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From the way the Variety article is written, it sounds like Harrison Ford is totally in the bag for doing another Indiana Jones movie.

However, if you look at the actual Moviefone interview with Harrison Ford (warning: pop-up), that’s not actually what he says.

Compare the texts with me:

Variety’s headline (complete with mismatched capitalization): Paging Dr. Jones; Ford Wants to play Indy and Jack Ryan Again

Ford’s actual quotes from the Moviefone interview:

Moviefone: Would you be up for another go-around as Indy?

Ford: Again, it would have to do with the quality of the script that I read, if and when we decide to go forward.

This has been your reading comprehension lesson for today.

Within the last 48 hours I have seen American presidents depicted in two movies, “W” and “Frost/Nixon.” And now I’m sitting with my absentee ballot (I’ll be traveling on election day) and I’m paralyzed. After seeing these two films, anyone in their right mind would conclude that this country is not very good at choosing presidents.
—Variety EIC Peter Bart, on why he’s not voting (maybe) in the upcoming U.S. election

Although the story came out yesterday in Variety and other places, according to the New York Times, the idea of filming a sequel to the 1987 Oliver Stone hit Wall Street has been in place since May 2007.

The old details are that the sequel will retain its producer Edward R. Pressman, and Variety says Fox really wants Michael Douglas to come back and play a post-prison Gordon Gekko. I have to admit that while I’m not crying into my martini over the loss of the good-guy Bud Fox character or even Oliver Stone (because Steven Soderbergh seems to be picking up his mantle very nicely), if they replace Michael Douglas with anyone else as Gordon Gekko, I will start throwing Bloomberg machines out of windows.

The new details are that Allan Loeb (21) will be its writer, probably based on the fact that he used to be a stockbroker in Chicago. I cry shenanigans on that, and think that former trader-turned-poker blogger Paul McGuire would be better suited to write it because he’s got a sharper edge to him. Don’t believe me? Just read this bit, written towards the end of the World Series of Poker this year:

When the online qualifiers won their seats they thought they won a ticket to the big dance. What they really won was a one way trip to nothingness.

After the third day you get numb to the smell of donkey blood and you ignore the bottoms of your jeans stained with oodles and oodles of spilled blood so much so that a steady stream bisects the Amazon into two parts. The French media have been calling it “Une riviere remplie du sang des anes.” That loosely translated into Donkey Blood River.

You can try to repress those horrific memories of the anguish in the killing fields and stash them next to your suicidal thoughts, but they always bubble up to the surface and ambush you when you least expect it. I have a few flashbacks everyday. I can’t escape the faces of the ones we left behind. Like the young kid from that small farming town in Kansas. He barely shaved. Had a girl back home. They were fixin’ to get married. He texted her every break until… it was his time to go. He exploded into a thousand little pieces. Never saw it coming. Sucked out on the river. One moment he was smiling and excited to be at the same table as Jesus. The next moment, he was a statistic. Seat open, table 23.

Fucking brilliant.

I do not envy the work that Variety online editor Anne Thompson and her researchers did on this story about the complicated split-up of Dreamworks SKG and Paramount’s production slate.

I am, however, going to be a dick and cherry pick the pertinent details out of it out for you:

Tintin: This is the one whose future is the most uncertain. After Universal backed out of a financing deal, Paramount offered to fully finance it, but without Spielberg’s usually large back end deals. Dreamworks started shopping it around, they lost a lead actor, and now no one knows where it’s going to go.

Here’s a hint from me: You just signed with Reliance for around $1.2 billion. Surely another $100 million isn’t going to break their coffers?

Up in the Air: The Jason Reitman directed comedy about a career transitions consultant (think the two consultant schmucks from Office Space) whose only two goals in life are to accumulate 1 million frequent flyer miles and get hired by an inscrutable company called MythTech will be released as a Paramount film. IMDB has George Clooney attached, but no mention as to what his role.

The Lovely Bones: Surprisingly, after spending $65 million to acquire it, Dreamworks doesn’t want to release this Peter Jackson-directed film after all, and this one will go to Paramount, too. It’s based on a best-selling, Oprah Winfrey-approved novel about a girl who was raped and murdered and sees how it’s affected her family from the beyond—like the TV series “Dead Like Me,” but less funny?

