Variety has unrolled its long-planned site redesign, signaling the change with a new, red logo (I always thought The Hollywood Reporter was red to Variety's green), more charts, and a fancy "Big Daddy" widget with more windows. Variety is trying to make easier navigating and finding pieces to read on the site--the more people find individual stories, the better.

Kim Masters revisits her old Hit and Run subject, ex-Columbia co-head Jon Peters, as he publishes a dishy new memoir.

Todd McCarthy lays out the likely Cannes lineup. Already confirmed is Pete Docter's Up as the fest opener May 13 and Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. Also expected are Ang Lee's Taking Woodstock and Sam Raimi's Drag Me to Hell:

Other English-language fare will include Campion's U.K. production "Bright Star," a drama about the romance of 19th-century poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne, starring Ben Wishaw and Abbie Cornish; Cannes regular von Trier's "Antichrist," a horror drama with Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg as a couple who retreat to a secluded forest cabin after the death of their son; Loach's "Looking for Eric," about a troubled adolescent soccer fan who's counseled by former star Eric Cantona; prolific helmer To's French-financed "Vengeance," starring Johnny Hallyday as a hitman-turned-chef who heads to Hong Kong to avenge his daughter's death; and possibly English director Andrea Arnold's "Fish Tank," toplining Michael Fassbender in a tale of a 15-year-old whose life is turned upside down by her mother's new boyfriend. Pic looks to be in the Official Selection, although in which category remains uncertain.

Director Michael Bay says he is totally committed to messing up his next project, Thundercats.

Inevitably, in advance of Warner Bros.' May 21 release of the tentpole sequel Terminator Salvation, the two neophyte financeers at Halcyon, Derek Anderson and Victor Kubicek (above) reached an "amicable" settlement with producer Moritz Borman, who sued to get the remaining $2.5 million payment of his fee. The suit was dismissed. Meanwhile, McG is already talking about a follow-up.

IAC mogul Barry Diller is rubbing his hands in gleeful anticipation of going on a low-ball acquisition spree:

As Fast & Furious does better at the weekend b.o. than it has any right to do--the weekend was up 75-80% from last year-- Entertainment Weekly's Mark Harris sees the first casualty of the recession: ambition. If all audiences want is escape, he worries, that's all the studios and TV networks will give them. "Stop the inanity!" he pleads.

Back in 1940, for example, Twentieth Century Fox acquired the rights to John Steinbeck's great Depression novel The Grapes of Wrath, hired John Ford to direct, Nunnally Johnson to write and Henry Fonda to star as Tom Joad. The results: two Oscar wins (for Ford and Jane Darwell) and money in the bank.

The NYT's Dave Kehr looks some Paramount Depression era DVD releases.

We're reading The Grapes of Wrath for my book group this month. Here's the trailer:

While Watchmen delivered a robust opening of about $55.7 million in North America, it came in lower than expectations--and much lower than Snyder's last film, the blockbuster 300--both domestically and overseas. Finally, Watchmen works best as the narratively complex, visually dazzling comics series from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. Originally published in 1986, the graphic novel is flying off the shelves. I hope people do read the book, which instantly draws you in with its compelling, never confusing storytelling, deepening and peeling new layers as it goes. The movie, on the other hand, is hard to fathom, boasts too many characters, and doesn't add up to much. Set in the 80s, Zack Snyder's film deals with the Vietnam and Cold War, and the end of the world via nuclear attack, but supplies a new ending with strange shades of 9/11. Moore always did insist that his comics were unfilmable.

The Brits are unhappy with Barack Obama for the way he treated Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who may be the ultimate workaholic policy wonk but lacks a few volts in the charisma department. His countrymen are even complaining about Obama's gift to Brown of the AFI set of 25 DVDs.

Gold Derby reports that the Academy is delivering Heath Ledger's Oscar to Michelle Williams.

Ray Pride and Jamie Stuart celebrate the 10th anniversary of Stanley Kubrick's death. Here's a wonderful 2001 Kubrick special on Charlie Rose featuring Kubrick's wife and producer and Martin Scorsese:

The obits of the late novelist Donald E. Westlake focus mainly on his huge output of books, but he worked in the movies as well, earning a 1991 Oscar nom for his adaptation of Jim Thompson's The Grifters, directed by Stephen Frears.

Fifteen movies were based on his novels. Westlake never sold the rights to his anti-hero Parker, so various actors played him under other names in such films as The Split (Jim Brown), Point Blank (Lee Marvin), Payback (Mel Gibson) and perhaps most memorably, Jean-Luc Godard's Made in USA (Anna Karina).

As a matter of fact, LA's The Nuart will show the rarely seen 1966 movie, based on Westlake's The Jugger (written under the pseudonym Richard Stark), for a week starting January 16. (Here's Rialto Pictures' sked around the country.) Because Godard never acquired film rights to the novel, Westlake sued to prevent the film's stateside distribution. So this is the film's first U.S. theatrical release in 35 mm (it's never been available on TV, video or DVD). It's a new widescreen print from the original camera negative, with new titles. Godard's homage to American noir--including Samuel Fuller's Underworld USA--is hardboiled, stylish fun. The Village Voice's Jim Hoberman calls it "Godard's hymn to vulgar modernism."

Michael Blowhard praises Westlake's script for The Stepfather, among other things. And here's Westlake himself, in a 2007 WGA conversation with another hardboiled writer whose books make good movies, Elmore Leonard.

