smith and spend tons of money on a big big movie. Which means the risk has to go down, and what's interesting and strange has to be mitigated by the usual series of second act action sequences that someone like Spielberg knows how to pull off without getting dopey, but this group could not.

Another problem, as Rachel Abramowitz points out, is superhero overload. Watch for Hancock's second weekend drop-off. If it's more than 60%, the movie could be in trouble.

Needless to say, media coverage of the Indie Film Crisis is entering crisis proportions itself. Here are more weigh-ins on the subject beyond Mark Gill, in case you want to dive into more depth on the subject. UPDATE: Here's my indie wrap-up.

Carrie Rickey.

Film School Rejects.

Patrick Goldstein.

Andrew O'Hehir in Salon.

David Poland.

UPDATE: Indiewire has more links and responses from producer Ted Hope and others.

As a sign of the times, City Lights Entertainment is making Hector Babenco's Oscar-winning film Kiss of the Spider Woman available as an exclusive-to-rent or download on Amazon Unbox. It's well worth checking out.

Kiss of the Spider Woman was adapted by Leonard Schrader from the 1976 novel El Beso de la Mujer Arana by Manuel Puig. William Hurt won the Oscar as a man who unexpectedly learns to love another prisoner (Raul Julia) in a Latin American jail. Kiss of the Spider Woman, produced by David Weisman, was the first indie to nab four top Oscar noms, including best picture and best director for Hector Babenco.

There's also a new doc, Tangled Web: Making Kiss of the Spider Woman, available on DVD or Unbox download. You can now rent the pic from Amazon Unbox for $2.99 for 30 days, or download to own for $9.99. Or wait until July 22 to get the Standard Definition and Blu-ray Special-Edition DVDs.

Rocknrolla, Guy Ritchie's latest foray into the tough-guy Brit underground, could go either way. Gerard Butler is back in post-300 muscle-mode, and Tom Wilkinson can do no wrong. Then there's this logic: since both Ritchie and producer Joel Silver badly need a hit right now, maybe they'll deliver the goods on this one.

This fascinating Charlie Rose interview with the three amazing brothers Emanuel--doctor Ezekiel, who has written a radical book on healthcare, Democratic congressional powerhouse Rahm, and Ari, the hard-charging, politically-passionate head of Hollywood agency-on-the-rise Endeavor--reveals that Ari, who is the model for Ari Gold on HBO's Entourage, is sweet and respectful to his impressive siblings. The three were raised with high standards in Chicago by demanding Jewish parents, who asked them to argue their cases at the dinner table with bravado and authority, and sent them to Israel every summer. Our children should all do so well.

Rahm, a frequent visitor on Charlie Rose, is a real charmer on video. He could go far...

The folks at Wired have posted a nice juicy Dark Knight production story/Chris Nolan interview. I'm working on seeing the movie--there's an L.A. junket this weekend--where they will be screening the pic in IMAX for folks who are doing interviews at the junket. I tend to stay away from junkets, roundtables etc. But I want in!

UPDATE: They're overbooked for the screening, actually turning people who thought they were coming away. The IMAX rooms are smaller than usual, it seems. :-(

They'll let us into their trade screening next week, they say. And meanwhile Rolling Stone has what Richard Roeper would call an "early review." It's a rave.

At the recent Provincetown Film Fest, Quentin Tarantino talks about finishing up Inglorious Bastards, his spaghetti western/World War II script. When I saw him in Cannes, he was still refining it. Easily distracted, Tarantino likes to take time between projects to let his mind breathe. But once he gets over the hump of starting something, he goes away somewhere on his own, like Amsterdam, and writes undisturbed, on yellow legal pads, longhand, in pencil.

The question on Inglorious Bastards is one of length. At one time the script, which Tarantino has been working on intermittently for many years, was huge. I asked Tarantino at the recent Warren Beatty AFI gala how long the pic would be. He said he's aiming to deliver the movie at Pulp Fiction length (154 minutes). (He presumably learned his lesson from Grindhouse, which failed at the b.o. as a three-hour double feature.) Pulp Fiction recently landed on top of EW's new top 100 list.