Cowboys and Aliens: This is one of the 17 that Steven Spielberg is taking with him and Paramount has an option to co-finance. It’s based on a graphic novel from Platinum Studios which is about an alien spaceship that crash-lands in the 1800s and the cowboys and Native Americans who have to fight it off.

The Rivals: This one is in Paramount’s hands, with an option for Spielberg to co-finance. Nicole Kidman (as classic actress Sarah Bernhardt!) and Marion Cotillard have been attached, or so Variety says.

UPDATE: (10/15 12:08 AM) According to her Anne-ness below in the comments, “The Lovely Bones was always going to be distributed by Paramount; when DreamWorks went to Par, the studio distributed their movies…now Universal will do the honors. Eleven DreamWorks movies in various stages of post-production will be distributed by Paramount, and there will be more co-financed movies released by the studio going forward, not to mention ones that were developed and left behind by DreamWorks that Paramount could decide to make.”

Check out the rest of the Dreamworks/Universal details here.

My first reaction to reading the Variety story of how comedian Steve Carrell signed a three-year first-look deal with Warner Bros. which includes housing his very own production studio Carousel Productions on their lot is optimism, tempered with a cautious skepticism.

Most of the skepticism comes from remembering this story, published back in 2002, which talks about a two-year first look deal that Warner Bros. struck with public radio show This American Life. According to Wikipedia, the one film that eventually did get released within the terms of the deal that was based on a TAL story was Unaccompanied Minors, which has a 27% fresh rating on the Tomatometer. Other projects that have been rumored to be picked up but haven’t gone anywhere include a story about a woman who trained herself into becoming a superhero and one about inmates at a maximum security prison who put on a production of Hamlet as part of a rehabilitation program.

Still, TAL is not Steve Carrell, who is more Hollywood-savvy and seems to have a head for choosing projects that run the gamut from pure comedy to thoughtful comedy. That’s not a bad trait to have when you set up a shingle to produce other people’s projects, as Carousel will be doing for the next three years.

Here’s hoping!

Due to its popularity slipping in the polls, Variety reports that the Conservative Party of Canada (colloquially known as the Tories, and yes, this is based on their roots as former British loyalists during its colonial days in the 1800s) dropped a bill from its platform that would have allowed it to pull tax credits from films and TV shows it felt were “not in the public interest” in anticipation of next week’s election.

In other words, in response to public opinion and with the support of actors like comedian Mark McKinney (yes, the one from Kids in the Hall), a conservative government is reversing its stance on a bill that would have effectively let the government deem what movies could be made and what movies are too pornographic or violent to make.

Let me repeat that one more time: Canadian conservatives who are noticing that the people of Canada don’t like them very much are changing their political stances in order to get elected.

If only the U.S. political parties worked like that, eh?

As reported in the Toronto Star, McKinney said that as good as the news is, it’s not enough: “[It’s] fantastic news, but I don’t think it’s anything we should be grateful for at all. This is like a man who steals your wallet and then kicks you in the face and then says, `Sorry about kicking you in the face.”

One of the reasons why this is such good news is that for almost a year, Prime Minister Steven Harper and other Tories cut $45 million CDN from federally funded arts programs, stating that such things didn’t matter to “ordinary Canadians.” The fact that people in the arts have made this one of the key platform issues in the election and it got the party to back down is freaking amazing.

This post has been brought to you by my own election fatigue and the wish that in the U.S. we could regularly overthrow the government just like the Canadians can.

Dear Gordon,

I know you weren’t too happy about learning that Tim Burton had cast an 18-year old to play his Alice for the new version of Alice in Wonderland that he’s shooting for Disney and with the idea of Johnny Depp playing the Mad Hatter. Well, Hollywood Reporter said that Anne Hathaway and Helena Bonham Carter are joining the cast as the two chess-themed monarchs, the White Queen and the Red Queen, respectively.

In addition, HR’s details reveal that in Burton’s film, the two will play sisters with the former having been banished and asking Alice to slay a creature called a Bandersnatch, presumably in order to get her kingdom back—while anyone who’s ever read Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There knows that such a thing never took place.

I’ll be over here while you finish ranting.

Sincerely,
Trisha Lynn

In announcing that the TV and radio actors’ union (AFTRA) and the movie actors’ union (SAG) would conduct their commercials contract re-negotiations together, Variety reported that AFTRA’s president Roberta Reardon said that it took the help of the federation of unions (AFL-CIO) to get them to this point.