[Hat Tip: David Chute. Photo courtesy Getty Images]

Glenn Goldman was a great guy who loved books and presided over my favorite L.A. bookstore, Book Soup, on the Sunset Strip. He put it up for sale on Friday, and then he died, of pancreatic cancer. He was 58.

Last time I spoke to Goldman, he told me business had gotten much tougher. For a time, Book Soup was the most popular indie bookstore in town. I attended countless readings and book signings there, most recently for Todd McCarthy's Fast Women: The Legendary Ladies of Racing. The space was jam-packed with canyons of books.

I guess my own Amazon habit is part of the reason stores like Book Soup no longer thrive. I love Amazon and I love bookstores too. I want them to co-exist. Though Kindle is obviously the way of the future, I still prefer the feel and ambience of browsing in a bookstore, and holding a book in my hand.

[Photo courtesy LA Observed.]

The movie my family and I went to see on Christmas Day was chosen by many others over the holiday: Marley & Me, a cannily crafted family film starring a restrained Owen Wilson, a charming Jennifer Aniston and a series of delightful rambunctious Labrador retrievers as the titular dog, Marley. My family made fun of me for crying so hard.

Written by Don Roos (The Opposite of Sex) and Scott Frank (Get Shorty) and directed by David Frankel (The Devil Wears Prada), this movie delivers both a romance between a handsome couple plus their relationship with their dog. This well-calibrated studio tear-jerker doesn't go overboard on the sentimentality, hews close to the original material (the bestselling memoir by newspaper columnist John Grogan) and keeps the performances natural. Both stars are well-matched to their roles and each other; Wilson gives his most mature performance to date. (Here are diametrically opposed reviews by Todd McCarthy and Stephen Holden.)

Also doing well over the holiday, after Marley & Me, was The Curious Life of Benjamin Button, which also drew opposite reviews from Scott (a rave) and the LAT's Turan (a dismissive pan). Its Metacritic average was 70%. That's just ok, but it should score with Oscar voters for its sheer technological virtuosity in any case.

EW's Dave Karger reviews the post-Christmas Oscar landscape. Needing a serious boost from critics was Revolutionary Road, reviewed Friday. The LAT's Turan loved it. Rotten Tomatoes' top critics give it 80%, which is good, but Metacritic is at 71%. I'm not feeling the Academy love for this movie, except for Kate Winslet, who could win the best actress Oscar for the double whammy of Road and The Reader. And Michael Shannon has a shot at a supporting actor nom.

The guy could write. The story of Revolutionary Road author Richard Yates, told in excruciating detail in Blake Bailey's 2003 A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates, moves me, partly because he got so little encouragement, yet went back to writing every morning, hung over or not. And he insisted on drinking and smoking himself to death. But he knew he was a good writer, and that sustained him. Here's my column.

Yates strikes a chord with me because my father sat at the dining room table every night at his Royal typewriter, a glass of cheap sherry at his elbow and a Kool wasting away in the ashtray. Yates was what he aspired to be. How many writers, inspired by the likes of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Salinger, pecked away at the great American novel? And never succeeded? (My father's debut novel, Halfway Down the Stairs, was launched to good reviews in 1957. He never got another one published.)

Karina Longworth gets me slightly wrong on the movie adaptation of Revolutionary Road. I don't think any producer from Hollywood or elsewhere could adapt this book for the movies without warming it up. You have to give the audience some reason to hang in there. Much as I admire the book, Yates is tough and brutal. Sam Mendes and screenwriter Justin Haythe, Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio kept the story grim and honest while figuring out a way to cut through the darkness.

Here's James Wood's appreciation of Yates and Revolutionary Road in The New Yorker.

And Tim Dumas in Westport Magazine.

[Illustration courtesy The New Yorker]

It kills me that Jane Fonda at 70 is at the height of her powers and because she no longer wants to do the heavy-lifting of producing her own movies--which is how she stayed at the top of the Hollywood actress pyramid for so long--she isn't working much. But she's a draw on the lecture circuit talking about women, teens and politics--she supported Hillary Clinton, then Barack Obama. And she's writing books; her autobiography My Life So Far is better written and more honest than most, and she's now researching and writing The Third Act: Entering Primetime, about women and aging.

I got a kick out of interviewing Fonda some months back when she was in town for the Warren Beatty AFI Tribute. She was open-faced, candid and fun to talk to. Here's my story in the current issue of More Magazine.

The long tail prevails. My daughter Nora, 19, is more interested in renting old Kevin Smith comedies and Good Will Hunting than she is in going out to new movies. The perfect book for any cinephile is Biographical Dictionary of Film author David Thomson's latest blue and red tome: "Have You Seen…?” , 1000 one-page reviews (of about 500 words each) of must-see movies, from Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein to Z. Here's my review.

Based in San Francisco, Thomson considers himself to be an historian more than a film critic, although he's done reviews for Film Comment and Esquire and other publications over the years. He's idiosyncratic, entertaining, erudite and fun to read. Early on, he says, he persuaded Knopf to forgo both illustrations and a rating system. Photos would have made the book too weighty, not to mention expensive. "If I couldn't get what I thought about a film into 500 words..." he says. "This book is all about the text."

Thomson's thinking about changes for the revised version, he says: "I already have second thoughts." He might drop some titles and add new ones, like the 1945 Michael Redgrave horror film Dead At Night or Bette Davis in Dangerous. He admits that he erred on the side of older films rather than more contemporary ones because people need reminding, he says. "There's a tremendous amount of valuable old stuff."

