The rom-com seems doomed by studio formulas and misogynistic concepts like Bride Wars, which I refused to go see. Thank God for Judd Apatow and John Hamburg, but still, their bromances are aimed mostly at men. So when a fresh chick flick comes along that isn't a dumbed down vehicle for Kate Hudson, I cheer. Written on spec over several years by production exec-turned-scripter Peter Chiarelli and directed by choreographer-turned-helmer Anne Fletcher (Step Up, 27 Dresses), The Proposal stars Sandra Bullock, who pokes fun at her age and credibly falls for a younger man without turning shrill and brittle. Her chemistry with Reynolds, who she's known for years off-set, is palpable. Chiarelli and Fletcher explain how they made a smart studio rom-com, and how the Writers' Strike may have been a good thing for their movie, which opens June 19.

Here's the trailer:

UPDATE: And here's USA Today's excellent Bullock interview.

Pixar writer-director Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo, Wall-E) is moving forward at Disney with his live-action debut John Carter of Mars, which he adapted from the Edgar Rice Burroughs Martian novels. The materials I've seen on James Cameron's Avatar remind me of this alternate world set on another planet. And in both stories, an American visits this faraway place full of strange creatures.

Stanton's a terrific writer-director, but at my February writers panel in Santa Barbara, admitted to some anxiety about working in a strange medium away from his Pixar comfort zone. He has found his two leads in Wolverine stars Taylor Kitsch and Lynn Collins. The movie starts at the first of the year. It's about Civil War hero John Carter (Kitsch) who goes to Mars and meets a princess (Collins). Mark Andrews wrote with Stanton.

We all knew that Daniel Craig was returning for the next James Bond installment set for 2011. Now the producers Michael Wilson and Barbara Broccoli have hired the writers, adding The Queen's Peter Morgan to the duo who wrote the last two Bonds, Neal Purvis and Robert Wade.

So far, with the exception of Jackie Brown (based on an Elmore Leonard novel) Quentin Tarantino has preferred to direct and write originals. While he has exec-produced a few things and been tempted by the odd Speed Racer or James Bond, he has never rarely succumbed to adaptation temptation.

According to this report by the Times of London, the estranged father and brother of bestselling Swedish writer Stieg Larsson (who died unexpectedly of a heart attack in 2004 at age 50 after climbing seven flights of stairs) claim that Tarantino and his Inglourious Basterds star Brad Pitt want to buy the movie rights to Larsson's Millenium Trilogy. The first crime thriller, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, has already spawned a hit Scandinavian movie that screened in the Cannes market.

UPDATE: According to Tarantino's rep, he's never heard of the project in connection with Tarantino, who has never mentioned it.

Because Larsson died without a will, his family is tussling with his common-law wife of 30 years, who is hanging on to his laptop which holds his unfinished sequel to the Millenium trilogy. They accuse her of blocking the sale of remake rights.

Here's Fangoria's Cannes review:

Among the main attractions in the market was the current Scandinavian smash hit MILLENNIUM: MEN WHO HATE WOMEN. Based on the first of three best sellers by Stieg Larsson, THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, Niels Arden Oplev’s gorgeously visual adaptation is without doubt the most nail-biting thriller of the year. Michael Nyqvist stars as a disgraced journalist, sentenced to jail for libel, asked to investigate the cold-case disappearance of a teen heiress. Aided by punk hacker Noomi Rapace, he uncovers an undetected chain of serial killings in this startlingly near-the-knuckle giallo, Swedish style. Think a sexier, more absorbing ANTIBODIES. MILLENNIUM is the European success story of the moment, and the remaining two parts of the trilogy, THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE and THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET’S NEST, will be released later this year. I cannot wait, based on this first expert translation of Larsson’s much-admired work.

And here's the trailer:

Newsweek comes to the defense of slimmed-down writer-actress-director Nia Vardalos, who may not be picking the best movies in the world (rom-com My Life in Ruins scored a miserable 34 on Metacritic) but shouldn't be castigated for her looks while doing it.

Brainy documentarian and periodic NY Times blogger Errol Morris has completed his seven-part treatise Bamboozling Ourselves. Check out the section on the "uncanny valley," as an art forger reveals how he duped people into thinking he had discovered paintings from a lost Vermeer period. The uncanny valley also applies to visual effects--the closer you get to approximating real, the weirder it looks. Like those creepy kids in Polar Express.

The elusive Dave Eggers talks to the Guardian, not about why Away We Go doesn't work as a movie, but about books and publishing, a business he does know something about. I love browsing the McSweeney's section of a bookstore, looking at the books and Wolphin DVDs.

Denzel Washington let the cat out of the bag at the MTV Movie Awards: Star Trek breakout Chris Pine will next star in Tony Scott and Washington's reteaming on Unstoppable--as a conductor on a toxic runaway train:

LA Observed's Kevin Roderick threw a roof top party at the Formosa Cafe for pals and colleagues to celebrate six years of independent blogging. The mood was surprisingly light, considering most of the partyers had lost their jobs or were about to, or were freelancing for little money. Hot topics: Jay vs. Conan, Twitter vs. Facebook, Melton vs. Rachlis at Los Angeles Magazine, getting into Comic-Con, and making money blogging.

I hung with Variety's Dana Harris, Brian Lowry (his BLTV blog is taking off), Pat Saperstein (who blogs at EatingLA) and Dave McNary (whose wife Sharon just ran her 72nd marathon; her commentary airs on KPCC today). I talked criticism's future with LA Weekly contributor and USC instructor Ella Taylor and KPFK host and history prof Jon Wiener. Ex-journo Ross Johnson explained why he's now vp of corp entertainment at BNC-PR--and plans to return to reporting with a vengeance one day. Ex-LAT writer Bob Welkos is finishing both a novel and screenplay, while LAT columnist Sandy Banks is considering blogging. (She'd be good at it and could connect with fans.) Sunset Magazine recently profiled 99 Cent Chef Billy Robinson.

New L.A. City Attorney Carmen Trutanich worked the room like a pro. When screenwriter and Vanity Fair/New York Observer contributor Bruce Feirstein told him a terrifying yet reassuring story about cops breaking into his house and patting him down to protect him from a reported intruder, Trutanich launched into a passionate speech about the dedication and bravery of L.A. finest. Not what you expect at a Friday night Hollywood party of writers and bloggers.

Kobre Channel's Jerry Lazar, whose daughter Maia is close to graduating from UC San Diego, wielded his flip cam. I was in the middle of skewering a journalist colleague when he pushed the red record button.

When Glenn Kenny was still at Premiere, he edited David Foster Wallace. He talks about the experience here.

Here's The New Yorker on Wallace's unfinished novel, which Little, Brown plans to publish under the title The Pale King.

