Roman Polanski once told Charlie Rose how devilishly hard it is to get everything to go right on a movie. So many little things can turn a promising project into something that never quite gels. Going in, Cheri, a French/British/German co-production adapted by Christopher Hampton (Dangerous Liaisons) from the Colette novel, directed by Stephen Frears (The Queen) and starring Michelle Pfeiffer in the starring role of an aging courtesan, must have looked so tempting.

But several factors doomed this enterprise. While the English-language movie aimed at global audiences has long been a cinema staple, moviegoers now demand too much authenticity. J.J. Abrams on Lost, Mel Gibson and Quentin Tarantino are right. Go for the real language and slap on the subtitles. At least it's real.

While top European craftspeople did beautiful work on this film--the sets and costumes are exquisite--and Alexandre Desplat's score is the Frenchiest thing in the movie, if you put too many people from different countries into one milieu, something starts to go wrong. (Think Tetro.) Here, American actresses Pfeiffer and Kathy Bates don't quite match up with a cast of Brits, including the title character, Rupert Friend. Even the MGM classic Gigi, while patently stylized and shot on a back lot, offered real Frenchmen Maurice Chevalier and Louis Jourdan and singer/dancer Leslie Caron to sell the audience. It worked. Would such a confection work today? Hard to say.

Cheri has already opened to tepid reviews overseas. It might have been better in hindsight for the filmmakers to orchestrate the opening so that Miramax would launch the film stateside first, where it might have had a friendlier initial reception. So far reviews are OK.

Cinematical talks to Frears.

I had heard about Lisa Cholodenko's new movie, The Kids Are All Right, which she cowrote with Stuart Blumberg. (Michael Fleming runs the official start of production announcement here.) It's a great story: Julianne Moore and Annette Bening are long-time partners; each mothered a kid with sperm from the same anonymous donor. Doctor Bening has a brainy achiever girl (Mia Wasikowska), while designer Moore's son is a jock (Josh Hutcherson). He wants to meet his father (Mark Ruffalo) and talks his 18-year-old sister into getting permission to approach him. The father doesn't mind. But complications ensue when he gets involved with his son's mother.

I hear the script is very sexy. We'll see how much winds up in the indie movie, which started shooting in L.A. Tuesday. Cholodenko (High Art, Laurel Canyon) has great chops, but hasn't broken into the mainstream. One market niche the filmmakers can count on: the under-served lesbian audience will turn out in droves.

Oliver Parker's teen girls run amuck comedy St. Trinian's, an indie hit in the UK, is opening stateside August 28. Much as I admire the always brave and forthright Colin Firth, the wackily playful Russell Brand and Rupert Everett in drag, this could go either way:

I always loved the original, starring Alistair Sim in drag, The Belles of St. Trinian's:

This The Informant! trailer plays like Steven Soderbergh's tongue-in-cheek comedic bumbling Get Smart/Inspector Clouseau version of The Insider, basically. I want to see it.

David Hudson is departing his daily obsessive IFC blog. This leaves a hole, especially at film fests, when he'd aggregate all the best reviews on any given film. (He used to write the GreenCine daily blog). But he's planning something and it makes sense that the brainy Berlin-based blogger and cinephile wouldn't want to do that forever. All best to him. I feel the online cinelandscape shifting. So does IndieWire's Eugene Hernandez.

KTLA reports on TMZ news that Jackson is not the biological parent of his children, nor is ex-wife Debbie Rowe. And Us Weekly suggests that LA dermatologist Arnold Klein, who employed Rowe as a nurse, donated the sperm for Prince Michael 1 and Paris Michael? Is this credible? UPDATE: Rowe's attorney insists she is their biological mother.

UPDATE: The Daily Beast quotes an unnamed Jackson insider with a thesis: Jackson was trying to provoke a brief hospital visit to get out of starting his tour.

The Wall Street Journal digs into the issues surrounding Michael Jackson's will, which appears to have been made in 2002, and leaves out father Joseph Jackson. The late singer's three children are in their grandmother Katherine Jackson's custody until a July hearing. For now, Jackson's mother also has limited control of his assets, reports the LAT. Jackson's estate executors have been named. He is believed to owe $500 million, but his assets should cover that, leaving his estate with some $200 million. Also, his songs are selling like hotcakes. The funeral is still up in the air.

Time examines in grisly detail why Jackson has had two autopsies.

MTV reports on the drug sweep at Jackson's house.

UPDATE: People Magazine posts a video photo montage of Jackson's changing face. Watching a VH1 special the other night, I was reminded of the joy he brought to performing. Watch his face show not only changes from plastic surgery but increasing sadness.

In many ways watching Sacha Baron Cohen promote his new movie Bruno, from his GQ layout and MTV Awards Eminem stunt to the series of global premiere stunts, from London to L.A. to Sydney, is more fun than the movie itself. While his performance art gives us a bit of distance, in the movie Larry Charles and Baron Cohen push audiences way past their comfort zones. No matter how sophisticated or tough you think you are--straight, gay, male, female, young, old--it doesn't matter. Something in the movie will make you squirm. (Here's Todd McCarthy.)

Me? [SPOILER ALERT] I had less trouble with simulated gay sex between Bruno and his diminutive boyfriend, complete with various accessories and black squares covering penetration, than I did with a sequence at a real swingers party that ends with a giant nipple-ringed dominatrix whipping Baron Cohen as Bruno (he flees, naked, into the night). That, Charles told me, was real. And the MPAA granted this movie an R-rating--thanks to various snips and black squares over private parts (shades of Eyes Wide Shut). One Universal exec admitted that those squares had to be made bigger to get the R-rating and definitely made the images more, not less, disturbing.

If ever a movie has earned an NC-17 rating, this is it. Now that I've seen Bruno, which is politically incorrect, button-pushing, brilliant, diabolical, provocative, challenging and often very funny, I understand the reactions I've been getting: not, "you have to see this," "it's hilarious" or "it's going to be huge."

People tend to talk in subdued, muted terms about how the movie made them feel: uncomfortable. And that sort of word-of-mouth--despite whatever opening Universal manages to muster with its superb global marketing and awareness--will tamp down Bruno's potential box office. Of course, even if we Puritan Americans resist Bruno's crude charms, the rest of the world may embrace them. (Not so sure.)

When Bruno struts a rakish short-shorts Hasidic outfit in Israel and an outraged Jew chases him down the street, you watch with a mix of amusement and horror. For one thing, Baron Cohen demanded a reaction, and got it. He was fearless. He was in danger of starting a riot and had to run for his life (a shopkeeper had to harbor him until he could sneak into one of many getaway cars used during the shoot). The LAT's John Horn quotes Universal's Bruno production notes on how much danger the filmmakers courted while making Bruno. What will the adrenaline junkie do next to top this?

The Academy has invited 134 new members, many of them long overdue, from actor Hugh Jackman--who wasn't a member when he hosted the Oscars on February 22--and producer Paula Wagner to directors Danny Boyle and Henry Selick, execs Daniel Battsek and Joe Drake, and writers John August and Howard A. Rodman.

The full release is on the jump.

The New Yorker's Malcolm Gladwell uses his economic analytical chops on Wired editor Chris Anderson's Free: The Future of a Radical Price (Hyperion; $26.99) and gives us reason for hope. For one thing, YouTube makes no money. And iTunes does.

The NYT's David Carr wants Gladwell to give "a pat-down" to Buzzmachine blogger Jeff Jarvis' What Would Google Do?, which is a persuasively well-argued must-read. I concur.

UPDATE: Thanks to Mark, who supplied Anderson's response.

It's not surprising that new Paramount production head Adam Goodman took advantage of his DreamWorks insider status and nabbed a high-profile project, License to Steal, from the super-hot screenwriter-producing team Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci. This buy of an overtly commercial Salon feature about globe-trotting Repo men chasing luxury planes and boats was pursued by several top directors and producers. It signals that an inside-Hollywood pro is back in charge, and the once-quiet studio is back in buying mode. When Paramount put into turnaround projects such as John Carter of Mars and Twilight , that sent another signal: the studio didn't recognize potential franchises.

When I interviewed Kurtzman and Orci on Star Trek's opening day (below), I knew they were sitting on three likely summer hits: they wrote Star Trek and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and executive-produced The Proposal. Now they've turned into bonafide summer smashes. Star Trek has grossed $246 million domestic and $368 worldwide. The Proposal is chugging along at $69 million domestically, while Transformers came pretty close to breaking The Dark Knight's $203 million five day record, despite execrable reviews (audiences liked it more than critics). Michael Bay talks to Michael Fleming about his opening night rituals.