I almost wish that I could have been a fly on the wall for that meeting, because I’m pretty certain the AFL-CIO guys would have said the same thing I’ve been thinking for months: SAG, you’re looking like a tool in this fight, and you’ve lost so much ground. If you want to get anywhere, you’re going to have to either bend a little, or bring a different weapon to the table.

Still, it’s so very hard for me to feel sympathetic towards SAG, especially in light of the current financial bailout, the knowledge that since studios get their operating money from investment firms, there might not be any extra money for new media residuals to go around, and my lack of knowledge about how much the average SAG actor—a working actor who isn’t a big celebrity, but someone who still manages to work on enough sets—is affected by the stalled movie contract.

Yesterday, SAG’s negotiating committee—and wouldn’t I really love to know who’s on it!—passed a resolution that basically pleads with the newly elected board to vote on whether or not it will ask its members to strike in order to get a better contract from the AMPTP. Just in case we all forgot, the contract they don’t like is the same one that the Writer’s Guild of America got after they went on strike. The AMPTP immediately proved they were more media-savvy than SAG by issuing a statement on the front page of its website, part of which reads:

Is this really the time for anyone associated with the entertainment business to be talking about going on strike? Not only is the business suffering from recent economic conditions, but if ever there was a time when Americans wanted the diversions of movies and television, it is now.

Ouch.

Meanwhile, 147,000 below-the-line workers in India’s rich movie industry went on strike yesterday. Those workers—which include the lighting technicians, the chorus girls, and the camera operators—called their action a “non-cooperation movement” à la Gandhi, but the studios aren’t having any of it. Over 40 shoots were affected, and at least one film that is expected to be released at the end of October has its opening date on the line.

And what are they asking for, you wonder?

On-time pay (usually, they get paid 90 days after a shoot is over), a 12-hour maximum workday, and improved safety conditions.

Kinda makes you really want to knee some American actors in the balls, don’t it?

Who knew that when 16-year old Bo Burnham started crafting music videos for his brother who was away at college in 2006, only two years later would he be represented by one of the top agencies in the U.S., with a Comedy Central record deal and publications like Hollywood Reporter stating that he was “in talks” with hit comedy director Judd Apatow to co-write a musical?

This is just further proof that the Hollywood dream is not dead; it’s just moved to the Internet. The best part about this is that Burnham does indeed have some wicked songwriting chops – though I find his habit of using callbacks in almost every chorus to be a crutch. Go study some Sondheim and Cole Porter! Your career will thank me for it!

In addition to Rachel McAdams being signed to star in Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes (filming starts next month!) as Arthur Conan Doyle’s only interesting female character Irene Adler, Hollywood Reporter is also saying that Jude Law will be RDJ’s Watson and Mark Strong will play Holmes’ nemesis, Blackwood. I don’t know enough about Strong to be excited about him, and I have to admit that I often get Jude Law confused with Ewan McGregor (when he cleans up, that is). Still, good casting choices, methinks.

The more I re-read the Sherlock Holmes short stories, the more I appreciate them. I’m in the middle of reading “The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes” on Bibliomania, and there are a few of the stories there that are about Holmes’ earliest cases, when he was fresh out of college or even when he was in college (“The Gloria Scott,” “The Musgrave Ritual”) and I have to admit that turning a tale like those into a movie might not be a bad idea.

Still, RDJ will have to go a very long way towards replacing Jeremy Brett as being the ultimate Holmes for me, God rest his soul.

As a former English major, I’m aware that there are only so many basic themes and plots to go around. As a (mostly) unpublished writer, I know that there are only so many ways you can tell the same story. However, as a movie fan, I’ve become pleasantly aware that with the visual medium, there are so many things you can do to make the commonplace absolutely extraordinary. Hell, Charlie Kaufman’s made a career of it—Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, anyone?

And with the official announcement of his next project Looper‘s 2009 production start date, writer/director Rian Johnson seems to be adding his name to the list of those in the Newer and Spacier Hollywood. Looper is purportedly the tale of hitmen who get sent their targets from the future. So if Brick was the re-imagining of the noir film and The Brothers Bloom is the re-imagining of the conman film, I’m fully prepared to have my little mind’s conceptions of the suspense-thriller completely blown away.