As he has aged, Woody Allen has starred a number of alter-egos in his movies with varying success, from Kenneth Branagh in Celebrity to John Cusack, my personal fave in 1994’s Bullets Over Broadway. But he has met his perfect match with Larry David in Whatever Works, which Sony Pictures Classics screened at ShoWest last week. David molds his signature bilious humor to Allen’s despondent, whiny, older-man crank persona, and it works like a charm. I didn’t even mind that the movie returns to Allen’s May-December romance concept because the relationship shared by the very young Evan Rachel Wood and the mature David couldn’t be less romantic. Patricia Clarkson is hilarious as Wood’s southern belle mother who takes about 5 seconds to morph into a West Village Bohemian with two boyfriends. The movie is the funniest –and most American–Allen has turned out in a while. Will it expand beyond his core urban art-house base when it opens June 19? Doubtful.

For those of you, like me, who are fascinated by the lives and deaths of poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, their son Nicholas, who slept nearby when his mother stuck her head in an oven at age 30, has also committed suicide. Blimey.

Update: The Daily Beast looks at the genetic risks of inheriting depression.

Bloggers are often successful because they know how to get attention, to market themselves. One example of a PR natural is Diablo Cody (Juno), who came to fame via her Pussy Ranch blog. These days the Oscar-winning scribe seems to be neglecting her MySpace/United States of Tara blog in favor of tweeting; she already has more than 28,000 people following her on Twitter. She also gets regular exposure via her regular column in EW, and recently landed a fashion layout with her screenwriter gal pals in the NYT.

[Photo of Diablo Cody and screenwriter chums courtesy of The New York Times]

Well, the movie industry doesn't mind that audiences are returning to theaters in droves during a recession. It's obviously good news all around. But David Poland debunks the NYT's recession "hype." While the studios may have been smart enough to not only give the audiences what they want but market the hell out of Paul Blart: Mall Cop and Taken, there's no question that these movies are doing better than they would ordinarily do. And the NYT stat that admissions are up by almost 16% is staggering.

But strong theatrical numbers still don't fix the studios' real bottom line: DVDs sales are down 30 %--mainly from disappointing tentpole titles.

A WGA panel Sunday night addressed these issues and other industry ills, reports John August's blog:

Yes, but movies are doing well, right? Box office receipts are on the up and up.

True, but the motherships (Time Warner/GE etc.) suck out that revenue and use it to prop up other flagging sectors. So that money doesn’t go back into development or the pockets of writers. Also, Navid McIlhargey notes that while theatrical has made a comeback, DVD sales have dropped by roughly 30%. That means four things:

The financial models studios look at before greenlighting a picture are skewed. (Depending on various factors, DVD revenue used to be equal to or greater than domestic theatrical revenue.) The projections for break-even are falling short on movies that might have been easily greenlit a few years ago. One way to counter that is by exploiting the international marketplace, which translates to more big action, (male) star-driven movies.

New Yorker writer Susan Orlean has abandoned Microsoft Word for Google Documents. As a recent convert to Google, I am duly impressed by how much Gmail, Calendar, Reader, News Alerts, Sync and other applications can do. But abandon Word? Sacre bleu!

Writer/producer Judd Apatow (who salutes comedy on the Oscars Sunday) returns to the director's chair with Funny People, starring Adam Sandler as a stand-up comedian battling death, Seth Rogen as his weepy joke writer, and Leslie Mann as the woman Sandler loves. Trouble is, she's married to Eric Bana. Jonah Hill and Jason Schwartzman (who is writing the music) also star. It's due July 31.

Diablo Cody is not only the mother of Juno and the many faces of Tara but she has also spawned Jennifer's Body, starring hottie Megan Fox as a possessed mean-girl cheerleader gone very wrong. Think Carrie meets the Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. Karyn Kusama directs, Jason Reitman produces. (EW has a preview in their current issue which I can't find online.) It's due in the fall. UPDATE: And Cody is producing a script with Mason Novick called Breathers: A Zombie's Lament, written by ex-reader Geoff LaTulippe.

Never to waste a moment licking his Oscar wounds, Clint Eastwood talks to The Guardian about Gran Torino and his upcoming Mandela, based on the book by John Carlin. Morgan Freeman will star in the title role.

Trekmovie.com tours the new USS Enterprise. I know the J.J. Abrams movie looks commercial. It may charge up another next generation of fans. But this ship doesn't ring "Trek" to me. Isn't that important here?

An Education's Carey Mulligan is the toast not only of Sundance, but Berlin.

Variety owner Reed Elsevier negotiates to extend its loans.

Milk scripter Dustin Lance Black, 34, tearfully accepted the Writers Guild Award for best original screenplay for Milk Saturday night by calling up the ghost of slain San Francisco politician Harvey Milk, the man who inspired Black when he moved to the Bay Area from San Antonio, Texas as a closeted gay 13-year-old. "I want to thank God for making my dreams come true," said Black, who was raised a Mormon, "and for giving us Harvey Milk."

Here are all the WGA winners, including non-attendee Simon Beaufoy, who won for Slumdog Millionaire's adapted screenplay, and Ari Folman, for the animated documentary Waltz with Bashir, which is on track to win the best foreign film Oscar.

Black had earlier accepted the WGA's Paul Selvin Civil Rights award. "This is a spec script," he told the writers. "It wasn't the easiest subject matter to pursue; it's pretty gay. Why would I spend five years with this Harvey Milk guy? It's the longest relationship I've ever had. His message of hope allowed me to dream, and to heal."

Black exhorted the gay community to learn from Milk's message: "Be proud, represent yourself, reach out," he said. He criticized the anti-prop 8 organizers for not pursuing outreach and education, of not following Milk's model of grassroots activism. When he told Cleve Jones, the character played by Emile Hirsch in Gus Van Sant's Milk, that he was getting the Selvin award, Jones told him, "Civil rights? We don't have them, and we want them." Black quoted Milk, who said, "If they demand the real thing, I find, they can get it."

Now is the time to think big, said Black, who asked the federal government to follow the model of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and ensure equal rights to GLBT people. "It's bigger than 8," he said. "Harvey Milk and the movies inspire people to dream big. That's how change really happens."

As far as the Academy Award voting goes, while Beaufoy will likely repeat his win, Black is competing with a rival, Wall-E writer-director Andrew Stanton (animated films are not eligible for WGA awards). Ballots are due on February 17; the Oscarcast is on February 22.

In a surprise turn at the International Animated Film Society Awards (Annies), DreamWorks Animation's Kung Fu Panda won the top prizes. This comes as a shock to those of us who just assume that Pixar's Wall-E is the frontrunner for the animation Oscar. What does this mean? Has Pixar ruled the roost too long? Even though the Annies tend to be a good indicator of where the Oscars are going, I suspect Wall-E will still get the love from the entire Academy. I was actually predicting that Andrew Stanton could win the Oscar for original screenplay.

Full list of winners on the jump.