Next for Orci and Kurtzman: Cowboys and Aliens and the Star Trek sequel, which is keeping them up at night. And Paramount wants another Transformers, Brad Grey tells Ben Fritz. Sooner rather than later. (Bay told me he wanted to take a breather with something else. We'll see.)

The changing Oscar rules are still a hot topic these days. At an Academy screening of Cheri last weekend (more on that anon), some members wanted to be consulted, while others feel that the Board of Governors did its job. One member who sees everything and votes with the foreign branch doesn't care at all. Just who are the folks who vote for these crucial decisions? The Academy's official governors list is on the jump.

Variety editor-in-chief Tim Gray weighs in. So does the LAT's Patrick Goldstein, twice, the NYT's David Carr, Time's Richard Corliss, and In Contention's Kris Tapley. UPDATE: Here's The Envelope's Tom O'Neil.

A friend sent me this list of ten films from 1999:

All About My Mother

Being John Malkovich

Boys Don't Cry

Election

Eyes Wide Shut

Fight Club

Magnolia

The Matrix

The Talented Mr. Ripley

Topsy Turvy

Here are the five best picture candidates that year:

American Beauty

The Cider House Rules

The Green Mile

The Insider

The Sixth Sense

That year, the Academy voted for mainstream soft lobs down the middle over higher brow fare. Some of the movies on the long 1999 list (Fight Club, Eyes Wide Shut) were tainted by failure at the time (and look better in hindsight), while others came from directors who hadn't yet earned admission into the Academy insiders club. Boys Don't Cry earned a deserved Best Actress win for Hilary Swank. Others landed nominations in other categories.

What makes so many people uncomfortable is the unknown. How will it work? Were these monumental changes made for the right reasons (commerce, or art)? And will the changes achieve the desired goals? I totally approve of moving the honorary Oscars to a separate awards show, where everyone will get more time. And I will have to deal, I admit, with no longer being an Oscar expert. Ten movies vying for best picture levels the Oscar prognosticator playing field: now everybody knows nothing.

Universal is counting on one thing to open Michael Mann's Public Enemies: Johnny Depp. According to The Ulmer Scale, he's the second most popular movie star in the world, after Will Smith. That's based on his hugely successful roles as broadly comedic, over-the-top Captain Jack Sparrow in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. But while Sweeney Todd wouldn't have done as well without him, Depp can only move the needle so far.

Being a movie star means giving the audience what they want, most of the time. Even that doesn't seem to be working this summer, as movies starring Will Ferrell, Eddie Murphy and Christian Bale have stumbled at the b.o. While this may give the studios more leverage in reducing movie star salaries going forward, it doesn't solve the problem that Universal is facing right now--and studio co-chairman Marc Shmuger is circling in this revealing LAT story about the waning power of stardom. Do audiences want Depp as a fairly realistic, non-fantasy version of Depression-era bank robber John Dillinger?

Advance tracking for Public Enemies, which opens July 1, indicates that Depp has some star allure. But early reviews reveal that the movie is not populist fare. (Here's Variety and Time.) It's Mann's take on a familiar saga: outlaws on the lam, running out of time, relentlessly pursued by the Feds. Mann populates the movie with compelling actors, from Depp to Christian Bale as FBI-man Melvin Purvis, Billy Crudup as J. Edgar Hoover, Stephen Lang as a Texas Ranger and incomparable Oscar-winning French actress Marion Cotillard as Dillinger's beloved gun moll. She warms up the movie, thankfully, as the one person he cares about. While fitfully engaging, the movie is often flat as a pancake, no matter how hard Elliot Goldenthal's jazz-inflected score works to pump things up. Only in the last half hour, as Dillinger fights for his life as the Feds turn his one-time allies against him, does the movie tighten into a taut and riveting drama.

Mann has always been a modern filmmaker working at the forward edge of technology and style. His biggest misstep here is the same as the Wachowskis with Speed Racer. His pursuit of what interests him formally may leave audiences behind. He wanted to immerse us in the period, he told me, by shooting the picture in high-definition video. The Sony F23 allowed him to manipulate color in the camera, cinematographer Dante Spinotti told ICG Magazine. "You can't come back," he said. "In other words, we were not recording in a safe, comfortable way." Mann confessed to playing with a digital intermediate quite a bit, and was color-correcting up to the last minute before last week's LAFF premiere.

HD is clear, harsh, honest. It works fine in a contemporary setting like Collateral or Miami Vice. (Somehow, David Fincher, who attended the Public Enemies premiere last week, made period HD work in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Zodiac.) But when moviegoers watch a period film, no matter how authentically recreated, they aren't expecting it to look like this. There's something jarring about the way Public Enemies shoves us into the past. While Steven Soderbergh alienated folks by shooting The Good German using old-studio techniques, the way Mann shot Public Enemies calls attention to its modernity. (UPDATE: SpoutBlog's Karina Longworth also addresses the film's production values.)

Here are takeouts in the NYT and The Guardian. Depp does Letterman, and Universal provides a featurette:

Film Independent chief Dawn Hudson and new LAFF director Rebecca Yeldham were heaving sighs of relief at the sunny awards brunch at the Hammer Museum Sunday. While official figures are not in, sales of festival passes were down at this year's LAFF, but day-to-day ticket sales were brisk, with many sell-outs, Hudson said. While the various jury and audience award winners are listed on the jump, the real winners of the 10-day fest were the movies that picked up attention and possible distribution.

Winner of a jury acting prize for Shayne Topp, Suzi Yoonessi’s Dear Lemon Lima picked up the most buzz at the fest. Submarine's Josh Braun is repping the mother-daughter flick set in Alaska. (Photo right of cast and director at LAFF awards brunch.) The epistolary film is narrated by 13-year-old Vanessa (part-Yup'ik actress Savanah Wiltfong), who tweets her disappointment that Philip won an acting prize:

although I won snowstorm survivor, philip won the lead in my life story. I tried to reach for the stars, but all I got was melted ice cream.

Winner of the dramatic audience award, surprisingly, was Cyrus Nowrasteh's intense Iranian drama The Stoning of Soraya M., starring Shohreh Aghdashloo, which is in current release. The doc audience award went to Jeffrey Levy-Hinte's music movie Soul Power, which Sony Pictures Classics is releasing July 10.

The narrative jury prize winner was Ben Chace and Sam Fleischner (pictured) for Jamaica-set Wah Do Dem (What They Do). They worked nine months on the film, about a white kid who runs afoul of some Jamaicans, and hope to capitalize on their win to get a distribution partner and a music compilation album, they said.

Building on momentum from Sundance, Ondi Timoner's We Live in Public continues to grow a following. The film will play at the IFC Center in New York in August followed by LA and five other cities in September. Timoner wants to hire a high profile publicist to push the film for awards consideration and an Internet event as well. UPDATE: Abramorama (Anvil! The Story of Anvil) will handle the film's release.

Other docs played well, from Sundance hit No Impact Man, which pits passionate environmentalist Colin Beavan against his journalist/consumer wife Michele, to blogger/filmmaker A.J. Schnack's behind-the-scenes Denver expose, The Convention. Oscilloscope picked up No Impact Man just before LAFF, while The Convention seeks a distrib.

The reviews Kathryn Bigelow has nabbed for The Hurt Locker (91 on Metacritic) are noteworthy. That doesn't mean that the movie will score at the boxoffice for Summit, but it's off to the second-strongest start for an indie this year. The movie has a shot at one of ten slots in the wide open Oscar best picture race. Even the NYT's tough-minded Manohla Dargis, who has long shared with me a sense of dismay at the thin ranks of gifted women directors, was moved to step out of the reviewer's box to praise Bigelow here.

Aside from critics' raves, The Hurt Locker boasts other advantages in the Oscar race. Bigelow is respected in the industry for making movies that are irrelevant to her gender; this movie is as intellectually rigorous and stylishly crafted as any Michael Mann film. (If anything, it's more engaging and viscerally exciting than, say, Public Enemies.) Also, the film industry, well aware of the failure of every Iraq War film to date, has been waiting for the exception that would break through and reach audiences. With America on the verge of withdrawing from Iraq, the timing may be right for this one. Finally, Bigelow gets points not only for figuring out a way to approach the subject that works, but for a high degree of difficulty.

It's shaping up to be an unusually good year for women directors. New Zealand writer-director Jane Campion, the only woman to ever win the Cannes Palme d'Or, is one of three women to be nominated for the best director Oscar, along with Sofia Coppola and Lena Wertmuller. (She won best screenplay for The Piano.) Bright Star, her tragic period romance about John Keats and Fanny Brawne, played well at Cannes but didn't take home a prize. New indie distributor Bob Berney plans to promote Bright Star on the fall fest circuit before a September opening. The impeccably mounted costume drama is quite Academy friendly.