Friends are indignant, he says, that he omitted Danny Boyle's Trainspotting. He left out plenty of Best Picture Oscar winners because "the Oscars serve their purpose, but they are an extremely unreliable reflection of what actually happened. The people awarding the Oscars do not have a laudable record. They've been wrong on more of them than they've been right."

“Have you Seen…?” is a book for anyone with a Netflix queue who seeks more depth than a Rotten Tomatoes score. And it's also available on Kindle.

Kate Winslet has come into her own. She stars in two potential Oscar contenders with strong advance buzz, The Reader and Revolutionary Road, directed by her husband Sam Mendes (American Beauty) and co-starring her Titanic leading man, Leonardo DiCaprio. And she's on the cover of Vanity Fair, airbrushed within an inch of her life.

Alfred Hitchcock expert Donald Spoto is going back to the well with his new book Spellbound by Beauty: Alfred Hitchcock and his Leading Ladies. NYT reviewer Janet Maslin points out in her review entitled "Hitchcock's Birds," that Spoto's focus is on the filmmaker "at his most fetishistic."

Tippi Hedren talks to Spoto about what she went through on The Birds ("Are you trying to kill her?" asked Hedren's doctor). Here's Vanity Fair's photo of Jodie Foster as Hedren:

While Oprah may not be willing to promote Barack Obama on her show these days, she doesn't hesitate to use her considerable clout with women to sell movies she believes in. She delivered for helmer Spike Lee, exhorting her millions of viewers to see his revisionist World War II epic The Miracle at St. Anna, for which he was duly grateful. The movie needs her help; it scored a miserable 29 % on Rotten Tomatoes.

And Oprah came through for Gina Prince-Blythewood's faithful, effective, and (given the presidential election) resonant adaptation of Sue Monk Kidd's 2002 bestseller The Secret Life of Bees. O Magazine also visited the set during filming.

Oprah gushed over Queen Latifah, who's warmly charismatic as the mom-figure bee-keeper in the 1964-set southern drama about a young teen runaway (Dakota Fanning) who seeks refuge with a cultured family of African-American women; Alicia Keys, who admitted to tapping into her own personality as a tough but lovelorn musician; Sophie Okonedo, who doesn't overplay an over-emotional woman who never recovered from losing her twin sister; Jennifer Hudson, who stays real as the young girl's nanny; and Fanning, in some ways more experienced than some of her co-stars, who carries the movie on her narrow 14-year-old shoulders.

Fanning told our first Sneak Previews class this week that while she reads and researches and prepares for any character she plays, this one came naturally, partly because she's from the South. Something happens the minute a director calls action, she says. She just becomes the character. While a group of reps and her mother read all her scripts, Fanning makes the final decision on what to make, based on what she responds to emotionally. While she enjoyed finally kissing a boy (The Wire's Tristan Wilds) in this coming-of-age story, Fanning only wants to do age-appropriate roles; she's in no rush to grow up.

Prince-Blythewood admitted that having been adopted played a part in her strong response to this story about a girl who thinks she accidentally killed her mother. Prince-Blythewood chased the project (produced by Lauren Shuler Donner, Will Smith and Joe Pichirallo) after it fell apart at Focus Features, and brought more Civil Rights consciousness to her adaptation for Fox Searchlight. Being a screenwriter, said the UCLA film school grad, has made all the difference in being able to direct movies like Love and Basketball (a fave of mine) and Bees. Despite the eclectic casting, from Brits Okonedo and Paul Bettany to untrained actor-singers Keys and Hudson, the ensemble hangs together. Even though the director wound up casting some mighty crooners in the film, Prince-Blythewood kept the singing to a minimum. "I was afraid it would pull the audience out of the movie," she said.

The Secret Life of Bees opens October 17.

New York Mag's cover story on the end of book publishing paints Amazon as the big bad wolf ready to blow all the publishing houses down.

I packed my Amazon review Kindle for my recent trip to cover the Toronto Film Fest, along with all my other gear: Flip camera, tape recorder, BlackBerry, Nikon Coolpix, iPod, MacBook. At the fest, I was a one-man band, showing up to cover Kevin Smith or Kathryn Bigelow or the Che press conference, shuffling my various media. I'd take a still photo for the blog, record the interview on the Flip (and sometimes the tape recorder), or take notes the old-fashioned way, in my reporter's notebook. For Che, I Flipped with my left hand and took notes with my right, as I would be handing the camera off to someone else to load onto the site. (I left the MacBook in the hotel with the wifi connection; while some people cart their portables with them, I once left my laptop under a cafe table in Cannes. The maitre d' held it for me.)

The Kindle works like a dream for downloading and reading books, whether at home or on the road. I had hoped it would be the perfect answer to my ongoing war against piles of unread mags and papers, but I found it strange to pay even tiny sums for clunky black-and-white Kindle versions of media, when you can move around more freely in a full-color online universe. Clearly, this is a situation where we should all wait for the new and improved Kindles --or Sony Readers, or Plastic Logic--coming down the pike. Some people swear by the eee PC, a simple small-scale portable computer.

Here's my Kindle column. Michael Arrington at Tech Crunch thinks Amazon should let the device go out into the world to proliferate and prosper as Amazon hangs on to all the book downloads.

As the Democratic National Convention gets under way, Liberal gadfly Michael Moore's pre-election book, Mike's Election Guide, hits stores just in time for the height of the presidential campaign. The writer and doc filmmaker (Sicko) promotes himself--per usual--via email to his fans:

Friends,

This morning my new book officially goes on sale. It has a fancy title: "Mike's Election Guide." It's cheap ($11.19 on Amazon). It's got a cool quote on the back cover from Republican congressman Tom Davis: "The Republican brand is in the trash can ... If we were dog food, they would take us off the shelf."