I knew we'd have a lively screenwriters panel at the Santa Barbara Film Festival this year because we had two actor-writers--Tom McCarthy (who also directed The Visitor) and Robert Knott (Appaloosa) as well as writer-director Andrew Stanton (Wall-E, nominated for 6 Oscars, including original screenplay), who is one of the most entertaining guys around, and young Dustin Lance Black (nommed for Milk).

Cal Arts grad Stanton has spent 18 years at Pixar, where he has written some of the best-reviewed movies of all time, including Wall-E, the Oscar-winning Finding Nemo (which he also directed) and Toy Story 1 and II, which he rewrote from scratch in three months, which he was only able to do because he knew the characters so well. Years ago when Stanton started writing Wall-E, he probably didn't have the chops to pull it off, he says now. The film carried the title Trash Planet for years, and even Steve Jobs wanted to keep it, but Stanton held his ground, because he knew "not a single girl would go," he said. ("What does Steve Jobs know about marketing?" quipped McCarthy.) Stanton originally wrote the doughy fat humans in Wall-E as gelatinous green creatures but soon realized the yuck factor was too great, so he made them into humans whose bones had gone soft (per real NASA research). When Hello, Dolly went into the movie, they had to use those images, so the Fred Willard video was live action too.

Why does Pixar have such a track record of excellence? Stanton chalks it up to the process they have of presenting everyone's work every so often and tearing it to shreds. Stanton thinks animation is starting to pull out of the ghetto and will make it to a best picture Oscar one day; progress is being made. Meanwhile he's writing his first adaptation, of Edgar Rice Burrough's John Carter of Mars, a favorite novel since childhood, and his first live-action movie, for Disney, not Pixar. Casting begins soon.

McCarthy spent a few months at Pixar working on Up, and testified that the experience was "brutal." The actor played the ambitious young newspaper reporter in The Wire, among many other roles (including a 30-second cameo date with Tina Fey in Baby Mama) and wrote and directed the BAFTA and Indie Spirit-award-winning The Station Agent. The Visitor is up for a Spirit for writing as well. And McCarthy is over the moon that Robert Jenkins nabbed an Oscar nom. He wrote the script for him, as a young Gene Hackman wasn't available. And he didn't worry that the character was passive and low-key. He thinks no one else could have played him so well, with such "emotional authenticity." Here's my April interview with McCarthy. These days he is acting up a storm while working on another script.

Oklahoma-born Robert Knott has acted in a ton of TV series and westerns (including The Hi-Lo Country), and worked with his old theater pal Ed Harris on Pollock as well as Appaloosa. It's a detailed, delicious character study about two gunslingers for hire (Harris and Viggo Mortensen) and a woman (Rene Zellweger) who comes into town and changes their buddy chemistry. Knott says when he's writing he gets on a boat and doesn't know where it's going to go, he just follows the characters. He started writing because the scripts he read were so bad. If he didn't get the part he'd throw the script in the trash. And if he did--well he knew he could do better. Knott hopes to make, with Harris, movies of two more Robert Parker novels.

Dustin Lance Black earned an Oscar nom for Milk, which scored 8 noms. Raised a Mormon in San Antonio, Texas, Black is also a writer-producer on HBO's Big Love, which is starting its third season. He came to UCLA, and was heavily influenced by the late San Francisco gay activist Harvey Milk, who was profiled in the Rob Epstein doc The Life and Times of Harvey Milk. Black did a lot of research, getting to know the real people close to Milk. And he used politics as the story's spine, which initally worried Van Sant. Black felt he needed a narrower focus, or the whole biopic would get unwieldy. He says there are still many gay kids like he used to be, as well as the real-life suicidal teen portrayed in the movie, who feel alienated, not accepted and lost in their lives. The filmmakers did want to bring the movie out before the Prop 8 vote but simply couldn't get it finished in time. Black is writing another film for Gus Van Sant, an adaptation of Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, for which he's been doing a lot of research (!).

Here's coverage from Variety, AICN's Quint, In Contention,and Jeff Wells, who shot some video:

[Photo of writers from left-- Tom McCarthy, Andrew Stanton, Robert Knott, Dustin Lance Black-- by me; panel photo of McCarthy, left, and Stanton, foreground, by Norman Christophersen.]

The Writers Guild of America nominees often line up with the Academy. They're a sign of where the prevailing winds are blowing.

And they show that folks like me predicting Oscar nominations at the LATimes Buzzmeter and Gurus 'O Gold can make mistakes.

I called surprise nominee Burn After Reading (7th at Gurus 'O Gold for original screenplay), but the Gurus and Buzzmeter agreed that Rachel Getting Married would land a nod (I did not). The Gurus (including me) thought that Happy-Go-Lucky and Wall-E would get in there too. They didn't. And the LAT missed on Changeling. This year, it seems, Clint Eastwood may settle for going for an actor prize for Gran Torino.

On adapted screenplay, I got the Nolans for The Dark Knight (while the Buzzmeter group went for Revolutionary Road) but I picked David Hare's The Reader instead of Doubt.

What does this tell us? The top five--The Dark Knight, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon, Milk and Slumdog Millionaire-- continue strong. And Doubt is looking good, too--and doing well at the boxoffice. Revolutionary Road is not feeling the love. And I always wondered about Rachel Getting Married. But the Academy writers could yet come through for Wall-E and Happy-Go-Lucky. We'll see.

The nominees are:

ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
"Burn After Reading," written by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen, Focus Features
"Milk," written by Dustin Lance Black, Focus Features
"Vicky Cristina Barcelona," written by Woody Allen, The Weinstein Company
"The Visitor, "written by Tom McCarthy, Overture Films
"The Wrestler," written by Robert Siegel, Fox Searchlight Pictures

ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," Screenplay by Eric Roth; Screen Story by Eric Roth and Robin Swicord; Based on the Short Story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros. Pictures
"The Dark Knight," Screenplay by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan; Story by Christopher Nolan & David S. Goyer; Based on Characters Appearing in Comic Books Published by DC Comics; Batman Created by Bob Kane, Warner Bros. Pictures
"Doubt," Screenplay by John Patrick Shanley, Based on his Stage Play, Miramax Films
"Frost/Nixon, "Screenplay by Peter Morgan, Based on his Stage Play, Universal Pictures
"Slumdog Millionaire," Screenplay by Simon Beaufoy, Based on the Novel "Q and A" by Vikas Swarup, Fox Searchlight Pictures

DOCUMENTARY SCREENPLAY
"Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story, "written by Stefan Forbes and Noland Walker, InterPositive Media
"Chicago 10", written by Brett Morgen, Roadside Attractions
"Fuel", written by Johnny O'Hara, Greenlight Theatrical / Intention Media
"Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson", Screenplay by Alex Gibney, From the Words of Hunter S. Thompson, Magnolia Pictures
"Waltz with Bashir, "written by Ari Folman, Sony Pictures Classics

It hasn't been a good year for film criticism. Here's a round-table interview with established film critics. And here's David Poland's plaint about the LAT hiring former L.A Times entertainment editor Betsy Sharkey as film critic. With so many unemployed professional critics out there, it seems a shame to deny one a prime slot. But that's not what's going on. The LAT doesn't want to let one of their good people go, and gave her an available gig.