The third Oscar possibility is Mira Nair, whose hits The Namesake, Monsoon Wedding and Mississippi Masala have earned her an Oscar shot with her latest film, Amelia, a biopic about flier Amelia Earhart starring Oscar-winner Hilary Swank in the title role. It doesn't hurt that Fox Searchlight (Slumdog Millionaire, Juno) is shepherding this period adventure, which will also open in October after hitting the fest circuit.

Here's the Amelia trailer:

Here's my Toronto chat with Bigelow:

I know that we're all reading a lot about Michael Jackson--we're hungry to know more, and the media is anxious to capitalize on that need--but veteran music critic Robert Hilburn's piece in the LAT was the most personal, contextual and well-observed I've read so far. It's yet another reminder of why newspapers like the LAT should hold on to their best writers.

On the lurid side, here's a London tabloid's take on what Michael Jackson's eventual toxicology report may look like.

Spike Lee recalls shooting a video with Jackson.

Here's Michael's appearance on The Simpsons:

Netflix promised anyone who improved their recommendation algorithm by 10% their $1-million Netflix Prize. One team claims 10.5% If no one tops them, the money could be theirs.

The day that Michael Jackson died, Universal execs realized that they had to make a change in Bruno. Fast. They called writer-producer-star Sacha Baron Cohen, who instantly agreed that a short scene with Michael Jackson's sister, La Toya, was no longer going to play. Not that night.

So director Larry Charles snipped the scene in which Bruno asks Jackson for her brother's phone number. When the movie unspooled to a celebrity-studded crowd Thursday night at Hollywood Boulevard's Mann's Chinese, La Toya Jackson was not in the movie. Universal execs say they will "reassess" whether to keep the scene--they have two weeks before they will strike prints for the film's national release.

UPDATE: The filmmakers have decided to permanently delete the scene from the film.

Pop star Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, was pronounced dead after arriving at UCLA Medical Center in a coma. He was 50. I saw him perform at his peak at Anaheim stadium in the mid-80s. He will not be going on his planned comeback tour. Thriller is still one of my fave dance albums of all time. Here's the John Landis video, which was top-of-the-line at the time, along with the music videos for Billie Jean and Beat It. No, he was not like other guys.

The old rule of thumb in journalism: celebrity deaths come in threes. So the first one was Ed McMahon, followed by Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson. The LAT posted a Jackson photo gallery.

Farrah Fawcett has lost her battle with anal cancer, reports People and LAT. She was 62. While she had given some strange interviews in recent years, the Charlie's Angels star will be remembered best for this indelible bestselling poster image.

Some folks at IFC.com scoured YouTube for the best trailers so you wouldn't have to. They picked the best 50. Or did they? Here are my faves:

Number 27: The Marx Brothers' A Night at the Opera:

Number 18: Woody Allen's Sleeper:

Number 17: Stanley Donen's Charade:

Number 15: Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction:

Number 10: Stanley Kubrick's The Shining:

Number 5: Orson Welles introduces Citizen Kane:

Number 2: Alfred Hitchcock introduces Psycho. This trailer terrified me as a kid.

And number one is Ridley Scott's original Alien-- with the best ad line ever written--"In space, no one can hear you scream":

What did they leave out?

Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences president Sid Ganis has another surprise up his sleeve: I hear he's going to promise that the Oscar show to be broadcast on ABC will not be longer this year, even with ten best picture nominations instead of five. This could mean that tech categories will get short shrift.

Hollywood was rocked Wednesday by the surprise news that the Academy, which rewards excellence in moviemaking, is adding five slots to the best picture Oscar category. Gob-smacked Sidney Kimmel Entertainment exec Bingham Ray spoke for many fellow Academy members when he said, "A move this big, I would have liked to have been consulted, or at least given a heads up. They should have put this to a vote."

For the Academy to cite this move as harkening back to 1939, when ten films were nominated, is absurd. That was the best year ever during the Golden Age of Hollywood, when the studios routinely churned out a hundred quality films a year aimed at grown-ups, movies that no self-respecting teen-driven studio head would dream of making today. "It will open it up to a wider spectrum, more genres," Ganis told NPR, like action films, comedies, documentaries, and foreign films. He went on to admit that the decision by the Academy board of governors was largely a business move.

Tensions had been growing between the Academy and broadcast network ABC, which has suffered ratings losses in recent years when Academy voters have selected high-end fare, from best picture winners Crash and No Country for Old Men to small-scale nominees Milk and Frost/Nixon. The Academy is placating ABC with the promise that ten slots will bring more popular films like The Dark Knight and Wall-E into the Oscar field.

What will this change mean to the studios, distributors, Oscar campaigners and filmmakers? Here are the winners and losers in this new scenario.

Oddly, the studios are not jumping up and down over this, because the floodgates are now open for filmmakers harboring Oscar hopes. (Christopher Nolan was NOT pleased when The Dark Knight failed to score a best picture slot last year.) And that means more movies to promote for a longer period of time. The studios are trying to cut their ad budgets, not expand them. They were planning to cut back on print ads after seeing how little they moved the needle on such films as Revolutionary Road, Frost/Nixon and Milk. So the NYT, LAT and trades are relieved about this news. For them, the more contenders the better. Oscar bloggers will likely see a boost in Oscar ads too. "Each studio can't mount a campaign for three, four or five movies," insist one marketing studio exec. "They're not doing trade ads for just anybody. They'll have to choose which films they'll get behind."

Thus Disney will certainly promote Pixar's well-reviewed Up, which opened Cannes, for best-picture consideration, which now has a real shot. And Paramount will be likely to throw ad dollars at J.J. Abrams' Star Trek. Studios will tend to favor in-house power players and movie stars over smaller titles.

The change will also make it easier--if expensive--for distribs to bring back movies released earlier in the year for Oscar consideration, from Michael Mann's elegant period epic Public Enemies to Kathryn Bigelow's Iraq movie The Hurt Locker. The studios will now recalibrate theatrical and DVD release strategies with Oscar in mind in order to efficiently target marketing dollars to boost films in theaters or in advance of a DVD launch.

Some feel that the Hollywood economy needs this boost, that spending on ten Oscar nominees will drive up boxoffice and DVD value. But should that be the Academy's job? "They're whoring out the Oscars," says one indie producer. "The Golden Globes have more integrity than the Oscars. It's dilutes the pure value attached to best picture."

"This will bring an exciting new dynamic to the show and give the entire awards season new energy," says Oscar campaigner Ronni Chasen. "It will be good for business and provide an opportunity for five more movies to gain added visibility and exposure that would be good for box office. This should be a win-win for everyone." The LAT's Patrick Goldstein, who has been lobbying the Academy in his column for Oscar reform, agrees.

Coming out ahead are specialty distribs such as Sony Pictures Classics, which could have used extra Oscar juice for smaller quality films such as last year's Rachel Getting Married, or Frozen River. But SPC's Tom Bernard worries about Oscar voters being able to see all the films, even with eight extra days in the schedule this year. The nominations will be announced February 2 and ABC will broadcast the Oscars on March 7. Bernard hopes the Academy will make some moves to increase the number of member screenings. Distribs will send out more DVDs, but what's going to make a given voter watch them all? "It's more inclusive and that's a good thing," says Bernard. "But it's hard getting the membership to watch all the films NOW. It's difficult to get them to see five foreign language films."

The worst thing about all this is the dilution of the exclusive, special nature of the top five. What if the ten selections aren't top notch? To put it bluntly, there isn't an overabundance of quality films anymore. What if they aren't all well-reviewed? The movies at the bottom of the best picture ten may reflect mere hundreds of votes. "Everyone is a contender now," says one studio publicist. "It's not the rarified five anymore. It makes it less elite."

Said one miserable Oscar campaigner: "People who thought they had no shot? Today they think they do."

Rob Luketic's sexually frank The Ugly Truth, starring Katherine Heigl as an uptight career girl and Gerard Butler as the straight-shooter who gives her a tarty makeover, looks hugely commercial to me. It opens July 24. Check out the red band trailer:

My initial story was correct: Quentin Tarantino is not cutting the shit out of Inglourious Basterds. GQ grills Harvey Weinstein about the final cut:

GQ: So the stories about him being asked to cut 40 minutes out of the movie aren’t true?