Tarantino is one of most fortunate writer-directors in Hollywood. While other filmmakers white-knuckle their way from project to project, hoping to finance their fantasies and get them up on screen just the way they want them--which never happens--Tarantino can count on long-time mentor/patron Harvey Weinstein to be there for him. As soon as the director is ready, he gets a greenlight, and can move forward into production. He wants to get Inglorious Bastards shot and finished by Cannes 2009.

Let's just hope The Weinstein Co., which will eventually emerge from its disastrously cynical pay-TV/distribution deal with MGM, will survive-- if only to keep backing Tarantino.

Emma Thompson, always witty and a better writer than most, fills out Vanity Fair's Proust Questionnaire.

Film vet blogger Jonathan Taplin goes after the fools who rush in to invest in Hollywood's Golden Goose.

Someone walking on the Universal lot picked up a piece of flotsam and it turned out to be a burnt, charred but recognizable frame from Back to The Future--one of the prints lost in the recent Universal Fire.

Years ago a screenwriter pal of mine, Steven Axelrod, introduced me to the idea of the Fluke Zone. I never forgot it--and brought it back for this week's column. Here's the short version:

The Fluke Zone is a place where a movie star (or director or writer) can do no wrong. Audiences love you no matter what you do. Many stars fall out of the Fluke Zone when they lose touch with their fans. They tire of the limitations of carrying formula studio pics. Audiences see a star in the Zone as someone who delivers every time.

The trick is to stay in the Zone as long as possible. Many try, but few are chosen.

Looking at this summer's movies, there's only one star in the Zone: Will Smith.

The hardest-working man in showbiz is doing what it takes: picking blockbusters crammed with f/x and action such as the Independence Day and Men in Black series, I Robot and I Am Legend, along with the occasional acting showcase, from the career-turning Six Degrees of Separation and Ali to his Oscar-nommed turn in The Pursuit of Happyness. And Smith, borrowing a page from Cruise and Schwarzenegger, works long hours burnishing his press on global promo tours. All that elbow grease has paid off.

This summer, in Peter Berg's Hancock, Smith plays a homeless superhero. Will his B.O. run continue? Nothing lasts forever.

It's even tougher for women. While men grow into their masculine authority, reaching their prime in their 40s, women have a shorter shelf life in the Zone. Hollywood doesn't allow them much room for error. But Angelina Jolie is breaking the mold. Jolie is Hollywood's first bonafide femme action star. Jolie mixes it up with the best of them. She can be tough, sexy, lethal, funny and heartbreaking, from her career-making Oscar turn in Girl, Interrupted to Mr. & Mrs. Smith, in which she met her match and partner, Brad Pitt.

While Jolie's output is uneven, she can open genre flicks, forging a path for ambitious actresses to follow. Universal paid her $15 million to return to action in the fantastical R-rated thriller Wanted, anchoring the pic with Morgan Freeman opposite the lesser known James McAvoy (Atonement). While Jolie is not in the Zone -- A Mighty Heart proves that -- she could be.

Many critics have compared writer-director M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening to Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds. It's no secret that Shyamalan is a fan of the master of psychological horror.

What The Happening and The Birds have in common is also what made The Day After Tomorrow so effective: they tap into our fear that after messing with Mother Nature, she will turn on us. The idea behind The Happening, that trees and plants will revolt to protect themselves from humans, is chilling.

Given all the movie choices this freakily hot weekend, David, Nora and I agreed to see The Happening. My theory: we didn't know exactly what we'd be getting (which is good) but we figured it would be well-made, scary fun, and not dopey. Shyamalan is an original: he's not playing by studio formula rules, so his movies have a directorial stamp and personality.