Going forward, film criticism is going to be in the hands of folks like Defamer's Stu Van Airsdale, who doesn't like what he's seeing at year's end, and Reel Geezers, who prove that it's not so much a question of age as format: the future is free video. Here's their review of Milk:

Emma Thompson has won Oscars for both acting (Howard's End) and writing (Sense and Sensibility). And she is coming to accept how satisfying both can be. "I always thought acting was my compulsion," she says," but that writing was a different form of creativity because it is so back to the knuckle. Acting is a natural thing because you are using your body, it's like singing. I was wrong about that. Both can answer the same need. I feel better after writing for two hours."

Thompson is back in her fave Bel Air Hotel bungalow promoting Last Chance Harvey, an unassuming romantic comedy that Joel Hopkins wrote for her some eight years ago. She revived it by bringing in as her leading man her co-star on Stranger than Fiction, Dustin Hoffman. "There are no special effects, no sub-plots, no heroes, no villains," she says. "It's just people talking and acting and falling in love and the obstacles that arise within the soul."

Meanwhile she's still pursuing her other muse, adapting the classic Lerner and Loew musical My Fair Lady for the screen for Columbia Pictures. She writes long-hand for the first draft, then moves to the computer, she says. "There is a connection between the brain and the arm and the pen."

Keira Knightley is signed on to star as Eliza Doolittle. While Thompson's old Cambridge cohort Hugh Laurie is her first choice for Henry Higgins, she has to finish the script first. And that choice will be made by the film's eventual director. (She won't be ready to direct, although she has some projects in mind, until her 8-year-old daughter is grown.)

Thompson revelled in checking into the source, George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion. "I love it," she says. "You can't contemporize this. I love that period anyway. I loved investigating Shaw himself and his relationship with women and actresses."

My My Fair Lady Higgins poll was a pitched battle between fans of Colin Firth and Jeremy Northam, who finally won. Who do you want to play him?

In the meantime the sequel to the family fantasy comedy Nanny McPhee is getting under way in January, written by and starring the snaggle-toothed Thompson. It's about "two sets of children and war between two families who don't understand each other," she says. And it stars a baby elephant.

Peter Morgan is parlaying his current status as the hottest screenwriter in Hollywood into his first directing gig, the third installment of his Tony Blair trilogy, starring Frost/Nixon's Michael Sheen as the British prime minister. Kathy Kennedy, who set up Morgan's script Hereafter at DreamWorks for director Clint Eastwood, will produce.

The question is, who should play Bill Clinton? John Travolta played him in Mike Nichols' Primary Colors. Got any suggestions?

One thing to keep in mind with Stephen Daldry and David Hare's adaptation of The Reader is that Bernhard Schlink's novel was written for German audiences. These British filmmakers faced a gauntlet of challenges in translating the movie for global viewers, not to mention American ones. Here's my column.

Greencine collects reaction to the movie; Thelma Adams questions the relationship between the 35-year-old woman and a 15-year-old boy. This never bothered me. Writer David Hare thinks Americans are a tad Puritanical in this regard.

The Bagger reports on one Reader party in NYC; Karina Longworth and Patrick Goldstein react to Manohla Dargis's NYT pan. Here's the NYT's feature. UPDATE: The Guardian publishes Hare's take.

My take on the movie: maybe it should have been done with German actors. Even in English. But even better in German. Odd that The Reader comes out at the same time as Valkyrie, which is actually pretty good. It too has a mix of actors with a wide range of authentic and inauthentic accents. What if cool Brits Kate Winslet (who is very good) and Ralph Fiennes had been replaced by Germans like David Kross and Bruno Ganz?

Universal, Miramax and Paramount/Warners are heaving huge sighs of relief that the Golden Globes rewarded Frost/Nixon, Doubt and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button with five nominations apiece. The three films had been virtually overlooked by influential critics' groups in L.A. and N.Y. this week. Only Frost/Nixon and Benjamin Button were nominated in the Globes' best feature drama category, though, which tends to carry more weight than the comedy category. Doubt scored four acting noms, plus screenplay for John Patrick Shanley.

The Globes are voted on by a relatively small and insular group, the 80-member Hollywood Foreign Press Association, who are often wined and dined by studios eager to get the extra boost of attention from Globe noms at the height of the pre-Oscar nomination season when Academy voters are deciding which DVDs to watch. The noms are not predictive, but do help build momentum.

Thus although the Globes saw fit to only recognize Sean Penn's performance in Gus Van Sant's very American and very political Milk (which won best film from the NYFCC), that should not hurt its overall awards chances. Nor would this group be particularly drawn to a fable beloved by both American moviegoers and critics, The Dark Knight. And Gran Torino's masterful, reflexive performance by actor/director Clint Eastwood is more likely to play to the Academy than the HFPA. (Oddly, they rewarded Eastwood for score for the Changeling and best song for Gran Torino.)

For example, Harvey Weinstein has always done well with The Globes and won their support for Stephen Daldry's The Reader, set in post-World War II Germany and starring Kate Winslet, who also stars in her husband Sam Mendes' nominated drama Revolutionary Road, for which she grabbed a best actress nom. Both films grabbed four noms. And Winslet was given a supporting actress nom for The Reader, to prevent her from competing with herself. Both films needed a boost, as they were also neglected by the critics groups.

Well on their way to awards season glory are Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire (Fox Searchlight) and Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona (Weinstein Co.). which nabbed four noms apiece. And Searchlight's The Wrestler is solidifying more acting noms for Mickey Rourke and Marisa Tomei.

Ben Stiller's Paramount comedy Tropic Thunder scored two noms for Tom Cruise and Robert Downey, Jr., which isn't so surprising when you consider that the HFPA is often voting for who will attend the Golden Globes Awards party. Thus both Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie gained noms for Button and Changeling, a feat that won't necessarily be repeated come Oscar nominations morning January 22.

The noms in the comedy categories are unlikely to have much impact on the Academy voters, who tend to reward gravitas, although Sally Hawkins, who was won best actress from the NYFCC, could score a best actress slot on January 22. Meryl Streep is more likely to land an Oscar nom for Doubt than for the raucous musical Mamma Mia!

Kristin Scott Thomas finally got some recognition for her role in the French film I've Loved You So Long, which was also nommed in the foreign film category, along with Jan Troell's Everlasting Moments, the Swedish Oscar entry, which is picking up support.

I'm not a big fan of live-blogging, but it does work occasionally, as NY Post critic-blogger Lou Lumenick demonstrates with his play-by-play reporting of the New York Film Critics's divisive voting this morning.