And it's got 200+ pages of facts and ideas that you won't read anywhere else, like:

** Does John McCain think it's right to drop bombs on civilians in (his words) "heavily populated" cities?

** The only reason Social Security is running out of money is because people who make over $102,000 a year pay NO social security tax on what they make over $102,000 (if they did, we'd have enough money in Social Security for the next 75 years!).

** Bring back the draft -- but only draft the rich. If they have to serve, they won't be so eager to start ridiculous wars.

** Despite what you've heard, we actually pay more "taxes" than France or any European country -- and get none of the benefits they receive.

** Why we must arrest Misters Bush and Cheney as they slip out of the White House this coming January 20th for the crimes they have committed.

It's taken six years to turn Sue Monk Kidd's 2002 bestseller The Secret Life of Bees into a movie. Producers Lauren Shuler Donner and Joe Pichirallo, who followed the project from Fox Searchlight to Focus Features (where David Gordon Green was attached) to Will Smith's Overbrook production company and back to Fox Searchlight again, doggedly kept the project alive when it seemed like nobody wanted to do it.

Of course The Secret Life of Bees breaks all the conventions of what's deemed commercial these days: it's period (60s South Carolina) and it's about smart, cultured African-American women (not a low-brow urban comedy), although the lead is a white teenager (Dakota Fanning). The film could easily turn into yet another well-intentioned, inspirational heart-tugger (like Denzel Washington's The Great Debaters or Akeelah and the Bee) that earns rave reviews but still fails to build into a crossover hit.

So why did Fox Searchlight finally step up? First, because the book was a huge bestseller, there's a core femme demo to count on. Second, the women at the Fox specialty division loved the project and were willing to roll up their sleeves and push it. When marketing chief Nancy Utley throws her weight behind a pic, it usually gets made.

Gina Prince-Blythewood (Love and Basketball) adapted the book and directed the movie, which stars Fanning as 14-year-old girl who seeks more info about the mystery of her mother's death. She leaves her father (Paul Bettany) and turns up with her babysitter (Jennifer Hudson) at the home of a family of three sisters with a honey business: Queen Latifah. Sophie Okonedo (Hotel Rwanda) and singer Alicia Keys, who delivers a song for the closing credits. It's 1964, during the Civil Rights movement.

Searchlight will be targeting two under-served audiences: African-Americans and women. One reason movies aimed at women are so risky is that they depend so much on execution. Searchlight is fanning the flames in Toronto, where The Secret Life of Bees will debut on September 5 in advance of its October 17 opening on 1200 or so screens. Here's the new trailer:

Somehow this new effort on the part of Time to spread its magazines around to subscribers fails to address one issue for consumers. Many people are overloaded as they try to keep up with all the paper piling up in their homes, along with everything they're reading online. I have always read a pile of magazines every month, and I can't do it anymore. I'm trying to figure out ways to cut back, without losing the stories I want to read. I'm trying to subscribe to more newsletters and rss feeds online, for one thing. I need to find what I want to read another way, rather than ploughing through reams of published material. This is where the aggregators come in, to fill this need.

Amazon's electronic "book," Kindle, might be one solution. Kindle has earned some glowing reviews lately. I don't know what the revenue model would be, but if readers could subscribe to the newspapers and magazines of their choice via Kindle, and then read and consume their stories (short or long), complete with sophisticated color and graphics and design, at their leisure with a hand-held portable device, they would have more control over storing and reading their own library of periodical material--as well as books, Kindle's other purpose. (This Kindle assessment seems based on books alone.)

The magazines have the advantage of glossy presentation and portability. That could be retained in the Kindle universe. In theory--I still have to get my hands on one. At $359, that's a fair investment. (I still have to upgrade my Phillips TiVo receiver so that I can go broadband and HD. And my iPod is running out of juice. And I'm aching to get my hands on Rock Band, which requires an Xbox or Playstation player.)

[Posted by Steven Gaydos]

I just got off the phone with venerated novelist and essayist Herbert Gold, who's dropped in from the Bay Area for some local appearances, including his book signing on Sunday at Book Soup in West Hollywood. To call Gold the last of the Beats is to over-dramatize his role in the '50s intellectual ruckus called the Beat Generation. It would also underestimate Gold, who's been intellectually restless and creatively productive in the decades since.

Beat, hip or cool? Don't be square.

Earlier this month, Tim Rutten of the L.A. Times, reviewing Gold's latest, "Still Alive: A Temporary Condition," said "If America had the literary culture it ought to have, every city would have a writer like Herbert Gold."

I know what he means. I just talked to Gold for a few minutes and the conversation sailed colorfully and insightfully through vignettes involving some key cultural figures Gold has hung with and in some cases, remarkably survived. Authors and showbiz artistes like Alex Trocchi, Mort Sahl, Saul Bellow, John Cassavetes, Lenny Bruce were a few of the topics, as they will likely be when Gold chats about his life and times at Book Soup.

Playtone producer Gary Goetzman wishes that Warner Bros. chief Alan Horn hadn't expressed his reservations about Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are to the LAT's Patrick Goldstein:

"We've given him more money and, even more importantly, more time for him to work on the film," Horn said. "We'd like to find a common ground that represents Spike's vision but still offers a film that really delivers for a broad-based audience. We obviously still have a challenge on our hands. But I wouldn't call it a problem, simply a challenge. No one wants to turn this into a bland, sanitized studio movie. This is a very special piece of material and we're just trying to get it right."