In an ideal world, someone would tell him that Mark Wahlberg, while he is a likable everyman, can be stiffly unheroic, even whiney. And the scene when the grass comes whipping across the field in a line incites laughter (at least in me). But I screeched obediently during the Psycho-sequence with the deliciously over-the-top Betty Buckley.

In short, we got exactly what we expected. It's too bad that the right smart people didn't come together to make this movie even better. I suspect that's Shyamalan's fault; he doesn't seem open to other people's input. He's got to be the smartest man in the room.

Nora suggested that the stuff that didn't work was the R-rated material. I agree. Shyamalan seems uncomfortable with yucky spurting limbs. Interestingly, the director raised some funds from India on this picture, which was also produced by his long-time partners at Spyglass. (Asian investment in Hollywood is the wave of the future.)

Universal, Mandalay and Platinum Dunes, Michael Bay's company, are developing a remake of Hitchcock's The Birds; Martin Campbell and Naomi Watts are attached. I'm of two minds. It could go so wrong (they've already been through an impressive list of writers). On the other hand, with visual effects, it could be terrifying.

Here's Jodie Foster as The Birds' Tippi Hedron (who always resembled a Barbie doll) in Vanity Fair. And Mattel has created a new The Birds Barbie. Here's their sell:

Based on the classic movie! Includes real fake birds! High-quality head looks scared and has awesome hair!

I finally caught up with JK Rowling's June 5 commencement address at Harvard:

The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination JUNE 5, 2008

Copyright of JK Rowling, June 2008

President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, proud parents, and, above all, graduates.

The first thing I would like to say is ‘thank you.’ Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honour, but the weeks of fear and nausea I’ve experienced at the thought of giving this commencement address have made me lose weight. A win-win situation! Now all I have to do is take deep breaths, squint at the red banners and fool myself into believing I am at the world’s best-educated Harry Potter convention.

Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can’t remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.

You see? If all you remember in years to come is the ‘gay wizard’ joke, I’ve still come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step towards personal improvement.

Actually, I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today. I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own graduation, and what important lessons I have learned in the 21 years that has expired between that day and this.

I have come up with two answers. On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure. And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called ‘real life’, I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination.
These might seem quixotic or paradoxical choices, but please bear with me.

Mark Gill of The Film Department, ex-of Warner Independent and Miramax, is one of those film execs journalists like to call because he's articulate, witty, observant, and actually has an overview of the business. He put all this to good use in his keynote speech, "Yes, the Sky Really is Falling," Saturday for the LAFF film financing conference. It's all here if you want to plow through it; he's on the mark.

Unfortunately, most of the folks trying to make indie movies these days, as was revealed at my film financing panel Saturday (including producer Cathy Schulman, ICM's Hal Sadoff and New Bridge Capital's Danny Mandel), seem to be trying to make genre thrillers with someone on the list of not-too-costly actors between the age of 20 and 30 who foreign sales agents want to sell in territories around the world (where interest in American product seems to be drying up). Quality dramas are a no-go, said Schulman, although that's what she's trying to make at Mandalay Indie. And the surviving specialty distribs are strictly cherry-picking. You might get your movie made. But it might go straight-to-video. And it wouldn't be worth as much as it might have been a few years ago. UPDATE: Here's Carrie Rickey's thoughtful feature on the state of the indies in The Philly Inquirer. And here are reactions to Gill's speech from Patrick Goldstein (on his new LAT blog) and MCN's David Poland.

Gill is arguing for quality, too:

“Yes, The Sky Really Is Falling.” Mark Gill , CEO, The Film Department Keynote Speech L.A. Film Festival Financing Conference 6/21/08

Good morning.

Last week, an old friend who is a director called to catch up. It almost seemed as if he was seeking reassurance.

“You good?” he asked.

My answer was simple: “How good can I be? I work in independent film.”

He laughed. And then he wondered aloud: “Do you think maybe Chicken Little was right—I mean, about independent film.”

Leave it to a director to hope Chicken Little might be a cinephile.

And again, my answer was simple: “Yes, the sky really is falling.”