Thus, Rachel Getting Married led the first two ballots and Milk pulled ahead on the third, followed by Happy-Go-Lucky and Slumdog Millionaire; Milk star Sean Penn handily beat The Wrestler's Mickey Rourke; Milk's Josh Brolin beat out The Dark Knight's Heath Ledger; and documentary Oscar front-runner Man on Wire beat out Waltz with Bashir and Trouble the Water. Vicky Cristina Barcelona's Penelope Cruz easily defeated Viola Davis of Doubt; third place was a tie between Rachel Getting Married's Rosemary DeWitt and Debra Winger. Happy-Go-Lucky writer-director Mike Leigh narrowly edged out Slumdog Millionaire's Danny Boyle. Wall-E took best animated feature over Waltz with Bashir.

Here's Lumenick on how the best actress vote went down, which helps explain the ballot process:

Sally Hawkins of "Happy-Go-Lucky'' won the New York Film Critics Circle award for Best Actress as voting got under way this morning at the Time-Life Building. Hawkins won on the second weighted ballot, receiving 39 points to 32 points for Melissa Leo of "Frozen River,'' with Kate Winslet ("Revolutionary Road'') and Anne Hathaway ("Rachel Getting Married'') with 22 apiece. In the NYFCC's convoluted voting system, the critics make one choice apiece n the first round. If nothing captures a majority, there follows one or more weighted ballots, each critic ranks choices with 3, 2, and 1 points; the winner also has to appear on the majority of ballots until the fouth ballot (if there is one) -- in Hawkins' case, 18 ballots.

OSCAR ANALYSIS
Finally, the critics voting solidifies my thinking re: the Oscar race. The Golden Globes may add some fuel tomorrow, but for now I see Milk as the front-runner for best picture, followed by Slumdog Millionaire and The Dark Knight, with The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon, Doubt and Revolutionary Road fighting it out for last two slots. Penn may be the front-runner now, but the man he has to beat is Clint Eastwood, who gives a devastating performance in Gran Torino. The Academy will be moved to tears by him. Mickey Rourke looks solid for a nom. The Visitor's Richard Jenkins could have used more help here.

Thanks to critics, Sally Hawkins and Melissa Leo are moving into best actress contention, while I've Loved You So Long's Kristin Scott Thomas may not. Changeling's Angelina Jolie is fading fast. Milk's Josh Brolin and James Franco could both win supporting slots.

Revolutionary Road will be in the hunt for picture, director, adapted screenplay, actress, actor and supporting actor. But the grim, serious drama needs some love at this point, especially from critics. And may get it.

The Reader, which may have a shot for Kate Winslet in supporting and David Hare for adapted screenplay, has a long way to go. It got slammed by critics today, earning an initial 54 % on Metacritic. That is not good enough. It needs all the help it can get.

Doubt has the support of the dominant actors branch and likely the writers (if not directors); it will be vying for actress, supporting actress, supporting actor and adapted screenplay.

Much as I admire Four Months, Three Weeks, Two Days, it strikes me as oddly perverse for the NYFCC to throw their foreign vote away on a movie that is only available on DVD at this point, rather than trying to boost the theatrical and Oscar fortunes of a new upcoming release. But it's a free country.

The full list of winners is on the jump:

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]

As Chris Nolan worked the room at Warner Bros.' Oscar-season party at Il Cielo for The Dark Knight, he looked as relaxed as I've ever seen him. That's because for the first time in six years, he's not working on a movie. He's been going over old files, reading, rewriting a seven-year-old original script that he wrote at a time when he hadn't done a big-budget studio movie. Now he has, so he's scaling it back. And he's enjoying the luxury, he says, "of just noodling around."

The LAT's Rachel Abramowitz was at the same party, collecting string for this Heath Ledger piece.

[Joker Oscar courtesy InContention.com]

[Posted by Tatiana Siegel]
Although the Sundance Film Festival won't unveil its full lineup until tomorrow, rumors are circulating that John Krasinski's helming debut, Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, will be making the trek to Park City. The film, a passion project for The Office star, is significant because it marks the only bigscreen project ever derived from the sizable literary library of the late David Foster Wallace. Krasinski also wrote and starred in Hideous Men, which is based on a short story by Wallace, who committed suicide in September. Krasinski was editing the film, which he shot two years ago in New York, when he learned of the author's death.

Though the film, which also stars Bobby Cannavale, Max Minghella and Christopher Meloni, is the first Wallace project to hit the screen, it won't likely be the last. Producer Jason Kliot (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and recent Toronto fest hit American Swing) is developing Wallace's Infinite Jest, the author's most famous work, with Keith Bunin penning the screenplay.

Here's my original story.

I get a kick out of William Goldman. The author of several film book classics (Adventures in the Screen Trade is one) and excellent novels (The Temple of Gold, Boys and Girls Together, The Princess Bride) has always been a candid observer of the movie business, especially the screenwriting trade. At the recent Screenwriting Expo, he was interviewed by writer Aaron Sorkin (who mercilessly teased girlfriend Beth Swofford, a top agent at CAA, with being eager to read everyone's screenplays), who like everyone else, admires Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, partly because it helped to invent the buddy comedy.

"Westerns are dead now except for Mr. Eastwood," said Goldman. "You could make the argument that unemployable in movies today would be John Wayne, Fred Astaire and Cary Grant." (I'm not sure I agree with him about Grant, who could do anything.) His point was the death of the genres these men dominated: westerns, musicals and romantic comedies. (But aren't musicals coming back?)

It's hard to believe that the eventual Oscar-winning popular hit Butch Cassidy was badly reviewed: partly, Goldman thinks, because he got paid so much for the script, a whopping $400,000 at the time. He was attracted to the story of Butch and Sundance and the Hole-in- the-Wall gang partly because they had a second chapter--they became legends again. "That moved the shit out of me," Goldman said. He worked on the script for eight years. When he was teaching at Princeton he wrote the script over his Christmas vacation in two weeks. It was initially rejected by every studio. After he rewrote it, they all wanted to buy it except one, who told him, "John Wayne doesn't run away."

He was lucky with the casting and with director George Roy Hill, Goldman said. He compares Paul Newman to Clint Eastwood. Both men were (and Eastwood still is) "terrific, not arrogant and nasty." He thinks that's because neither made it when they were young. Eastwood was digging swimming pools into his early 30s [actually, late 20s]; Newman was working off-Broadway.

Nobody wanted Robert Redford for the Sundance Kid. Steve McQueen didn't do it because his agent and Newman's agent got into a pissing contest and wouldn't give up first billing. Marlon Brando "disappeared and went to play with the Indians." Redford was considered a light comedian. The movie made him a star, and Newman became the biggest star in the world. The duo followed up with an even bigger Oscar-winning smash hit, The Sting. "Why they never worked together again I don't know," said Goldman. "I don't know if any studio would make Butch Cassidy today. They die at the end."