On the City of Ember train, Goetzman responded: "Warner Bros.' vision and Spike and my vision of the picture may be a little different. In the end good taste will prevail. The final cut is Spike's. Warner Bros. is not taking over the picture and has no intention of bringing down the hammer on anyone here."

The kid starring in the pic as Max (Max Records) isn't going anywhere. He was picked by Spike and approved by Warners, said Goetzman.

Goetzman admitted to me and AICN's Mr. Beaks that the live-action animatronic wild things definitely did not work in the context of shooting in the jungles of Australia and that CGI is being added now. "CG can always look right," he says. As for the rumor that kids ran screaming from an early research screening, Goetzman says that's not true: "There was no screaming, no crying, none of that."

Clearly, Jonze, who is still working on the troubled movie, needs more tinkering time. The original October release date is long past. But it does seem to make Goetzman a tad nervous that there is no new release date set. Clearly, limbo is not a comfortable place to be.

Earlier post: Where the Wild Things Aren't.

When EW writer Nicole Sperling posted a Twilight item on her blog, she got 821 comments in 15 hours. Thus it was no surprise Thursday that screaming women flocked into Hall H prepared to screech like Beatles fans whenever Harry Potter star Robert Pattinson opened his mouth.

The poor guy was "tweaked," admitted one Summit staffer who tried to prep the guy in advance. He could barely talk amid the screams in a room packed with some 7000 people. "Let me focus," he begged. One fan asked a question about The Day the Earth Stood Still and Twilight opening on the same day, December 12. 'Who will win?" The fans screamed their answer.

"I just wanted to play the hottest vampire in the world," joked Pattinson. "He's a fantastical dude and he dazzles."

Comic-Con Photo Gallery: Twilight Panel - includes more photos of Robert Pattinson

NYT media columnist David Carr's memoir about doing drugs, The Night of the Gun, is due in bookstores this August. Carr is not only a terrific writer/reporter but Oscar season blogger as well (aka The Carpetbagger). Here's one chapter from the NYT Magazine. This is strong stuff:

I remember driving to a dark spot between the streetlights at the rounded-off corner of West 32nd and Garfield. Right here, I thought. This would be fine.

The Nova, a junker with a bad paint job my brother bought me out of pity, shuddered to a stop, and I saw two sleeping children in the rearview, the fringe of their hoods emerging in outline against the backseat as my eyes adjusted to the light. Teeny, tiny, itty-bitty, the girls were swallowed by the snowsuits. We should not have been there. But I was fresh out. I had nothing. I called Kenny.

Anna was out, and I could not bear to leave them home, but I was equally unable to stay put. So here we were, one big, happy family, parked outside the dope house. Then came the junkie math. If I went inside the house, I could get what I needed in 5 minutes, 10 minutes tops. The twins would sleep, dreaming their little baby dreams where their dad is a nice man, where the car rides end at a playground.

Carr's book inspires Jeffrey Wells to recall some of his own darker moments before he pulled himself out of some bad habits.

When you think about it, the first inkling that director Spike Jonze wanted to use animatronic puppets for his adaptation of Maurice Sendak's beloved children's book Where the Wild Things Are was a warning sign. First of all, just look at Jonze's movies and sensibility and you know he's a maverick indie spirit, an artist. It's no shock that he ran into trouble making a mainstream studio movie with family appeal--especially at straight-arrow studio Warner Bros., which is better at making tentpoles than anything else. Which may be why they gave the guy $80 million??!!

While I applaud Warner chief Alan Horn for giving the director some time to figure things out, I agree with Patrick Goldstein that this may not have been an ideal match (much like the Wachowskis and Speed Racer) between director and subject. As exciting as it is to have Dave Eggers write the screenplay, again, Eggers + Jonze does not = family movie for all audiences.

That's what Warner Independent was supposed to be for, guys. (For a lot less money.)

Tim Appelo (Swarthmore '78) interviews Peter Biskind (Swarthmore '62) who in turn interviewed my boss Peter Bart (Swarthmore '54) in his book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, which seems to be the last Hollywood book to have sold many copies. It was dishy, thanks to the wives of the directors, basically.

I was disturbed to hear that Mark Harris's well-reviewed 1967 cultural-history-in-a-bottle, Pictures at a Revolution, didn't sell well. Being smart and well-written and informative doesn't seem to be enough these days. The section on Warren Beatty's Bonnie and Clyde is the best of the five Oscar contenders Harris covers.

Dish is the quotient that pushes a movie book into popularity, methinks.

Biskind is suffering in book limbo as he uses all the patience required to get to the end of his long-in-the-works Beatty bio. (Here's a 2006 excerpt in Vanity Fair.) It will be worth waiting for--as long as it isn't too reverent. Yes, the recent AFI lifetime achievement honoree (the show airs on USA Network July 8) is a top Hollywood talent, a writer-actor-producer-director renowned for his painstaking perfectionism. Shampoo, Reds, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Heaven Can Wait, Bulworth and Bonnie and Clyde will stand the test of time. Not a bad record at all.

But when I finally read Biskind's book about this legendary womanizer-turned-family-man, all I ask is for a little bit of dish.

[Hat tip: 2 Blowhards]

Just because the New York Post reports that someone who used to work at Miramax is writing a Weinstein tell-all does not mean it will ever see the light of day.