HW: Those stories are all untrue. There’s no fucking way. Here, read my lips: That is nuts. Please don’t even write that, it’s insanity. There’s not even a question of that. Whatever you’re reading, it’s like some insane blogger… There’s no truth to any of this. He’s not gonna cut. What he’s doing is just reorganizing some scenes. I mean, the guy had six weeks to cut his movie [for Cannes]; most guys take six months. Most guys take a year. When I worked with Martin [Scorsese], we’d do eighteen months in post-production. Quentin Tarantino cuts a movie in six weeks? Come on, there’s shit on that cutting-room floor that’ll blow your brains out. I was telling Quentin the opposite—"You should put that shit back in the movie." There’s scenes with Brad Pitt and the Basterds, and I’m praying he puts that shit back in, ‘cause it’s un-fucking-believably great. Listen—this movie will be between two hours and twenty minutes and two hours and twenty-seven minutes. I don’t think it’s going to be shorter—it’s just a question of rearranging. I know he’s putting footage back into the movie. I know he’s got some cool shit that he didn’t get time to address.

I am stunned by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences decision to nominate ten films for the best picture Oscar. The reason is obvious. Given that the annual show is designed to showcase and promote the movie industry, boosting the number of films will broaden the show's appeal. The broadcast has suffered drops in viewers when the best picture winner isn't Titanic or Lord of the Rings.

This way, clearly, a mass-appeal movie with great reviews like The Dark Knight, which was close to landing a spot in the top five, would be included. Moviegoers pay less attention to movies that are nominated in the technical categories.

What worries me about this is that ten is less exclusive than five. And given the limited number of quality movies that Hollywood is making, it may be hard to come up with a decent list. Also, this brings the Oscar show closer to the Broadcast Film Critics Awards or The Golden Globes, which nominates five comedy/musicals and five dramas.

Last year, for example, the top ten best picture Oscar list would have looked something like this:

Slumdog Millionaire

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Milk

Frost/Nixon

The Reader

The Dark Knight

Wall-E

Doubt

The Wrestler

The Changeling or Gran Torino

This raises many questions; I am canvassing various distribs, Oscar campaigners and marketing folks. I'll report back at the end of the day. Let me know what you think. Is this a good or a bad thing?

Here's what I learned on my rounds at the Transformers: ROTF premiere Monday night:

Transformers 2 cost north of $200 million, plus $150 million in global marketing. That's $350 million going in. It could outgross the last one ($708 million worldwide) and score $1 billion around the world. There's no question it will open. (The record to beat for a five day weekend is Spider-Man 2's $152.4 million, reports Variety.) The anxiety is about what the second weekend drop-off will be--will it play, in other words. I think so.

The movie is critic-proof, and needs to be, the reviews will suck. (The NYT uses the word "cretinous.") It's a nonsensical, eye-rolling macho fantasy--it's about Megan Fox running in slow motion, and artillery fire, and giant roiling robots desecrating ancient pyramids, and rows of pointy-nosed fighter planes taking off in formation. But there are sequences--one where the Decepticons attack and sink an aircraft carrier comes to mind-- that are stunningly beautiful. Bay has the gift of visual poetry--as well as chaotic pixel excess.

The problem is, when movies like this do so well, it encourages the studios to keep thinking in terms of big-scale brand-names. At the after-party, Paramount chairman Brad Grey admitted that the studio will keep chasing these movies. It's where the money is. (And they'll probably keep passing on iffy ventures like Steven Soderbergh's resolutely uncommercial Moneyball--even with Grey pal Brad Pitt attached. The back end was still a problem, even with Pitt's upfront price slashed. The movie would have had to make $100 million. And that wasn't likely to happen.)

What made the Transformers sequel so expensive was ILM's robots, which are ingenious. (So is the sound design, which helps to make the characters more distinctive and cut through the clutter.) I prefer the little gremlin-like robot characters, partly because my brain can comprehend them. Producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura (who came out clean in Michael Cieply's NYT profile) says there are about three times more transformers in this one--the last one had about 13--and they're best viewed in big-screen IMAX. Here's an interview with ILM genius Scott Farrar. And EW runs a Megan Fox layout and interview.

Pay boosts are another added sequel expense. Shia LaBeouf, who hung with Emile Hirsch at the Transformers street party as Linkin Park rocked out, almost didn't make the sequel when his manager demanded $20 million. LaBeouf had made a deal for $750,000 for the first two films. After the first one scored, Paramount offered $3 million for the next two. They wound up settling for $5 million each. LaBeouf talks to Kim Masters about his wild, wild life.

Michael Bay wishes he had one more week to edit the picture, which everyone, including him, agrees is too long. It could use a trim. Paramount's new production chief Adam Goodman, who supervised the movie, asked Bay to cut it, but he wouldn't, partly because they ran out of time. Paramount wants another installment to go real soon, on a slightly smaller-scale. Bay has other plans. He says he wants to do something else first. Clear his head a little.

Producer Edward Norton considered taking the fall fest route with his By the People: The Election of Barack Obama doc, which has been filming since 2006. But Amy Rice and Alicia Sams' much-anticipated film about Obama's presidential run will quietly bypass the Venice and Toronto fests this year in favor of a short August Oscar-qualifying run in LA and NY and a splashy HBO event launch in September. Norton is repped by the new WME combine run by Ari Emanuel, brother of Obama's chief-of-staff, Ram Emamuel. This should be a big must-see.

The Toronto International Film Festival is starting to post its line-up. The press release is on the jump.

The NYT's David Carr visits the source of the Evil Google Empire.

Don't believe all the conventional wisdom about advertising in a recession.

Back in February, Nikki Finke told me she was entertaining offers for her blog. Well, she scored a buyer, MovieLine.com owner Mail.com Media. MMC will now distribute Deadline Hollywood Daily. Finke will continue to write her weekly column for Village Voice Media, which lends her print credibility.

The question is, will the delicate alchemy that works well for her now at the LA Weekly: freedom, autonomy, no regular deadlines to meet (when Finke gets tired of blogging constantly, she stops for a while) change DHD for the worse? Finke insists in her early Tuesday morning announcement that she will continue to be free to be her sweet self. But someone now owns her--and paid low seven-figures for her, estimates PaidContent. (UPDATE: Sharon Waxman interviews Finke and credulously reports a $14 million sale.) Finke now has a boss. That has not always worked for her in the past. We'll see.

UPDATE: Finke's planning to become a manager too, by hiring a NYC blogger. I've always seen Finke as a great solo act.

UPDATE: Spoutblog wraps up the coverage. Here's the WSJ and the NYT. And the LAT and Gawker doubt the crazy numbers being bandied about. Remember--it's in Waxman's interest to make it look like entertainment media properties are worth a huge amount.

Looks like Michael Bay didn't really have much to worry about with this pro-forma anxious-Nelly, grammatically-challenged letter to the Paramount brass. This is normal. He was saying, 'don't be complacent, spend money!" And so they did and pre-sales are through the roof. As of Friday, MovieTickets.com reported over 350 sold out performances, including 115 midnight performances. The film accounts for 41 percent of tickets sold at MovieTickets.com last week. Even Flixter.com is crediting a boost on its iPhone app to the movie. The Wednesday opening will be huge.

Shia LaBeouf's injured hand really had an impact on the Transformers: ROTF production, says Bay. Nine ways the movie is shameless, reports Movieline.

It was a bad week for Steven Soderbergh and his $57-million screen version of Michael Lewis's baseball book Moneyball, which Sony shut down as of Friday--with a Monday start-of-production date. (How odd that "producer" Michael DeLuca was on his honeymoon last week and still has not returned. Soderbergh's producer Greg Jacobs was in charge, clearly.) The problem with the Sony spin over the weekend is that it doesn't make sense for Sony chief Amy Pascal to be suddenly discovering that she didn't like a script that had been in circulation--and active pre-production for weeks. Soderbergh was open about his documentary-like approach, and had obtained Major League Baseball cooperation.

So the Brad Pitt theory-- that he got cold feet (not for the first time) and used Pascal as his beard-- makes more sense. But that is not what I'm hearing from Pitt's camp. They say he was ready to make Soderbergh's movie. It's hard to imagine Pitt agreeing to make the movie with another director at this point. It would have to be Soderbergh or no one. Pascal was demanding certain changes that Pitt and Soderbergh refused to make and threw her foot down, perfectly willing to walk away. Point is, she would have made the movie a year ago. She can't afford for this movie to lose money right now, bottom line.

Soderbergh had the weekend to line up another studio, but his bad luck was that Paramount was in disarray. And Warners passed. Either he makes some kind of rapprochement with Sony or the project's dead. Here's Michael Fleming. UPDATE: And the LAT.