Here's the bicycle scene with Katharine Ross (accompanied by the hit single Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head):

To know that David Carr is in touch with the online zeitgeist, just read this week's New York Times media column about Google. Carr gets it. And once a year, when he morphs into The Carpetbagger, he gets to shows his stuff to a media world that is struggling to make the transition from print to pixels.

On December 1, Carr's award-season alter-ego The Bagger will embark on his fourth season of daily Oscar-blogging. As befits the constantly evolving nature of hybrid journalism, there will be changes. For one thing, The Bagger aims to file daily video on the blog from his New Jersey basement. "There's huge demand from people for someone who looks homeless in his messy basement talking about the most glamorous event in the world," he says. "I will certainly use props and there may or may not be puppets."

Carr--who writes fast--plans to churn out six or seven posts a day (crikey!) which he will not have to do alone. Other NYT staffers, such as Brooks Barnes, will assist him. Such are the demands of rebuilding traffic for this seasonal blog. Other more elaborate video features will be produced in a more conventional manner, using Carr as "talent." Carr has already set up nine or ten stories he wants to cover. "There's more planning ahead," he admits, "and more willingness to go to L.A."

Going into his fourth season, it's hard for Carr to continue the conceit of the franchise that he is a bumbling outsider sent to cover the ultimate insider event. In the past, Carr admits, he has "gotten rolled by people" pursuing Oscar coverage in the all-powerful NYT. "I can't pretend not to know what's going on," he says. "I've picked up on some things."

With four Oscar-related features coming up in the newspaper of record, Carr is careful to make sure that the two worlds don't collide. "Whatever unwritten rules there are about doing what we do are baked into me," he says. "Some chip is installed. In three years I have never gotten edited."

While Carr installed his Google Reader last week so he can check out other Oscar blogs, he wants to avoid falling into group-think because, he finds, "often it's wrong. It's like an echo chamber. I'll be doing less reading and more phone calling."

The Bagger is also playing catch-up on viewing kudo-friendly films. "I've seen almost nothing," says Carr. "It's like showing up at school when everyone's four chapters ahead." He does foresee several strong story threads to pursue through the award season: the comeback of The Wrestler star Mickey Rourke, Harvey Weinstein, who is "always in the middle of things," and Anne Hathaway's bid to gain traction for Rachel Getting Married. One thing Carr is counting on: "The Oscar race is always full of surprises," he says.

Just in case you missed this take-off on Variety Slanguage.

[Posted by Steve Gaydos]
This week's UCLA Sneak Preview screening of Rod Lurie's Nothing But The Truth provided a showcase for the writer-director to practice his other craft - acting - while animatedly talking up his new topical thriller/lady in distress platform for star Kate Beckinsale.

Lurie laughed about playing a cameo as a D.C. newspaper chief in his own film, but faster than you can say "What's my motivation?" he was on his feet acting out the parts of a real life Memphis prison warden who thought the film's costar Matt Dillon was that Dillon fellow who stars in Entourage as well as the nonplussed Matt himself.

"You're not on 'Entourage?' asked Lurie/Warden to Lurie/Matt. "Nope, that's my brother Kevin," replied a dead-on impression of Matt, noting the Warden might have seen him in There's Something About Mary, or The Outsiders or any of a number of his other films.

"Not on 'Entourage',? replied the Warden. "Then I don't know you."

While Charlie Kaufman's films Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Adaptation were art-house hits in Israel, his directorial debut Synecdoche, New York is being unceremoniously dumped by its Israeli distributor.

Esquire Magazine defined great journalism for decades. To celebrate its 75th anniversary, the magazine is posting their 7 Greatest Stories in the history of the mag, including Gay Talese, Norman Mailer, Tom Junod and Tom Wolfe. Read it and weep.

Back in 2005, Illinois Senator Barack Obama roasted his favorite Illinois Congressman, Rahm Emanuel, who is now the president-elect's chief-of-staff. I had seen Obama's sense of humor displayed in a video clip at a tribute to George Clooney in which he made fun of the star's unmarried status. Here Obama's wicked streak--and writing skills---are on full display:

At the recent Screenwriting Expo, William Goldman recalled meeting Obama at a NY fundraiser and was astonished that when he was introduced to the candidate as the screenwriter of All the President's Men, Obama said,"Yes, you also wrote Marathon Man and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid." Goldman was tickled pink.

[Hat Tip: Gawker]

Quentin Tarantino is moving full-speed ahead on casting his neo-spaghetti western World War II movie, Inglorious Bastards, which has a fab poster.

UPDATE: Rotten Tomatoes reports that Tarantino has a new title: Inglorious Basterds. I'm sticking with the spelling on the poster.

Thanks to Glamour Reel Moments, Kirsten Smith is making the move from screenwriter to fledgling director.

Yes, Reel Moments is about promoting the Glamour brand (and sponsor Suave). But the fact remains that Glamour Magazine's annual series has given 14 women (including Gwyneth Paltrow, Jennifer Aniston, Rita Wilson, Kirsten Dunst, and Kate Hudson) the chance to make their film directing debuts. This year's installment, premiering Tuesday, October 14 at the DGA, unveils the rookie shorts of actresses Courteney Cox and Demi Moore--and House Bunny scribe Smith.

Smith dove into directing with The Spleenectomy, based on a Glamour reader's own story. The short stars House Bunny comedienne Anna Faris "as an aspiring community theater actress," says Smith, "lacking in natural ability, who goes on the audition of her life."

Smith, 38, loved the freedom of directing, with help from Reel Moments producer Freestyle Productions and Faris. "She's crazy talented and easy relaxed," says Smith. "It's great to encourage people to give their best, to get all these ideas and take credit for them. The auteur theory is so cocakamamie and untrue."

Authors of some 25 scripts over 12 years, Smith and writing partner Karen Lutz first sold 10 Things I Hate About You in 1997. Then came the post-feminist rom-com Legally Blonde, starring Reese Witherspoon, which broke out in the summer of 2001--with support from both teen girls and gay men-- to gross more than $96 million at the domestic boxoffice. Some of the duo's scripts were originals, like She's the Man, some were page-one rewrites, like Ella Enchanted. And the team has also delivered various polish-jobs-for-hire.

This summer Smith and Lutz scored again with 2008 hit House Bunny, custom-made for Faris, who plays a buxom ditzy femme thrown out her Playboy Mansion paradise and into house-mothering a college sorority of Plain Janes. "We're particularly drawn to underdog and fish-out-of-water stories," says Smith. She and Lutz first approached Faris after admiring her work in Just Friends. "This girl is rad," they decided.

Call Nancy Nigrosh a recovering agent. After 25 years, she has left her recent post at Innovative Artists as a talent agent after decades of repping writers and directors for film and television. Now that she's free from the shackles of agenting, she's leaving what she calls her Parting Shot#1. If she's right, Hollywood's days of labor unrest are not over.