The last thing I heard him say was “I have to go throw up now.”

Unfortunately, he’s not alone in that feeling these days.

I know I don’t have to repeat all the ways that the independent film business is in trouble. But I’m going to do it anyway—because the accumulation of bad news is kind of awe-inspiring:

1: Picturehouse and Warner Independent have been shut down.

2: New Line’s staff was cut by 90 percent, and the survivors were sent to hell...I mean...Burbank.

3: Paramount Vantage was folded into the mother ship (this one may not be all bad news, by the way, but it still scares the hell out of independent film people).

4: Sidney Kimmel shrunk his company in half.

5: ThinkFilm is being sued for not paying its advertising bills, even as the unions repeatedly close down their David O. Russell production with the prophetic title “Nailed” for failure to meet weekly payroll.

[Photo of Mark Gill courtesy IndieWire]

The LA Film Fest opened with the premiere Thursday night of Universal's Wanted, followed by a Westwood block party. Spirits were high, because the smart director's showcase played.

Wanted is a stylish R-rated, violent adaptation of the comic books by Mark Millar and J. G. Jones. Producer Marc Platt matched up the comics with a series of screenwriters (Michael Brandt & Derek Haas and Chris Morgan) and director Timur Bekmambetov, the established Russian auteur of the stylized, over-the-top horror thriller Nightwatch and its Daywatch sequel, huge hits. Bekmambetov doesn't just do action, he said last night, smiling slyly. He also released a recent hit romantic comedy.

Bekmambetov's WMA agent Mike Simpson was over the moon because this is the kind of director Hollywood studios fantastize about--a Tim Burton with visual flair who can do action. Bekmambetov could do a Mission: Impossible or Bourne movie (that's Universal) if he wanted to. It was Universal that had the guts to put him on a $100-million actioner (Universal's official budget is $80 million)--and lured reliable stars Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman to support James McAvoy. The ads sell Jolie, who's terrific, but McAvoy carries his third American-accented picture--sans dialogue coach. He gives the movie a believable center. And yes, these people are playing actual characters. The movie breathes.

And it delivers action on a Bourne or Matrix level.

Suspension of disbelief is required. But the direction is so controlled, precise, detailed and inventive that you go for the ride. Bekmambetov has another plus: his own visual effects house in Russia, like Peter Jackson does in Wellywood. The f/x by Bazelevs are superb. Jolie and McAvoy skip along elevated subways, do metal-bending aerial car stunts, and boast special skills that enable them to alter the laws of gravity. SPOILER ALERT: Just when I was wondering when they'd stop working so hard and get sexy, the movie delivers a major kiss. And there's a stunning train derailment off a mountain abyss.

Assuming Wanted plays widely when it opens June 27 (a lot of arguments Thursday night were about whether it was a two-or-four-quadrant movie), McAvoy is signed up for two sequels. But, he predicts, "There won't be more than one. I don't want to do action movies." Bekmambetov was mum about whether he would return. (They will likely have to pay him.) He's setting up something called Saga, I hear. (Is it a movie version of the videogame?)

Here's Variety's review.

Universal could have a big summer. Marvel's remake of The Incredible Hulk dropped dramatically on its second weekend, but should be steady as they go. Next up is Guillermo del Toro's $100-million sequel, Hellboy II: The Golden Army, which closes the LA Film Fest. The movie musical Mamma Mia! has global pull with women thanks to its long-touring theater show. And Rob Cohen's $170-million (official studio budget is $150 million) reinvention of the Mummy franchise, The Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, shot in China with Brendan Fraser, Jet Li, Michelle Yeoh and an army of Terra Cotta warriors, opens in August. A test screening this week yielded a positive AICN posting.

What these movies have in common--and this will be an interesting test of what the box office will bear--is that "they all know exactly what they are," says Universal co-chairman Marc Shmuger, "and who they're for."