The LAFF barely got away with opener Paper Man on Thursday night. It had a highly regarded script, respected producer Richard Gladstein, the potential discovery of new directors Michele and Kieran Mulroney, and in the context of everything the fest was looking at (most of the films had screened somewhere else), it must have looked like their best and freshest option.

Paper Man played better for the audience than the critics. My daughter and her pal didn't care for it. I responded to the needy teen girl (Emma Stone) in the Hamptons and the needy neurotic writer father (Jeff Daniels). It's where I come from. But there was something ham-fisted about the super-hero fantasy friend played by Ryan Reynolds, who's so much better in The Proposal, which I'm happy to say opened great. (He looks starved, for one thing).

The LAT's indie columnist Mark Olsen covers the opening night festivities. Mingling at the after-party at the Napa Valley Grill were Melissa Leo, Dermot Mulroney and Chaz Bono; I talked to Groundswell's Michael London, Sidney Kimmel's Bingham Ray, The Gold Co's Joe Pichirallo and new Film Society of Lincoln Center chief Mara Manus, who's rooting for chum, new LAFF director Rebecca Yeldham. Here's a photo gallery.

I wish I had gone to Friday night's showing of Davis Guggenheim's ode to three blues guitarists, It Might Get Loud (which debuted at Sundance Toronto), because Jack White and Jimmy Page showed up. Here's an LAFF blue carpet video interview. Instead I went to a screening of the must-to-avoid French male fantasy The Girl from Monoco. No one warned me. Jeff Wells covered Saturday's screening and Q & A for the timely Iranian true story, The Stoning of Soraya M.

Saturday morning, I moderated a financing conference panel on the future of the indie biz, with producers Laura Bickford (Soderbergh's Che and Traffic) and Robert Teitel (Soul Food, Barbershop), Landmark Theatres CEO Ted Mundorff, Christian Gaines of Amazon/IMDb's Without a Box, and Oscilloscope owner Adam Yauch (Wendy and Lucy). They admitted being as much at sea as everyone else these days, although the producers were more downbeat than exhibitor Mundorff, who says business is good--up double digits this year from 2008. He said, it's not because there's less product (my theory)-- he still sees too many pics in the market--"People do want and will support the theatrical experience."

Mundorff is very worried about the trend of disappearing critics, because newspaper critics drive people to go to theaters in their local markets. "I have never seen a spike in box office because of an online critic," he said. (Scott Kirsner tweets: maybe it's hard to track impact of web reviews?)

Yauch said he was being presented with more product than he could ever manage to handle. He likes docs, but not because they're doing great business. It's more that he really wants to bring their messages to the world. He's hoping that people will start to bring more sanity to dealmaking and make films more affordable for everyone.

Bickford says the decrease in business on DVDs is a problem and means all costs have to come down--also foreign sales aren't what they once were, even when they were raising money for Che. Where the boxoffice to DVD sales ratio used to be approximately one dollar for one dollar, now for every five dollars of box office, you get one dollar from DVDs, Bickford said.

Bickford is high on the theatrical/VOD experience she had with IFC on Che. But that micro release was not what they had envisioned, and was partly the result of a slash in the number of indie specialty houses with even fewer Oscar slots. But everyone agreed VOD is where indie film distribution is going. And that film fests are playing an increasingly important role in getting the word out. And yes, movie distribution will wind up online. But nobody knows who's going to make money that way. Here's the LAFF podcast; IndieWire pulled out Ten Insights on Film Financing.

USA Today presents a first look at Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, starring Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham-Carter and Anne Hathaway, pictured here as the Mad Hatter and the white and red queens, respectively. The on-line story allows you to explore cool large photos via zooms.

[Hat Tip: In Contention]

In the overall scheme of things, a $57-million budget is pocket change to a studio, especially a big-spender like Sony. So why would Sony chairman Amy Pascal risk alienating a star like Brad Pitt and a director like Steven Soderbergh by pulling the plug on baseball movie Moneyball hours before it was to start shooting? She's sending a message to Hollywood, loud and clear. She's asserting her power to just say no. Finally, in this economy, the studios are spending less on fewer available slots. That's also what Brad Grey is signalling at Paramount by ditching production execs John Lesher and Brad Weston: he's saying, "There's no room for error."

Pascal can afford to let this movie go because it was always a risky play, and she clearly isn't willing to take a gamble right now unless she believes in it. (That might not have been true a year ago.) According to sources close to the movie, last week Soderbergh turned in a shooting script that was different from the earlier Zaillian draft that the studio had green lit. (Sony producer Michael DeLuca is on the movie.) Pascal felt the honorable thing to do was to allow Soderbergh to take the film to other studios, where he could presumably make the film he wanted to make.

If Soderbergh can't get the movie financed--which includes coming up with some $10 million already charged against the movie, including Zaillian's scripts and pre-production costs; the movie was slated to shoot Monday--it will return to Sony, who will go back to their Zaillian draft and presumably seek another director. (David Frankel, director of Devil Wears Prada and Marley and Me was circling the project at one point.) The studio may choose to take a write-off.

The question is, does Pitt stay on board? What does he think? He is loyal to Soderbergh, who has done well by him through three Oceans movies. Pitt can be notoriously indecisive about choosing projects--he dropped out of The Fountain, State of Play, and The Bourne Identity. For all major movie stars, there's a great deal at stake every time they step up to bat. They cannot afford to miss. Pitt is coming off a strong Oscar-nominated role in David Fincher's The Curious Case of Benjamin Button , which was expensive and barely scraped into profitability. He and CAA will wield some clout here.

Sony will meet in the next day or so to determine what happens next. Pascal and her production chief Matt Tolmach are fans of the Michael Lewis bestseller and Zaillian's script. What did Soderbergh do to change their tune? While he knows how to make popular Oceans movies, his track record on other studio mainstream fare is less consistent. (See: The Good German and Solaris, both starring one-time partner George Clooney.) Besides, Soderbergh's primary affiliation is with Warner Bros., not Sony.

What's so risky about this movie?

Baseball movies are hit and miss. Hits like Bull Durham, Field of Dreams and Major League are exceptions. For Love of the Game starring Kevin Costner is more typical, grossing $35 million domestically. Also, baseball doesn't translate overseas.

No star is a sure thing anymore. Even Pitt. (See: The Assassination of Jesse James by that Coward Robert Ford, The Mexican, Snatch.) His next, Quentin Tarantino's Cannes entry Inglourious Basterds, is far from a guaranteed hit.

Soderbergh isn't a tentpole director, outside the Oceans franchise. And he's coming off micro-budget The Girlfriend Experience and Che, both strictly high-end audience plays. But Soderbergh's a good match for this material. He used to play serious baseball in Baton Rouge; he had a great arm but lost his mojo at age 12. "I woke up one morning and I didn't have it," Soderbergh told Jess Cagle in 2001. "And I knew that I wasn't gonna be able to get it back. Whatever the thing was, it was just gone."

Soderbergh told ESPN what he wanted to do with this movie, including shooting this summer at baseball games, interviewing real athletes, and rebuilding parts of the Oakland As coliseum on a soundstage:

"We have the dramatic building blocks, so the question is how real can we make the world? My clearly stated goal is to set a new standard for realism in that [sports] world."

I really want to see him make Moneyball. I hope this contretemps gets worked out in his favor.

The story finally broke today that we've all been waiting to hear: the inevitable shake-up at Paramount.

Studio chief Brad Grey, while a brilliant businessman, has not scored well on managing the production side of Paramount. First he kicked out production chief Donald DeLine and threw out the development slate, sacrificing valuable production momentum. After he brought in TV exec Gail Berman, Grey showed her the door within 18 months. Now John Lesher is out too, and Adam Goodman, who has been quietly showing his professionalism since he moved over from running production at DreamWorks, has inherited the job. Squalling competitors Lesher and Brad Weston--who supervised Star Trek, the one homegrown Paramount blockbuster (at $350 million worldwide to date) that shared no DNA with DreamWorks-- have both lost their exec stripes. Grey has offered them production deals. Non-Dreamworks smashes Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (Lucasfilm) and Iron Man (Marvel) were also not Paramount productions.

The official Paramount release is on the jump.

Lesher was a brilliant agent, and knew how to navigate at Endeavor. He also flourished at Paramount Vantage (An Inconvenient Truth, Babel, Into the Wild, There Will be Blood) but got out while the going was good, sacrificing his hard-won label as the market turned against specialty fare. (Here's my column on Lesher and Vantage.) Lesher has taste, and knows how to handle talent, from P.T. Anderson and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu to Martin Scorsese. But he isn't, finally, a sturdy corporate warrior. Both Lesher and Weston have more talent than grace and were capable of vicious in-fighting. I wish them well going forward. May they make some decent movies.