Much as I would love to read it.

But what goes up, must come down. Michael Eisner, Mike Ovitz, Joel Silver and the Weinsteins are not what they once were. Haze your way up in this business, and it's rougher on the downward slope. Your friends can become your enemies. And when things are rough, as they are now for the Weinsteins--many folks are asking how long Goldman Sachs will support their company's current scale and scope--all the knives come out.

People in Hollywood love to jump gleefully on a once-fierce competitor when they aren't so strong anymore. But the Weinsteins have many friends in New York politics and publishing, so we shall see.

The would-be Weinstein book author attached a seven-minute audio file to his pitch to Page Six:

The recording is of a Dec. 12, 1996, phone call between Harvey and Joe Roth, then president of Walt Disney Studios, in which the two complain about the $138 million severance deal that Mike Ovitz negotiated to leave Disney after 16 months.

"Please fire me," Weinstein facetiously tells Roth. "I'll split whatever I get . . . I'll meet you in St. Barts. We'll buy both halves of the island . . . If you don't fire me, then I think we should make bad movies next year. Let's make a series of [bleep]y movies."

Roth replies: "I obviously made a mistake. I made good movies." Harvey says, "Joe, you are a success, so therefore you are a failure in this town." The two then name Peter Guber, Michael Fuchs and Jon Peters as having won huge golden parachutes.

"Everybody got wealthy on failure," Weinstein says. Roth replies: "You know what the problem is with you and me? We care about the movies." Weinstein laughs: "We have character flaws that must be overcome."

Here's the podcast (in California, isn't it illegal to record someone without their knowledge?), which is amusing and I see their POV, actually:

Speaking of Joel Silver, he does not come off so well, nor does producer Larry Gordon (Hellboy2), in screenwriter Larry Gross's juicily candid memoir of working on Walter Hill's 1982 48 HRS., which helped to define the Hollywood buddy comedy genre for decades to come, and made Eddie Murphy into a star. MCN is publishing the pieces in serial form; part four is up now. It's a must-read, and I understand that it is making Silver and Gordon none too happy. The person who emerges smelling like a rose is director Hill, whose Broken Trail and Undisputed should put him back on the must-hire list. Hill can do comedy, tragedy, action, and subtle character work. But does Hollywood have work for someone who doesn't do tentpoles? That is the question.

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.

Twentieth Century Fox acquisitions exec Tony Safford, a man of many hidden talents, has written a useful instruction manual on how to read a book. I'd like to think that this arcane practice is familiar to many of you, but given that it seems to be going out of style in our Internet age--how many of us spend time on Facebook that might be put to better use?--I asked him for permission to post it here.

Instruction Manual

HOW TO READ A BOOK

Things You'll Need To Get Started:

- A book

- A chair

- A light (as required)

- Reading glasses (if needed)

1) Select a book. Books average 288 pages and come in a variety of sizes, usually rectangular. Their titles are almost always different. The average size of a paperback book is 5 1/2" x 8 1/2" and weighs 8 ounces. Hardbacks, the more durable of the two, are larger - averaging 7" x 10" - and weighing significantly more: 20 ounces on average, due to their size, paper stock and cover material. Thickness can vary but, as a general rule of thumb, the thicker the book the longer it takes to read. Hardbacks often have a dust jacket and, for more than purely aesthetic reasons (see below), avoid selecting one without it. Type face can also vary (there are dozens!) but the most commonly used is Times New Roman, size 12.

For the purposes of this instruction, I suggest you pick an average size contemporary book, no matter paperback or hardback, but not a large, heavy tome or an over-sized art book. Do not select a "coffee table book" which is not meant for reading (it's meant for the coffee table).

2) One can read standing up; on a bus bench; in bed; while eating a meal; fishing; drinking tea; even jumping on one foot; none of which I recommend for various reasons, certainly not for extended periods of time. Some can read while in a car but none should read while driving it. It's difficult to read while doing physical activity such as swimming or parachuting; or while concentrating on something else (sewing) or not at all (sleeping).

You can read in the bathtub but not in the shower. Personally, I recommend reading on a plane, particularly on long plane rides, particularly when sitting in Business Class.

You may wish to begin by sitting in a comfortable chair, preferably one with arm rests. Pick wisely. What is "comfortable" for you may not be for another; that of course is subjective, a matter of taste, style and, well, comfort.

3) Adjust the lighting as necessary, taking into account your eyesight (you may require reading glasses for example) and, importantly, the time of day. At night you will most likely need a light. The point of lighting is to illuminate the words. You may, therefore, wish to purchase a specially designed “reading lamp.”

4) Adjust audio environment as necessary or as preferred. You are likely to prefer silence or soft music over, by way of example, a barking dog or crying baby (neither of which are often found in Business Class).

5) Hold book stationary, approximately 12-16 inches from your eyes, positioned downward towards your stomach, with your head also stationary and bent downward at exactly a 15 degree angle (see diagram #1).

6) To open and begin reading a book is a challenging experience, requiring patience and much trial and error. First, hold the book with the spine (or binding) in a VERTICAL position. On contemporary paperbacks, locate the bar code on the outside cover of the book (for hardbacks, bar codes can be similarly found on the dust jackets).

Summit Entertainment is doing cartwheels. That's because they're already in production on a movie, Twilight, based on the first book in a trilogy vampire saga by book phenom Stephenie Meyer.