Bravo to the Academy for making the long called-for tweaks in the Oscar rules for songs and foreign films. Now only two songs per film can get nominated, which would avoid what happened last year when three nommed songs for the Disney musical Enchanted knocked each other out.

After a concerted reform push by producer Mark Johnson, the Academy also approved a new selection process for the foreign language category, reports Variety.

The only other significant change involves the procedure for the foreign-language film voting. It's still a two-phase process. Now, the phase one committee will vote to determine only six of the nine films that will ultimately go to the phase two committee. The other three titles will be determined by members of the 20-person foreign-language film award executive committee. The executive committee's selections will be made after the phase-one voting has been tallied.

This would give the foreign language exec committee a chance to fill in a less popular but deserving title like last year's Palme d'Or winner Four Months, Three Weeks, Two Days, which was overlooked by the foreign film branch.

Netflix subscribers are complaining that the DVD rental service has cut back on its consumer-friendly profile service, reports SiliconValley.com. Families used to be able to have mutliple profiles under one account. No more.

Mike Myers has a problem. It's been five years since his last picture, the over-the-top bomb Cat in the Hat, which sent me fleeing from the theater (something I rarely do). Myers has scored in the Shrek movies, but that's not going to keep him in the $20-million zone to which he has become accustomed. This weekend The Love Guru, which is projected to open behind Get Smart, will prove whether or not Myers still has a love connection with moviegoers. As of Friday, Rotten Tomatoes is ranking Get Smart at 54% fresh with film critics, while The Love Guru is at 14 % rotten.

There's a theory in Hollywood that karma really does follow you around, no matter who you are. While it's true that the studios tend to reward bad behavior like indulgent parents, especially with talent---he who shouts loudest tends to get his way--things do have a way of coming around. When the world turned against former CAA czar Mike Ovitz, there weren't a lot of people coming to his defense. His Disney nemesis Michael Eisner has never inspired warm and fuzzy feelings either. Meanwhile the schadenfreude is thick around Warners producer Joel Silver, who is having a run of bad luck at the boxoffice.

EW goes after Myers' reputation for being difficult in this cover profile:

Still, the fact is, within Hollywood, not everyone is cheering for Myers to succeed. Since early in his career the actor has been tagged with a reputation for being difficult to work with: moody, controlling, and arrogant. That description could, of course, fit many actors and filmmakers, but the degree of enmity directed toward Myers by some who've worked with him — even years after the fact — is rare. Says one executive who has had a rocky relationship with Myers: ''I honestly root against him.'' Penelope Spheeris, who directed Myers in his first film, the 1992 smash Wayne's World, says she has shared war stories with others who've worked with the actor. ''Maybe he could open, like, a children's hospital to clean up his rep,'' she jokes darkly. ''He's got to do something pretty quick.''

Here's Variety's review, which basically recommends the movie as dumb comedy for 13-year-old boys. UPDATE: My column this week explores how hard it is for stars like Myers to stay in The Fluke Zone. Biting reviews like this one by John Anderson won't help:

Mike Myers isn't the Antichrist, exactly. But he is anti-comedy -- if one believes comedy ought to be smart, new, surprising, or, yes, funny. This isn't an accusation. It's been Myers's shtick for a long, long time: Jokes that don't work, bad jokes, lame jokes, jokes that are 40 years old and jokes told by characters we should be feeling sorry for -- the chronically adolescent hero of "Wayne's World," for instance, or the deluded hipster of "Austin Powers." Losers lacking Chaplinesque pathos. Misshapen social cogs without the virtue of an interesting angle.

In short, Mike Myers's oeuvre is about sympathy laughs, although it's not his on-screen persona we're feeling sorry for in "The Love Guru." It is, at long last, Myers himself.

Myers has been doing the PR rounds, with often delightful results. Here's his Barbra Streisand story on Shootout:

The Love Guru, he says, was inspired by Deepak Chopra: "It's a comedy. The best delivery system for ideas is silliness."