The town has long complained about a dysfunctional Paramount operation where they did not want to bring movies. Finally, Grey has a shot at straightening the ship with Goodman. Ironically, the DreamWorks exec is the last man standing.

UPDATE: Here's Variety's weekend update. And the NYT's examination of key Paramount producer Lorenzo di Bonaventura.

When I came out of the AMC 15 this week after seeing the execrably lame Year One, which scored a miserable and deserved 20% on Rotten Tomatoes today, a bunch of people were sitting quietly on the restaurant terrace, rapt, happily watching a movie they knew in advance they were going to like--Forrest Gump--for free. The Westfield Mall is offering Wednesday Movies on the Terrace. Cannily, this draws people to line up at the restaurants and PinkBerry, for the minimal cost of renting a DVD and projecting it on a wall with a few sound speakers. Next week is Footloose, followed by Back to the Future, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Ghostbusters, Top Gun and a bunch of musicals in August.

Another mall, Hollywood and Highland, is trying to lure traffic by offering free Tuesday night jazz at the Central Courtyard; meanwhile free jazz at LACMA is back on Friday nights.

No matter how nasty some of the reviews for Tetro, which has summoned plenty of strong positive ones for its quote ads, as Francis Ford Coppola says in a letter to the Landmark Theatre Club (pasted on the jump), if he's paying for the movie, he can do whatever he wants! The Friday full-page LAT print ad is fascinating: it promotes the movie not with star Vincent Gallo (who is a turn-off for many moviegoers) but newcomer Alden Ehrenreich, who has been pulling raves. And Coppola uses the ad to sell the product that paid for the movie in the first place: Coppola wine, 2007 Black Label Claret, to be exact.

It's crucial that new Los Angeles Film Festival director Rebecca Yeldham programmed an indie opener for Thursday night's LAFF launch. She waited and waited and hung in for the right movie, long after her staff was comfortable, through Cannes. But she finally found her opener. "I wanted for the opening to find a film that reflected the spectrum of great movies in our contemporary film culture," says Yeldham. "We didn't have an American independent as one of the tentpoles."

Yeldham had read Paper Man at the script stage. She knew the filmmakers. "I was excited about what it could be," she said. "We had to see it manifested." In the nick of time, she and programmer Rachel Rosen were able to see Michele and Kieran Mulroney's finished movie, which stars Jeff Daniels as a man with an imaginary superhero friend (Ryan Reynolds). It passed muster. So LAFF is debuting a brand new indie film no one has seen. "I loved the idea of playing something of this quality for the home crowd," says Yeldham. "We're presenting two new directors to not only the industry and the public but to specialty distributors."

For Yeldham, who during a deep recession managed to hang on to most sponsors, add a few new ones and streamline without losing any significant programs, LAFF is "a distinctive festival. It's not just an indie film fest. We're embracing all films from all sources."

Thus Yeldham booked a few studio tentpoles into the Westwood-centered summer fest, from Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (after all, the fest had premiered Michael Bay's first iteration) to the fest's centerpiece, Michael Mann's Public Enemies, starring Johnny Depp as John Dillinger, and fest closer, Disney's English-language version of animation great Hayao Miyazaki's Ponyo.

The fest also waited until the last minute to announce artists in residence Khaled Hosseini (Yeldham produced, with William Horberg, the movie version of Hosseini's book, The Kite Runner) and Thom Mayne, the Pritzker-prize winning architect. Hosseini presents on Saturday night The Stoning of Soraya M. After the screening he'll talk with the film's writer Cyrus Nowrasteh, star Shohreh Aghdashloo and religious scholar Reza Aslan about women and Islam. "This sort of rich contextualization of the movie might never happen again," says Yeldham.

Mayne will talk about architecture and cinema to cinematographer Fred Elmes, who shoots for Jim Jarmusch, Charlie Kaufman and David Lynch.

Austin filmmaker Robert Rodriguez will present a festival conversation with his three kids; they'll talk about making the family film Shorts, with a behind-the-scenes show-and-tell. "They conceived the movie and worked together," says Rosen. "It's for kids."

Some movies are being presented free, including Sundance faves Amreeka and The Cove. The LAFF is also assembling its filmmakers for an off-the-record retreat.

Yeldham and Rosen decided not to worry about where some of their fave selections had already played---a healthy number of films debuted at Sundance, especially--so 500 Days of Summer, Big Fan, Cold Souls, In the Loop, Paper Heart, it Might Get Loud, Humpday, We Live in Public, Black Dynamite, Soul Power, and When You're Strange: A Film About the Doors are all in the program. "Plenty of American independents didn't meet the standards for our programmers," says Yeldham. "Beautiful movies need support. We don't censor anything. I'd rather present films we can stand behind. We're aggressively launching new talent and movies too."

IndieWire posts interviews with LAFF directors.

Here are Yeldham profiles in the LAT and LA Weekly.

I was wondering why Variety's Peter Bart hadn't blogged since May 21. Turns out he's soft-launched a new Variety blog, BF Deal Memo, enlisting the aid of New York Variety newshound Michael Fleming. That's where all Bart's posts have been going.

What Bart writes is choice, but he doesn't post that often. (He's a busy man.) Fleming breaks big news in the trade all the time; even if he only posts a short version of those stories--see this item about Tom Cruise and J.J. Abrams reuniting for Mission: Impossible IV--it will beef up the blog's content and traffic. But I want to read all the juicy stuff that none of Fleming's sources want him to put in the print edition.

One's Japanese, the other isn't. And there's the rub.

While John Lasseter's Disney animation division and producers Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall have supervised the English-language dub of Hayao Miyazaki's latest anime film, Ponyo--already a hit overseas--the film is still magical and yes, very Japanese. (It closes the LAFF June 28; Miyazaki will appear at Comic-Con in July before the film opens in North America on August 14.) Lasseter is banking that with proper handling from Disney, the movie could break out to family audiences in a way none of Miyazaki's imports ever have, even with one Oscar nomination (Howl's Moving Castle) and one win (Spirited Away). Liam Neeson, Tina Fey, Liam Neeson, Cate Blanchett, Matt Damon and Betty White are among the stars providing voice talent on Ponyo.

Fast Company lists Miyazaki as one of the top ten most creative people in film and TV. Wired lists the best anime coming out this summer.

I've been a huge Miyazaki fan, from My Neighbor Totoro through Kiki's Delivery Service, Princess Mononoke, and beyond. Ponyo is also sublime. Like all great movies it whisks you effortlessly into another world. And it's old-fashioned, hand-drawn 2-D (not an ounce of CG in it), stylized animation. Miyazaki has always been able to capture the forces of nature and the great outdoors, in this case, the ocean that menaces the Japanese coast in the form of a tsunami. The movie lacks violence or anything urban: nature provides the story's threat and drama. Don't miss this one.

The Seattle Film Fest debuted another movie from a Japanese source. Hachi: A Dog's Story is a remake of Hachiko, based on a famous true story from the 20s. Loyal Akita Hachiko met his beloved master every day at the train station, and after the gentleman died of a stroke and never returned, escaped each of his new homes to wait for his master, faithfully every day, through heat, rain and snow, until he died ten years later (sob).

Lasse Hallstrom (My Life as a Dog) took on the American remake with Richard Gere in the role of the professor who bonds with his dog. (The two men are friends and neighbors and worked together on Hoax.) But the movie twists itself into a pretzel explaining how a Japanese dog named Hachiko came to America, met the professor, got into the habit of waiting for him at the train every day--and kept waiting. There's a wife (Joan Allen) and a very slim family narrative. The movie doesn't work. Yet the bones of the story are still so powerful (which is why Gere and Hallstrom wanted to do it), that the Seattle audience and I were all in tears.

The movie's financeer, international sales co.Inferno Distribution, has a pact with Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions Group for North American and Australian ancillary rights to its movies. Inferno is negotiating with service distrib Consolidated Pictures Group (led by Bottle Shock filmmaker Randall Miller, who’s releasing I Love You Phillip Morris), which is looking to raise some P & A for a fall release.

But the movie really belongs at Disney, where the family label would mean something. Gere's agent Ed Limato showed the movie to Disney's Dick Cook, but the studio passed. Inferno's Bill Johnson changed the title from Hachiko to Hachi because he was afraid it would put off American audiences. "Hachi is more reminiscent of Benji," he said.

Check out the original Hachiko. Like Ponyo, it's the authentic real deal.