The Lone Screenwriter

It's time to take one last look back at the two and a half decades I spent as an agent. Of all the questions I’d had over the years, there’s one that most burned and bothered me:

Why is it so ingrained in Hollywood that one person alone cannot write a producible screenplay?

The Writer's Guild Of America's 2007-8 strike was supposed to be about a bigger piece of the pie for the future distribution of a writer's produced work… the pie in the digital sky.

But the real truth is that the actual day –to- day script development process based on writer elimination has created the real strife. Historically this practice has led to the cyclical bloodletting every time the guild’s contract with the buyer /employer gang known as the Association of Motion Picture and Television Producers, expires. If something doesn't fundamentally change, there will be more strikes in the future, as each contract expires, creating a negative cycle of meltdown Hollywood and its doting mama, California, can ill afford.

Novelists, playwrights and poets are not rewritten by other writers. Even journalists do the deed pretty much alone. But screenwriters not only routinely and eagerly replace each other, they are tactical in their competitive quest for credit, credit that is not only emotionally gratifying but financially existent. Without credit, future opportunity, immediate and contingent compensation, dissolve. All that hard work to get beyond base camp, undone. Back to square none. Meaning - what do you tell your family, friends, former classmates, neighbors, and people you’ve yet to meet - that you did work on something glamorous for possibly years even, but in the end, your name didn’t scroll by?

And the other question that will not leave your mind is the calculation of cash you didn’t get and residuals you will never see.

This belief and its subsequent practice of multiple screen authorship is a unifying principle that not only does not serve its community of believers, but actually endangers its members from achieving prosperity in a scarce economy.

Kim Voynar, who recently ankled her gig at Cinematical, is joining David Poland's staff at Movie City News. Officially, her title will be features editor, but she'll be staying home in Seattle and writing regularly on her blog (Film Essent) and covering fests as well as helping out editorially. Poland may not realize what a strong addition Voynar is to his operation. The site could use a design upgrade, for one thing (whose couldn't?) and Voynar really gets how the too-competitive and clogged movie Internet space works.

A.J. Schnack is pro; Jeff Wells is con. Poland's paying her more than Cinematical ever did. End of story.

Inspired by the release of How to Lose Friends and Influence People, Time Out London collects a list of toughest journo assignments in movies. What about Zodiac? All the President's Men? Absence of Malice? Under Fire?

Meanwhile, Little Children writer Tom Perrotta goes after the accuracy of John Hughes' reporting on teens for Breakfast Club.

I never met the late great David Foster Wallace. Yes, I devoured his magazine stories--including this classic David Lynch Premiere piece--as well as his other writing, but my former Premiere colleague Glenn Kenny, who edited Wallace and befriended him, has written up something on his blog.

BTW, here's a DFW story in The Atlantic. And Time's appreciation by Joel Stein. And Slate.

[Photo by Nancy Crampton]

Before Aaron Sorkin started writing his movie about the creation of Facebook for producer Scott Rudin, he decided he'd better get himself a Facebook page. So he got a researcher to do it. New York Magazine's Vulture got Rudin to confirm that Sorkin is in fact writing the script. UPDATE: Here's Variety and more details at 02138.

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.

Joss Whedon isn't the only writer taking things into his own hands on the Internet these days. On the City of Ember train, screenwriter Caroline Thompson (Edward Scissorhands) told me about her new short film distribution website small & creepy films, which she launched two months ago with her partner, producer Steve Nicolaides.

The duo invested some of their own money in it, though it wasn't "arduous," Thompson said. "Having worked in this industry so long, and given so much away psychologically, I wasn't willing to give anything more away. I'd look all day on the Internet where there are so many interesting things to see. We lack gatekeepers for outsider art."

Their first production (in partnership with Chiller TV) is the 28 episode web series The Hills Are Alive, produced and co-written by Nicolaides and Thompson, which they shot on their ranch in Ojai over many years.

Their goal is to collect and show "weird, genuinely out-there stuff," said Thompson, whose friends at film fests are sending them material. Small and Creepy is also sponsoring a young animator, Evan York, who records people's dreams and animates them with a Sharpie. For now the site shows shorts. "People don't have the patience or bandwidth to do otherwise," Thompson said.

Her goal, not yet met: "I will make a cell phone feature," she said.

With Comic-Con looming, movie sites are pushing to get scoops on new movies of interest to the fan community. A sequel to 300, which broke big at Comic-Con, is a big deal.

Thus at the Saturn awards last month, after Collider.com got Zack Snyder to talk about a planned 300 sequel, word spread through the fan sites and eventually Variety tracked the story down and got official confirmation of Frank Miller writing a 300 prequel for Snyder to direct.

Here's how Variety handled the online coverage:

Another "300" has been rumored from the start, but last week Snyder and the original producing team stoked a frenzy online when they talked about it at the Saturn Awards.

This happens a lot.

This doesn't mean that Variety purposely stole the story, as Collider suggested. Variety's Diane Garrett actually nailed down more info.

It's not always cut-and-dry--sometimes everyone is chasing the same news and a given reporter may not be aware of what has broken online. A reporter isn't always tracking down where something broke first, just the story itself. "Sometimes when a publicist sees a story break online," asserts one major online site editor, "they try to place the story in a legitimate news source and they don't necessarily let anyone know."

The Collider protest led to several other sites joining a boycott of the Hollywood trade papers. Here are reports in Folio and MTV News, which spoke to Variety editor Peter Bart. He announced Variety.com's plan to create a blog of blogs:

“I think we’ll grow together. I really do and I think to some degree we want it. I would like to have us develop a blog of blogs, where we get a highlight reel of the best blogs that deal with the entertainment media. I think that will happen before long, and I think that would ameliorate some of these concerns.”

The fight for numbers now is so fierce that the site that breaks a story wants to get credit for it---via links and traffic. That is what is at stake. By the way, a host of mainstream outlets, online and print, rewrite Variety stories without always giving us credit, either. This is the way of the world.

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.)

One of my Internet spies sent me this post from a writers' forum: an uncredited screenwriter on Kung Fu Panda describes the fabled Jeffrey Katzenberg DreamWorks Animation script process. Needless to say, painful as it may be, the process works like a charm. (Something tells me the folks at Pixar, who work as a team, have more fun.) In just over a month, Kung Fu Panda (which scored 88 % fresh on Rotten Tomatoes) has grossed $346 million worldwide.

I'll just watch.

Posted: Fri Jun 06, 2008 3:18 pm Post subject:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I'm sure nothing Rob and I contributed ended up in there. We wrote a bunch of scenes they kept not using because we were changing too much.

My hats off to anyone that can write a Dreamworks Animation film. They have a unique process.

First they storyboard the entire film. That is the first step. Not kidding. No writers, no script, just a story, and an entire film drawn on pieces of paper.