It’s been a while since I gave you an AMPTP vs. SAG update, hasn’t it? Well, previously on Dude, Where’s My Contract?…

Marcia Wallace and the Unite for Strength underdogs challenged Membership First incumbents David Carradine and his gang for overall control of SAG’s fate. Meanwhile, the AMPTP pulled their black hats lower over their heads and announced they’d reached a tentative agreement with the casting directors’ union (scroll to September 12), which I am sure includes provisions for keeping their couch privileges.

The results of the nationwide election came in last week, and… well, let’s let SAG’s barking dog (which backs Membership First) run it down:

Well, the election results are in. And what have we learned? Members vote for celebrities, even if they have diametrically opposed political views as far as SAG is concerned.

For instance, UFS got five of their celebrities elected to the SAG National Board, as did Membership First, one independent Morgan Fairchild was reelected to the National Board.

So, forget any talk about this being a mandate for UFS or a rejection for Membership First. All in all, it seems to be more about who has the most recognizable kisser.

Average people voting for whomever they know that makes them feel comfortable rather than something different and outside of the norm? Us Americans and anyone who went through John Howard’s Coalition rule in Australia wouldn’t know anything about that, would we?

SAG proper also conducted their own version of the Gallup poll, sending out over mail-in postcards to some of their paid-up members asking if they wanted SAG to continue negotiations or if they wanted to take the “last and final” AMPTP offer from June 30. Of the 103,630 cards they sent out, SAG announced in a press release that 87.27% of the respondents would prefer for SAG to try and get them a better deal. Of course, the AMPTP had something to say about that as well, suggesting that there may have been ballot stuffing when there were reports of some actors receiving more than one ballot.

So where do things stand right now? We’re still nowhere near getting the SAG actors a contract, which means that these silly one-upsmanship games will continue to be played.

Maybe if I wait a few months, there will be more interesting news on this subject…

As mentioned back in July, DreamWorks SKG has finally finalized the deal to break free from the Paramount Pictures group and join up with India’s Reliance ADA. “Sources” say that the deal includes Paramount being able to keep their cut of whatever comes out of the DreamWorks pictures that started development prior to just now, without any of the upcoming or future fiscal responsibility. Films in various forms of pre-production that are affected by this deal incude Lincoln, The Trial of the Chicago 7, The 39 Clues, and Tintin.

The reason why I’m so intrigued by this deal is that ever since I learned that the movie studios these days get a lot of their financing from banks and other investment houses, I’ve been wondering how Hollywood is going to come out of our current financial crisis. The only benchmark we had to judge against was that of the Great Depression, where people flocked to the cinemas and theaters in droves, scarfing up gangster movies like Public Enemy, screwball comedies like My Man Godfrey, and musicals like 42nd St.—all genres which gained prominence in this era. Even then-president Franklin D. Roosevelt had this to say:

When the spirit of the people is lower than at any other time during this Depression, it is a splendid thing that for just 15 cents, an American can go to a movie and look at the smiling face of [child actress Shirley Temple] and forget his troubles.

But “in a world” where our equivalent to Shirley Temple is pictures of cats clutching invisible objects and the motion picture industry is competing with TV, cable, and the Internet for peoples’ attention spans, that business model has to be thrown completely out the window. The question is, what kind of model will take its place?

I’m not entirely sure what Michael Douglas is up to with his most recent career decision to star in Solitary Man, a picture from Millennium Films. It’s about the former owner of a car dealership whose libido destroyed his career and marriage, which sounds like a similar premise to both Basic Instinct and Fatal Attraction—movies he made when he wasn’t 64. I hope that the script has more sensibility than to try and push a May-December romance on a public that is crude and callous enough to make jokes about a presidential nominee and the 18-year age difference between him and his second wife. A dialogue about male sexuality and how testosterone overload can poison the mind? That’s an interesting subject for a movie.

Meanwhile, Ocean’s 11 and Traffic director Steven Soderbergh was indirectly quoted by Variety writer Michael Fleming as saying that Douglas would also be starring in a biography about flamboyantly and famously closeted gay pianist/entertainer Liberace that the director is developing for Warner Bros. Fleming also wrote that the director has been talking to Matt Damon about playing Scott Thorson, Liberace’s younger secret lover who sued him for over $100 million in palimony (and eventually settled for $95,000). However, “sources” have also said that it’s not going to be Soderbergh’s next project, or even the one after that. I just gotta know, whatever happened to good old-fashioned primary sources and direct quotes in movie journalism, huh?