You can't keep a good man down. Ex-Lionsgate and Paramount Vantage exec Nick Meyer has resurfaced at his new Sierra company, which will take over foreign sales for Sidney Kimmel International, which is shutting down its New York office. (More customers are in the offing.) That means sayanara to outgoing exec Mark Lindsay.

SKE is in a new phase, backing off from producing too many uncommercial movies (read: Charlie Barnett, Management, Adventureland, Synecdoche, New York) in favor of selecting a robust few. SKE execs Jim Tauber and Bingham Ray partnered with Screen Gems on Chris Rock and Aeysha Carr's script for the black family remake of SKE hit Death at a Funeral, this time directed by Neil LaBute and starring Zoe Saldana and Chris Rock. Screen Gems financed and acquired all rights worldwide. Meanwhile Ray is deliberately pushing several projects heading toward a production green light.

Salon's Andrew O'Hehir runs down the current digital distribution landscape.

I'd go on this Beatles mystery tour in a heartbeat. I also confess to wanting Beatles Rock Band, which is selling well in advance of its September 9 release. UPDATE: The LAT raves about the mini-movie inside the videogame.

[Photomontage courtesy USA Today]

We all saw Sacha Baron Cohen in his Bruno guise descend on the face of Eminem at the MTV Movie Awards. Well, not since Zoolander have we seen a straight actor take so many gay poses. Not only is he on the cover of GQ--with more provocative spreads inside--but he looks quite fetching in a Brit military outfit at the Bruno London opening.

Is Bruno too gay? All too predictably, GLAAD has stepped up to voice concern about the movie's treatment of gays. Please: the whole point of Cohen's comedy is to push everyone's buttons in the most politically incorrect way possible. I howled at the footage I saw at SXSW. But from reports I'm hearing from pals of mine who've seen the movie, it does make people squirm in an uncomfortable way. Will folks go see it anyway? Of course. But it could put an R-rated cap on how broadly the movie plays.

UPDATE: DHD and The Wrap both posted similar Bruno stories quoting the same source.

DF Indie Studio generated a surprising number of stories, many of them written on the fly over the weekend without much probing. (Here's DHD.) I was skeptical; as I suspected, there was less to the announcement than met the eye. That doesn't mean it's a complete sham. It means that these neophytes have a long ways to go before they sleep. A.P. corrected their DFIS story.

Here's IndieWire's update, including Ted Hope's targeting Chris Monger's The Amateur Photographer as the first film. He told me they had not greenlit anything, nor had he gotten any money from DFIS.

What this tells me is that there is a great hunger for DFIS to exist, to work, to thrive. If not this company, than another. There is a need that DFIS is seeking to fill. Whether they have the chops is another matter. BTW, the reason DFIS supporter Ira Deutchman has been flying under the radar: he had an emergency appendectomy this week.

As Overture Films lines up their 2009/2010 slate--hoping for a breakout--Wednesday they announced development of Celeste & Jesse Forever, a divorce rom-com co-written by and co-starring Rashida Jones (I Love You Man, Parks and Recreation) and Will McCormack (Must Love Dogs, Syriana). Team Todd (Austin Powers, Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland) is producing. (It's odd that Overture announced without a director in place.)

Overture CEO Chris McGurk and COO Danny Rosett have slated for release: Sundance screenwriting award-winner Paper Heart, starring Charlyne Yi and Michael Cera (August 7); horror-thriller Pandorum, starring Dennis Quaid and Ben Foster (September 4); and the untitled Michael Moore Wall Street greed expose (October 2). Set for the first quarter is the F. Gary Gray thriller Law Abiding Citizen, starring Jamie Foxx and Gerard Butler.

The company recently acquired The Men Who Stare at Goats, a war satire starring George Clooney, Kevin Spacey and Ewan McGregor, which is in post-production and not yet dated, and pre-bought Ron Nyswaner and Catherine Hardwicke's contemporary remake of Shakespeare's Hamlet, starring Emile Hirsch, which is casting.

Of these titles, the Michael Moore and Law Abiding Citizen boast the most potential to become breakout hits. So far, DeNiro/Pacino thriller Righteous Kill is Overture's biggest grosser at $40-million. Espionage thriller Traitor and heist comedy Mad Money grossed $24 million and $21 million, respectively. Rom-com Last Chance Harvey scored $20 million worldwide. Art-house acquisitions The Visitor and Sunshine Cleaning fared modestly well. But Sleepwalking, Nothing but the Holidays and Henry Poole Is Here lost money.

This is not an embarrassing track record. With Starz and homevideo, all these pics generated more numbers. What McGurk and Rosett need is a breakout like Twilight.

First the media touted the uptick in 2009 theatrical business, now they're pointing to a downturn compared to last summer's b.o., a few big flops and the absence of blockbusters. "Through Sunday, summer B.O. revs stood at $1.46 billion, compared to $1.47 billion last year," reports Variety.

Hold on folks, it's early days yet. Everyone knows what the blockbusters will be (besides Up): Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Disney's pairing of Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds in The Proposal should yield strong returns with the femme demo. But word is that neither Universal's Bruno nor Public Enemies will break out huge. And Sony's Year One and Paramount's G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra (which had a disastrous preview) look soft indeed.

Here are some summer lessons:

2. Origin myths sell. Star Trek skipped behind the other ten movies and went back to the beginning. Director J.J. Abrams found the right balance for Trekkies and newbies alike. Gross to date: $233 million so far.

3. Smart R-rated dumb male comedies sell. Always have, always will. The Hangover is the summer's sleeper hit, grossing more than $110 million in its first two weeks. The best news for Warner Bros: no talent profit participants. The bad news: they have to share with partner Legendary Pictures.

4. R-rated dumb male comedians don't sell in family movies. Universal miscalculated by starring Will Ferrell in $100-million remake Land of the Lost. The studio pulled the second weekend print ads on the picture, an unusual move. Gross to date: $36 million.

5. Eddie Murphy without makeup doesn't sell. I rest my case with Imagine That. Put Murphy under pounds of makeup playing a character, and they show up. Give him a role playing someone close to himself and audiences stay away in droves.

6. Lackluster sequels sell--but don't break out big. The key with these tentpole franchises is keeping up the quality.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine, which cost $150 million, opened huge and dropped off drastically. That means Fox's massive marketing budget pulled the core comics fanbase, but the movie failed to broaden. Gross to date: $176 million domestic, $353 million worldwide.

The sequel to The Da Vinci Code, Angels & Demons, also scored big overseas ($415 million) but did middling business stateside ($124 million). To my mind Ron Howard delivered a better E-ride this time. But the book and the movie lacked the compelling Christian scandale that the first one had. This movie was (expensive) standard-issue.

Despite McG's $200-million budget, Terminator Salvation failed to improve on its predecessors and seemed oddly retro. The highlights were not Christian Bale, who seemed to be channeling Batman, growl and all, but supporting performers Sam Worthington and Anton Yelchin. Gross to date: $115 million, plus $100 million overseas.

Like Kris Tapley, my father turned me into a cinephile. (Cineaste, as Dave Kehr is wont to point out, is strictly reserved for filmmakers.) Raising two (and later three) kids in Manhattan, my father took us to the movies every weekend at the local movie houses: the Riverside and Riviera, Symphony, Nemo, Olympia, Thalia and New Yorker.

His taste was eclectic: we saw The Mouse that Roared, The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!, Lord Love a Duck (three times--it must have been Tuesday Weld in those cashmere sweaters), To Kill a Mockingbird, Lawrence of Arabia and Dr. Zhivago, El Cid, A Hard Days Night, Singing in the Rain, Gypsy, Meet Me in St. Louis and Damn Yankees. (We drove into the Bronx for that one.) And he eagerly looked forward to every new James Bond--From Russia with Love was his fave.

Torry had a booming laugh. One night from the balcony at the New Yorker during a Marx Brothers marathon, I could hear him guffaw from the orchestra below. (He also loved W.C. Fields.) He taught me the phrases "they were rolling in the aisles" and "not a dry seat in the house." I used it once in a live CNN interview!

My father is responsible for my love for World War II movies such as Battleground and Tora! Tora! Tora!. He adored Angela Lansbury and Peter Sellers (The World of Henry Orient), Alec Guinness (Bridge on the River Kwai), John Huston (The Maltese Falcon, The African Queen, The List of Adrian Messenger), and had a healthy appetite for horror, from Hammer dracula flicks starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing to The Haunting and Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. We watched Chiller Theatre on TV every Saturday night over spaghetti and garlic bread. On our walls were movie posters: The Creature from the Black Lagoon, Un Messe Pour Dracula and Le Bon, Le Brut et Le Truand.