Then Katzenberg watches an animatic of the boards and says, surprisingly, "this needs a lot of work. You have a month."

Then they hire their first writer. And spend that month changing as much of the storyboards as they can, which is about 20 to 30 percent.

If the 30 percent change isn't the right kind of change, people get fired. Maybe the director, maybe the writer, maybe both.

Sometimes, only the writer gets fired and an additional director is hired to help out. It all depends on who is better - at pointing a finger with one hand while covering their own ass with the other.

I came in about four writers into the process. It's kind of hard to write a "better" scene than the last writer when the rules are that you can only change 30 percent of each scene or completely change 30 percent of the scenes, per Katzenberg screening. So, for instance, in this scene, the panda comes up a flight of stairs carrying a bucket of water, slips on a banana peel, says something to two geese and does an air guitar. The good news? There can be anything in the bucket. Your mission: make the movie better.

It's harder than it sounds. Especially when the larger "bucket" that the movie is contained in cannot change: the fact that the story has to be about a panda who is informed he is the chosen one, destined to ...beat up... a guy who has escaped from prison and who is spending the entire movie walking to town, in order to...try to beat him up, because that's the prophecy. And I won't spoil the movie, but the bad guy doesn't win. Because he's not destined to. But just to make sure he doesn't win, and because there's 70 minutes of time to kill before he gets there on foot, the panda is trained in the martial arts. it's kind of like Karate Kid, but if Mister Miyogi had long ago banished the Kobras and was running the karate tournament.

That resonates, right? We've all been in that situation. Oh, yeah, but we weren't the "panda." We were the "bad" guys, walking from Nazareth to Jerusalem, hoping to help people, only to get nailed to a fucking cross by the "good" guys. For instance, I had this job once at Dreamworks Animation...

I tried to divide my time there between the tasks of writing 30 percent of scenes, being hazed by storyboard artists because I didn't know how to do 30 percent of my job, yet, and explaining to the producers that Messianic myths (like The Matrix, which seemed to have a slight impact on their story) usually resonate because in the beginning of the story, things are bad, not good, and the good guy is usually the one overcoming insurmoutable odds and attempting to reclaim something from systems that have the magical ability to beat the living shit out of them no mater what they do.

I said, could we please dedicate this month's 30 percent change to making the bad guy be the ruler of the town, and the prophecy is that this panda is supposed to dethrone him.

Well, the prison scene is already drawn. And Jeffrey really likes it.

All right, can we make it like Demolition Man or Austin Powers or Cat Ballou, have the bad guy break out and everyone's panicking and they go and get the guy that according to legend is the biggest bad ass, but he's out of shape, out of his element and kind of a dick.

Hmmm, okay, but in that case, why is he coming up a flight of stairs, and what's in the bucket?

I don't know. There's food in the bucket, because he loves food so much, and ...he keeps his food in the basement, and he's coming up to answer the door because the stork is knocking at it and beseeching him to be a hero.

Well, the stork never knocks on a door, though. And Jeffrey likes the stork not knocking on doors.

So we quit. Actually, I believe we were fired.

A screenplay has leaked on the Internet, of a recently unearthed Dark Knight script by writer-director Michael Bay. (It's a send-up.) Warners clearly opted to go another way.

Finally, I would have preferred to see The Dark Knight in 35 mm, not IMAX. (I will go see it again when it opens July 18.) While the sequences that were shot with giant cameras were stunning at the IMAX venue--especially the deep detailed helicopter shots over Gotham and the amazing car/truck chase filmed in Chicago's freeway tunnels--I found the movie overwhelming. My brain starts to shut down when it gets over-pixillated, and this film goes on for two and a half hours. (Here's Justin Chang's review.)

My instincts told me when I first saw The Dark Knight trailer: Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins follow-up would fall into the trap of the summer tentpole sequel. It's not entirely his fault. The studio gives him his marching orders: top the last one. Make it bigger, better, bolder, more FX, more action, more scale and scope and characters (read toys). What else should a poor boy to do with $180 million?

Nolan delivered on the first Batman reboot and he does it again here. The Dark Knight will work at the boxoffice and keep the franchise alive.

In many ways, this movie functions as a western, with an honorable sheriff (Gary Oldman's lovable police detective Gordon), a nasty outlaw (Heath Ledger's extraordinary, anarchistic Joker), a lone gunman hero operating outside the law (Christian Bale's Batman) with loyal veteran sidekick (Michael Caine as Alfred), and the lovely lass that the outsider cannot have (Rachel Dawes, the delightful and wily Maggie Gyllenhaal).

And then--here's where the movie starts to go off the tracks--we have Aaron Eckhart's Harvey Dent, the too-virtuous-to-be-true D.A. who is in love with Gyllenhaal, thus forming a love triangle, as well as another Batman accomplice, inventor Lucius Fox (read James Bond's Q), played by the over-exposed Morgan Freeman. Then add a bunch of mafia guys led by deliciously wicked Eric Roberts.

Somehow, David S. Goyer (who wrote the story), and screenwriter Nolan brothers Chris and Jonathan manage to play out all these plot strands. But they wind up with a half-hour finale on top of the two hour main movie, which is really about Batman vs. Joker, who wind up in an iconic face-off on a main street in Gotham. (Ledger dominates Dark Knight news coverage, natch. The LAT addresses the movie from that angle, while EW goes way overboard. Clearly, Warners is making an Oscar push for the film. Ledger's acting nomination is inevitable; while James Dean and others have been nominated after their deaths, only Network's Peter Finch has won a posthumous Oscar.)

Oddly, because The Dark Knight is busy servicing all these other characters, the movie doesn't spend enough time with its leading man, Bruce Wayne/Batman (BTW, Batman's basso-growly voice is silly).

After twists and turns aplenty, some more satisfying than others, the movie comes to a gratifying conclusion (setting up the next sequel). But while Eckhart is winning as Dent, his character detour as Two-Face does not pay off.

I suspect that the filmmakers should have figured out the shorter version of this movie before they shot it, not after, because by then they couldn't cut it, according to Nolan (the full Q & A from one of my Guild spies is on the jump). Nolan shot The Prestige before he came back to work on the final drafts of the script. And by then he was locked into studio-mandated start and delivery and release dates.

My fantasy of the ideal version of this movie doesn't matter a whit, because it will play. The complexities of the plot are more fun to talk about than anything since Wall-E or Iron Man, and that makes Dark Knight one of the best movies of the summer. Maybe some dark over-nourishment is better than a simpler, structurally perfect masterpiece, after all.

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.

Baltimore filmmaker John Waters takes questions on USA Today's PopBlog from his fans, about his upcoming film Fruitcake, due at Christmas, and the DVD release of his true-crime DVD series, Till Death Do Us Part.

UPDATE: Karina Longworth points out that Johnny Knoxville is the new Divine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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