The 34-year-old Mormon author just landed a takeout in Time Magazine calling her the new queen of fantasy with the head: The Next J.K. Rowling? The article praises Meyer's books for being about the "erotics of abstinence." She "rewrites stock horror plots as love stories."

She's basically the young adult Anne Rice, because Twilight is a romantic 17-year-old Romeo and Juliet with vampires and humans. Rising star Kristen Stewart (discovered by Jon Favreau in Zathura, Panic Room) plays a girl who falls for a handsome guy (Robert Pattinson, of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire) who turns out to be a vampire. But he's a good vampire who has renounced sucking human blood. He and his mother coven feed on animals. His virtue--his psychological struggle against his lust for blood--makes him interesting. The movie, directed by thirteen's Catherine Hardwicke, is due December 12.

Vampires have fed Hollywood since its infancy, from Bram Stoker's Dracula and Nosferatu to Rice's Interview with a Vampire, Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Underworld series. But this series has femme appeal.

When Summit slapped a teaser trailer up on MySpace on Monday at 11 AM, it pulled 1 million views in 36 hours and has now passed 2 million. The teaser will premiere on E.T. Friday, and will run in front of family-friendly Speed Racer (maybe that will boost its ticket sales). "I would have been happy with 500,000," says Summit chief Rob Friedman, who scooped up the rights to Twilight when it had sold 10,000 copies just after he started Summit's new production/distrib arm. Paramount had the option and let it go. Since then the first three Twilight books have sold over 6 million copies in the U.S. "I knew the book had a fan base but it's always good to see it's bigger than you think," says Friedman, who has a potential franchise on his hands. This is what any new company lusts after.

UPDATE: Wired is also tracking this. The trailer could break the current record of 4.1 million views in one week set in March by Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. The internet fan buzz on this is so intense that Summit marketing may want to consider pulling back a tad.

Here's the HD teaser trailer:

Twilight in HD

[Illustration for Time by Anita Kunz]

Suze Rotello, the iconic girl on the 1963 Freewheelin' Bob Dylan album cover, has long been a mysterious figure, until now. She's written a book, A Freewheelin' Time, about her four-year relationship with the young Dylan, whom she met at age 17, when he was 20. They were deeply in love, but the pressures of his rising fame broke them up, writes the LAT.

Check out these revealing clips a few years later at a party where Dylan and Donovan watch each other perform:

The movie that is likeliest to exceed expectations at the boxoffice this summer--and pass the $300-million mark domestically-- is the second Narnia pic, Prince Caspian, partly because the filmmakers have added more grown-up action and a more adult hero in Caspian himself. It's not only a sequel, but a family-oriented four quadrant Disney/Walden pic that has been embraced by the Christian community--and is tracking really well in advance of its May 16 opening.

Here's a new photo and excerpt on the cast from the film's gushy behind-the-scenes book, which is not surprising as it is written by the unit publicist on both Narnia pics, Ernie Malik:

Making a full-scale motion picture like Prince Caspian is a journey unto itself -- not only a physical one that took hundreds of filmmakers thousands of miles across two hemispheres, but also a spiritual and emotional voyage for the film's family members.

With mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, sons and daughters, and husbands and wives away from home for close to a full year, the film company's 600-plus members bonded closely, sharing in both work and play, to create not only a friendly on-set environment over the lengthy seven-month shoot, but hopefully something greater than the sum of its parts -- something all can hail proudly when the lights go down, the projector flickers, the film unspools, and their collective movie magic enchants audiences the world over.

As production began over a year ago on that mid-February morning in Auckland, there stood Andrew, the lanky director, alongside his Pevensie clan like a proud father with his children, home for the holidays. Even though it had been barely two years since the completion of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, his film family had, indeed, matured, both physically and emotionally. Their patriarch grinned with pride at the progress.

[Posted by Pat Saperstein]
Reinventing Hollywood, but how to start? Whether at film festivals or book fairs, lately every film panel seems to turn into a whinefest about the good old days of musty arthouses. This weekend's L.A. Times Fest of Books panel "Reinventing Hollywood: The 1960s and Beyond" was no exception.

Moderator Leonard Maltin’s intro quickly pointed up a gulf between those who feel Hollywood has forsaken them and those who embrace comicbook fare. “I mean, am I supposed to really be excited about ‘Iron Man’?” he asked sarcastically. Half the audience and most of the panel immediately countered “We are!”

Discussion mostly focused on why, as LAT film critic Kenneth Turan put it, “even the loyal core audience for smaller films is staying home rather than seeing the films in theaters,” and whether there is “any glimmer of hope” to get fans of films targeted towards adults back to theaters.

Author Mark Harris (“Pictures at a Revolution”) pointed out that it’s nearly impossible anyway to find good films in theaters for the first eight months of the year — “After New Year’s Day, it’s goodbye to you and your snooty friends until Labor Day.”

And while panelists were wowed by several of last year’s pics including “No Country for Old Men,” “The Savages” and “Michael Clayton,” Peter Biskind (“Easy Riders, Raging Bulls”) was chagrined that “The Assassination of Jesse James” was ignored at kudos time. Biskind also worried that this year’s crop of quality fare will be sparse due to the effects of the writers’ strike.

Harris said that the shift to home viewing means films can’t have the kind of wide cultural influence they had in the 1960s, when viewers knew they would likely never be able to see “The Graduate” uncut on their TVs.

“It puts movies at the center of the conversation when you can only see them in theaters,” Harris contends.

What will panelists find to discuss when day-and-date distribution of independent and foreign films directly onto large-screen TVs finally becomes commonplace?