Did I have any choice? But my father was a Cornell-educated snob who wanted me to become a high-falutin' academic (my brother Peter took on that mantle). He couldn't understand my decision to enroll in the Department of Cinema Studies at NYU. But he came around later when I worked at Film Comment and he donned a tuxedo as my date for the opening night of the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center. He was a proud father then.

What a difference two years makes. The picture on left of Shia LaBeouf ran in Parade Magazine when Disturbia made him into a star. The photo on the right ran this week in Parade in advance of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. (Here's Variety's review.) We all know that talent is only one component of a long and happy career. Stability is another. Or to put it another way, sometimes the sensitive tuning rod that is essential to a working actor's skill set isn't screwed on tight enough. LaBeouf speaks frankly about his demons. I wish him well in dealing with them.

The young star also let slip the fact that Indiana Jones 5 is in the offing. Surprise.

UPDATE: More LaBeouf true confessions.

The economy is a ruthless, Darwinian Master. Only the strong shall survive, and that applies to the mighty studios as well as everyone else. Sure, the theatrical market is holding up pretty well. But for every Fast & Furious, Star Trek and The Hangover there's a cynically bloated flop like Land of the Lost (for which Universal pulled print ads on its second weekend) or Imagine That. (The Wrap was inspired to do a quickie Stars Who Should Worry chart including Will Ferrell and Eddie Murphy, which probably got the site into more trouble than it was worth.)

In any case, healthy boxoffice doesn't bail Hollywood out of the predicament each studio owner is in. DVDs, once a beautiful way for the studios to reap tidy profits, are inexorably declining, most dramatically among the blockbusters that used to deliver huge returns. For example, Pixar's 2004 The Incredibles earned $260 million at the domestic boxoffice and sold 18 million DVDs. By comparison, in 2008, DreamWorks' Kung Fu Panda earned $215 million domestically, but sold 11 million DVDs. That's a sizable drop. Sales are down across the board, including classic rereleases, and less precipitously, specialty titles.

The studios can recoup those losses in three ways:

Make movies cheaper.

Make talent their partner. Push back the gross to a point where the studio can make some money.

Cut marketing costs. As the studios produce fewer movies going forward, one bonus will be less clutter and noise for marketing departments to cut through.

Studios answer to beleaguered corporate parents fighting their own battles. Paramount owner Viacom--which one report suggests is open to a Paramount merger when there's no evidence that anyone has interest in buying anybody else--has volatile Sumner Redstone at the helm as ad rates plummet. Each of the six media behemoths is rocked to some degree by the horrid ad climate: 30 to 70 % of their incomes come from ads. News Corp and Time Warner are coping with reeling publishing empires. NBC/Universal parent GE is dealing with its troubled financing division. Disney's Robert Iger is worrying about ABC and theme park attendance. And Sony's hardware divisions are getting slammed.

But at this point in history one studio won't buy another studio because it's impossible to put a value on their assets. Studios generate new hits as locomotives for their libraries. That's the studio business. But now it's tough to place value on the library because nobody knows whether the copyrights will live forever, or be worth nothing in a few years because of the Internet. (The music business has gone from a combined value of $30 billion to $8 billion because the music catalogs are worth next to nothing, due to free music downloads.)

Four weaker companies are more likely to seek new alliances in order to survive: indie Lionsgate, having over-leveraged itself, is under attack by financial agitator Carl Icahn; fledgling Overture's pitiless owner John Malone could easily withdraw support if the company doesn't deliver some Summit-sized grosses; and both MGM and The Weinstein Co. are desperately seeking relief from their crushing debt burdens. Trouble is, while a deep-pocketed player could buy enough debt to shut down a company and buy its library, who's to say what it's worth today? Goldman Sachs is desperately trying to recapitalize MGM before its $4 billion comes due next year. Ordinarily they'd find some action, but at this rate they may have to sell the library at a discount to a tech player with a digital future.

Some folks believe the entertainment economy will bounce back. Others think the Internet has killed the golden goose. (Here's Wired's Chris Anderson on the free economy.) Some studios want to pursue a Hulu model, others prefer following iTunes or Netflix. But unless the consumer has an easy way to buy cheap movies, they'll download them for nothing.

Newsweek critic David Ansen pens a lovely tribute to late filmmaker/professor Richard P. Rogers on the occasion of a new documentary about him, The Windmill Movie.

Star Trek colorist Stefan Sonnenfeld is the rising star in a profession, film colorist, that is increasingly in demand.

The LAT lays out the reasons why so many studios chased the online video boom--and went bust.

There's a new producer/distrib/foreign sales combine in the works. DF Indie Studio is led by finance experts Mary Dickinson and Charlene Fisher, who are raising coin. Two years ago they first met with Ted Hope, one of several indie-prods lined up to supply future product for which there is guaranteed U.S. distribution, potentially supervised by consultant Ira Deutchman; ex-Focus and Weinstein Co. foreign sales maverick Glen Basner is set to handle foreign sales. Having domestic release assured would make it easier for producers to raise foreign funding. That's been the scary factor for producers in recent years, as studio specialty distribs have decreased, and even existing ones often refuse to sign on to projects before they are complete.

UPDATE: Dickinson and Fisher started to raise an investment fund, but as they talked to indie insiders, they moved to a more full-service model. "We encouraged them to dream larger," says Hope, "all the way beyond a fund to distribution and marketing, looking at things we felt would help them to raise money and attract producers. I was excited that they were in the under-$10 million space, as I could see the movement out of it. The other writing on the wall was the ending of producer overhead deals. Where I sit, it's producers who generate good material."

Hope also likes the promise of carefully nurtured domestic releasing that doesn't depend on 1500-screen openings. "There are so many changes in the game being played that people have to be innovative in the ways we reach upscale audiences," he says. "Newspapers are shutting down film critics, people don't go to movies, newspaper ads don't have show times, they've cut out the ways we always built interest and attention for films. It's a bigger challenge than ever before. People have to experiment if something is to pop."

Clearly, DFIS has a ways to go to reach its goals and will need to build a track record before it becomes competitive. At this stage, Dickinson and Fisher are unknown to reps for stars and name directors, who won't take a chance on a new outfit sight unseen. "If something's working, that's a good thing," says Hope. "It builds momentum and trust. They've hit some key thresholds, and like everything else they have a series of hurdles to go through."

For his part, on a non-exclusive basis, Hope has "earmarked" a "handful" of projects that DFIS is interested in, he says. But he has not yet received any funding.

It's odd that the indie duo picked the name DF Indie Studios. "Studio" to me connotes the old Hollywood system, with its back-lots and theaters (you had to have both to be called a major studio). That's not what this is. They're sending the message that they're occupying a low-budget space that the studios are not, and taking over a function that the studios have largely abandoned. While the DF Indie Studio business model is structurally sound, and relative neophytes Dickinson and Fisher have lined up strong execs, consultants and producers, their trickiest feat will make or break them: combining accessible competitive commercial indie fare with the strongest possible marketing and distribution.

UPDATE: Here's the LAT's Company Town, the Financial Times and the NYT.

The press release is on the jump.

I'm heading home from four days at the Seattle International Film festival (SIFF), the largest film festival in the U.S., "a ridiculously huge annual event," joked SIFF managing director Deborah Person at the closing awards brunch at the Seattle Needle. Many people turned up, exceeding last year's attendance, despite a recession and 25 days of glorious sunny weather in a row--the clouds rolled in on the last day.

SIFF showed 268 features and 124 shorts from 62 countries, with 31 world premieres, 45 North American premieres, and 13 US premieres. 80 films sold out, and 60,000 ballots were cast for the audience awards, which went to best film Black Dynamite, best actor Sam Rockwell (Moon), best actress Yolande Moreau (Seraphine), best director Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker) and best doc The Cove.

I was on the doc jury along with indie producer Paul Federbush and Aleksandra Biernacka of TV Polska; we awarded our grand jury prize to Talhotblond, an amazing truth-is-stranger-than-fiction crime doc about internet sex-texters whose fantasy lives take over. (Full list of winners on jump.) "This is the first thing I've ever won, ever," said Black Dynamite director Scott Sanders (pictured with Amreeka director Cherien Dabis). "It's unexpected. My movie's about pimps and kung fu and boobs and stuff."

Whenever the fest has tried to cut back, fest founder Dan Ireland told me, their loyal customers protested. (I recommend cutting back by one day a year.) But they seem to revel in their sprawling breadth. Artistic director Carl Spence admitted to cutting the budget back by 25%. But nonetheless the fest brought up 373 guests, including Francis Ford Coppola (Tetro) and Spike Lee (Passing Strange). "We showed more films than ever before," boasted Spence.