UPDATE: He was more uncomfortable on Jon Stewart Thursday night:

Media empire shakeups: Hearst and Hachette Filipacchi Media have both lost their chief execs. The NYT posits that Hearst CEO Victor F. Ganzi may have lost his job because he was investing in newspapers, heaven forfend, instead of expanding online. Hachette, which has also been slow to see the online future, has kicked CEO Jack Kliger upstairs to chairman, importing Alain Lemarchand from France to replace him. I worked for Kliger when I was at Premiere. Which means I hold him responsible for the demise of that mag.

Am I alone in believing that Hollywood and movie fans miss it? Stars don't get their cover stories. Movies don't get their production stories. EW, Empire, Vanity Fair and the NYT and LAT Sunday sections are what's left. Nicole Kidman touts Australia in Vogue, but that's not the target demo that Premiere was.

If Hachette had published it properly and moved online when they should have--seen online for the subscription booster and marketing tool that would save the mag--hell, they could have used the Premiere brand name as a movie destination web portal if they had been willing to spend a few pennies. All that Premiere content, all those celebrity profiles--all the traffic they could have had, sitting collecting dust. You can't even link to any Premiere mag stuff online. It's a tragic waste.

[Posted by David Cohen]

Yesterday's AP story on George Lucas's Red Tails, which is in pre-production, focused on the Tuskegee Airmen who will be the subject of the film, revealing that John Ridley is writing the script. There's been some speculation that Lucas might be returning to the director's chair.

According to Lucasfilm, Lucas is NOT directing Red Tails. As originally reported by Variety, he is an executive producer, with Rick McCallum and Charles Floyd Johnson producing. (Variety first mentioned the project back in 2006.) Ridley is writing. No other attachments yet, they say.

They have not started talking to distributors and aren't yet talking about their plans for financing. Lucas could pay for the whole thing out of his own pocket and barely miss it, but that doesn't mean he will.

Like so many other projects, they will push production back if there is a SAG strike.

And for those who are asking if a story about World War II airmen facing racism might appeal to a certain Lucas pal named Spielberg, known to have made movies that touch on African-American history and the Second World War now and then, be assured, we checked with Lucasfilm and he's never been involved with the project.

Picking the top 100 movie classics is an old trick from Premiere, Empire and the AFI, but hell, it works like a charm. Everyone loves weighing in on this stuff. Entertainment Weekly is sticking to the last 25 years--they know their audience.

UPDATE: Here's the Top Ten:

MOVIES
1. Pulp Fiction
2. The Lord of the Rings trilogy
3. Titanic
4. Blue Velvet
5. Toy Story
6. Hannah and Her Sisters
7. Saving Private Ryan
8. The Silence of the Lambs
9. Die Hard
10. Moulin Rouge

Several summer trends are good for the movie biz.

Ticket inflation means b.o. grosses are up. (Admissions are down.) The high price of gas is keeping folks closer to home: that's good for cineplexes. School is finally out for summer, which will boost midweek ticket sales. Theaters are charging more for concessions like popcorn (corn prices are up), and they're cleaning up on pre-show digital advertising.

Overseas, the dollar is weak. While it's a bitch to shoot a movie outside the U.S., because it costs more, on the other hand, it boosts overseas revenue.

The other side of that coin: when the dollar eventually gets stronger, the studios won't be able to count on that extra boost.

DreamWorks is nearing a financing deal with deep-pocketed Indian company Reliance, which has been looking to get into bed with Hollywood. Hollywood had expected Universal to be DreamWorks' likely future studio home, where partner Steven Spielberg has kept offices for decades.

On June 2, Peter Bart reported on his blog that DreamWorks was looking to leave Paramount and raise financing. Patrick Frater reports on Reliance and the sixth richest man in the world, Anil Ambani. Here are the LA Times and The Wall Street Journal.