Sony's happy: 21 and Prom Night are doing well. Universal is less thrilled that George Clooney's Leatherheads took a steep decline. I didn't go to Street Kings after a pal told me that it's very close to Ron Shelton and David Ayer's 2002 Dark Blue, which I liked.

Instead, I watched my biggest Yankee crush, Mike Mussina, pitch a few innings of a Yankee game, some In Treatment episodes, and the new Bonnie and Clyde DVD. The 1967 collaboration of Arthur Penn, Warren Beatty, Robert Benton and David Newman holds up really well. I remember when Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate first came out; they were the first movies I went to with my Manhattan school pals instead of my family.

And I recommend my ex-EW editor Mark Harris's well-researched and elegantly written new book Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood, which paints a vivid portrait of the 60s period when both of these films were made. I had no idea that New Wavers Truffaut and Godard were interested in making movies in Hollywood, nor that they both flirted with making Bonnie and Clyde. Whenever I read one of these Hollywood books I am reminded that the more things change in Hollywood, the more thay remain the same. Check out this quote, from director Fred Zinnemann:

"If you go to France these days you are constantly involved in passionate discussions about the creative side of moviemaking. Here in Hollywood we are going in circles. We have moved into a trap, a self-imposed, self-induced trap with our dependence on best-sellers, hit plays, remakes and rehashes."

Vanity Fair queries my Variety colleague David Cohen on his recently-published screenwriter tell-all, Screen Plays.

Warners has figured out a Harry Potter solution that is consistent with the studio's successful approach to adapting the hugely popular J.K. Rowling books: stick to the story. In the case of the final installment Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, that means splitting the long book into two films, six months apart. (And filming the kids back-to-back while they still look under 20.) The Deathly Hallows will open in November 2010, with the second part to follow in May, 2011.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay author Michael Chabon writes about Superman in The New Yorker.

London producer Material Entertainment has acquired screen rights to rookie adventure writer John Drake’s Flint & Silver. The action-packed prequel to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island will be published by Harper Collins later this year. It paints in the details on the fierce rivalry between Captain Flint and John Silver that exploded in the Stevenson classic. Material prexy Robert Jones says the book's characters "leap off the page in a thoroughly contemporary manner that has incredibly broad appeal." Two further prequels are incorporated in the rights deal. Jones is already approaching several name writers to adapt the screenplay.

Material's first picture, Run, Fat Boy, Run, a Simon Pegg comedy that topped the UK box office chart four weeks running late last year, will be released by Picturehouse this March.

In an LA Weekly cover story, Nancy Rommelmann gets close to Laura Albert, aka J.T. LeRoy. I never tire of this woman. She both fascinates and horrifies me.

The Coens are going to shoot Michael Chabon's Yiddish Policemen's Union--a book I loved but that I thought was unfilmable by Hollywood. This they could pull off. This could be another Scott Rudin match made in heaven.
Click here for Michael Fleming's story.

Sundance 08 is packed with authors and tie-in books, all looking for a launch pad.

NYT reviewer Janet Maslin says Andrew Morton's new Tom Cruise biography is more an attack on Scientology than an examination of Cruise.

Living in the heart of Hollywood is a constant reminder of how old you look. (I feel ten years younger every time I leave L.A.) Angelinos prize their anti-aging expertise, from ingesting vast quantities of soy, fish oil and ginseng to finding the best shiatsu back-walkers in town.

New Yorker and ex-Glamour editor Charla Krupp's new book, How Not to Look Old: Fast and Effortless Ways to Look 10 Years Younger, 10 Pounds Lighter, 10 Times Better, offers some surprising advice. (She gets a launch plug in Time, where husband Richard Zoglin is a senior editor.) This book will sell like hotcakes.

1. Don't get a face-lift, it makes you look instantly older.
2. Botox is the way to go.
3. Forget pancake makeup, stay sheer and healthy-looking.
4. Throw out the dark lipstick and stick to lighter shades.
5. And always color your hair, natch.

[Photo courtesy of Time.]

In the LAT, Time critic and author Richard Schickel delivers a scathing critique of screenwriter Marc Norman's book A History of American Screenwriting, which arrives at a timely moment, during a protracted Writers Strike.

It probably began with Mack Sennett. The nearly illiterate, purely instinctive producer of silent comedies used to sequester his "writers" (their main job was concocting knockabout gags) in a room where no books, periodicals or playing cards were permitted. According to recollections reprinted by Marc Norman in "What Happens Next: A History of American Screenwriting," there were a few cushionless chairs and a bench with multiple armrests, which prevented anyone from lying down on it. Lunch was a tuna sandwich and a glass of milk because, the master said, "Eating heavy food makes writers logy." There were a couple of typewriters in the room, but they were never used. Once a sequence evolved it was described to the director from scribbled notes. He was expected to shoot it from memory, while the writers returned to their grousing.

Norman's heavily anecdotal (and error-strewn) history of screenwriting encourages us to believe that, except for the money and except, perhaps, for scriveners who add a hyphen and a second title -- "director" -- to their credits, the conditions under which movies get written have not greatly improved since Sennett's day. From the beginnings of the movies, writers have always been regarded as necessary nuisances. They provided structure and intertitles for silent pictures, but that was a medium that conveyed most of its meanings visually, which meant that the director was early established as the writer's superior. There were a few famous screenwriters in those days (Anita Loos, June Mathis, Frances Marion), but mostly it was easy to platoon anonymous functionaries off and on pictures, especially as moviemaking became an increasingly industrialized process.