The question is, who is going to be the future owner of Universal? GE's low stock price leaves the stability of Universal, which is well-run by Ron Meyer, Marc Shmuger and David Linde, in question. The studio is expecting a strong summer (led by Mummy 3, Hellboy 2 and Wanted). But that's irrelevant to Wall Street; analysts are rumbling that GE has lost so much value that the multi-conglomerate should shed some assets. Universal is the appendage that sticks out and looks like it doesn't belong with the electronic giant's other core businesses. It could be tough for Jeffrey Immelt to resist the tide of stockholders and investors who want the stock to surge again.

Immelt's the guy who lost DreamWorks in the first place by dragging his feet when Meyer could have made a deal. David Geffen then hastily took the deal to Paramount. DreamWorks was an excellent fit with Universal, which also lost Stacey Snider, then chairman of the studio under Meyer, when she followed Spielberg to Paramount. She's expected to be made a DreamWorks partner.

UPDATE: Some think that DreamWorks wants to buy Universal. But if Geffen wants to leave the business, why would he buy a major studio? Peter Bart weighs in.

J.J. Abrams has a new TV series coming up, written by Transformers writers Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, Fringe. It's due on Fox Tuesday nights in the fall. The two hour pilot alone cost $10 million.

It looks like Abrams could be going viral again to promote it. (Remember Lost and Cloverfield?) He's keeping folks guessing. UPDATE: The Fringe TV-press DVD screener has been leaked online.

Here's the nail-biting Fringe trailer (X-Files meets Lost meets Twin Peaks?):

Also coming up for Abrams, besides the reinvention of Paramount's Star Trek franchise (also with Kurtzman and Orci), is a project which the new John Lesher studio regime just scooped up, based on a NYT article published last Friday, writes Variety:

The studio has paid mid-six figures for a New York Times article written by Penelope Green about a Gotham home whose owners discovered secret panels and hidden clues that led them on a mystery-filled scavenger hunt.

Abrams will produce the film via his Par-based Bad Robot shingle. Maya Forbes and Wally Wolodarsky have been tapped to write.

The Fifth Avenue home, described as a giant '20s-era co-op with Central Park views, was gutted several years ago at the behest of a couple, who later moved in with their four children. An architectural designer who oversaw the rehab job left behind a series of messages, games and treasures, unbeknownst to the family, who eventually unraveled a mystery that featured a poem, a book, a soundtrack and a host of historical figures.

Frank Miller has taken an interesting approach to the look of the movie version of Will Eisner's The Spirit. He's making it contemporary with a film noir/Sin City graphic feel, without going totally retro with the comics' original look. Here's some art from the pic.

Nicole Kidman talks pregnancy, the rigors of shooting Baz Luhrmann's epic Australia, opposite Hugh Jackman, and other topics in Vogue.

UPDATE: Here's the article by John Powers.

Publisher McClatchy is cutting its work force by some 1400 jobs nationwide, reflecting the continuing declines in newspaper circulation.

Another reason consumers are letting their print subscriptions lapse in favor of online: they feel guilty about all the newsprint piling up. They want to be green, responsible non-tree-killing citizens. (Have you noticed all the TV ads promoting everything green?)

In Cannes I was struck by an edition of the LAT that was emailed as a PDF and printed out locally; just the sections we wanted. I love to browse my morning newspaper, but I routinely throw away all the sections I don't want to read. There must be some way to deal with this waste.

Of course I recycle all my LAT newsprint, and I keep my subscription because I believe in newspapers, I want to support the LAT. And I still want to read the paper every morning with my coffee. But especially the Sunday paper--all that bulk! Of course, it's the ads that keep the paper alive. The online ads bring in a fraction of the print ones. What is the solution?

I would subscribe at home to the NYT and WSJ as well if they wouldn't pile up like everything else these days. I don't really WANT to read these papers on my computer. But I am often frustrated when I read stuff in print form and have to remember it to find it again and link to it online. (One solution is to read the paper with my portable computer on hand.) I would happily browse the LAT in electronic book or Kindle form. (But I will never give up reading magazines and books.)

UPDATE: More critics are departing their established newspapers, leaving all their followers behind. Well-regarded Washington Post film critics Stephen Hunter and Desson Thomson have taken buyouts.

Paramount sent out a press release today (it's on the jump) proclaiming their billion dollar international gross at the the b.o., after only six months, which is a studio speed record.

But Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was a Lucasfilm production; Iron Man was Marvel; and Kung Fu Panda was DreamWorks Animation. Paramount did a great job distributing and marketing these pics, but did not make them. They will share a sliver of the rewards.

And while Nickelodeon's The Spiderwick Chronicles, Cloverfield and No Country for Old Men generated some modest returns overseas, most of the Brad Grey management team's other biggest hits have come from the DreamWorks side of the ledger--Michael Bay's Transformers and its follow-up, currently filming, are co-productions. And Mike Myers' Love Guru is not likely to be a huge overseas performer.

What happens when Spielberg and Geffen raise their big bucks (I'm hearing they're courting global funds as we speak) and split? Then it will be up to John Lesher and Brad Weston to soldier on.

M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening scored a dismal 20 % on Rotten Tomatoes; it opened decently, but critics had a field day giving the Philly filmmaker the shaft. Fox didn't screen the pic for me; they focused their efforts on a sharp marketing campaign. In this case, clearly, critics were not going to be their friend.

I'm curious to see the pic, because Shyamalan (SHA-MA-LAN) is an anomaly--a writer-director who makes an original every time out, and tunes into the beat of his own drummer, with occasionally risible results. He needs someone like Nina Jacobson, who when she was at Disney--before she gave him the feedback that led him to take Lady in the Water to Warners-- kept him on the right path.

Producer Scott Rudin worked with him once on The Village--in that case the often grandiose Shyamalan was so optimistic about that picture that he wanted Rudin to help him cast it upscale with the likes of Bill Hurt and Sigourney Weaver in hopes of landing a few Oscars.

I enjoyed The Village, while recognizing the ways that it could have been better. I've liked all of Shyamalan's films except Lady in the Water. They go off the rails in ways that could easily be tweaked at the script stage, or in the editing room. He seems to have a tin ear for where something too serious might go over the edge into unintended humor.

Shyamalan is the perfect example of the hazards of making these movies entirely on your own. Where he goes from here is another question. He needs a good producer he can trust, who will buffer him. Even the utterly independent Coen Brothers have a Rudin or Eric Fellner to interface with the studios for them.

The New Republic went out of its way to not review the movie.

Here's Variety.

MTV's Josh Horowitz twists the knife.

David Edelstein's New York Magazine review is hilarious.

Shyamalan talks to Cinematical.

UPDATE: In not surprising contrarian style, the NYT's Manohla Dargis is positive.

F/x master Stan Winston has died. He was 62.

Check out his website. Winston was an f/x pioneer who specialized in the live-action animatronic puppet end of things. On Jurassic Park, Steven Spielberg needed his slow-moving large-scale dinosaurs along with the CGI ones. Winston was at the top of his profession and participated in many of the ground-breaking f/x pics of his day, including James Cameron's Terminator 2, for which he won an Oscar. He was working on Cameron's Avatar when he died.

Here's a bit from the Variety obit:

Winston won visual effects Oscars for 1986's "Aliens, "1992's "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" and 1993's "Jurassic Park," for which he created animatronic dinosaurs that complimented the film's digitally-animated creatures. "Iron Man" visual effects supervisor John Nelson "Stan was the man when it came to making those kind of prosthetic effects, he was the guy. If you look at the litany of other good people in the business, they tend to be people who worked for Stan."

UPDATE: Here's Time's Richard Corliss.

Ricky Gervais cast Brit chum Karl Pilkington in his new caveman "high concept" comedy This Side of the Truth. Pilkington suspects Gervais wants him around to keep him amused. Judging from this hilarious on-set podcast, he may be right.

[Hat Tip: Underwire].

Will Apple win the tech wars?. Michael Arrington says Apple will flatten all.