A friend sent me a list of scripts, and I’m wondering which (if any) seem the most intriguing to readers. (1) Casino Royale by Neal Purvis & Robert Wade, second set of revisions by Paul Haggis (12.13.05); (2) Believe it or Not! by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski (5/6/05); (3) The Last Kiss by Paul Haggis (10.31.03); (4) Night At The Museum by Scott Frank (2.4.5); (5) The Martian Child by Seth E. Bass & Jonathan Tolins (3.14.05); (6) The Astronaut Farmer by Mark & Michael Polish (6.16.05); (7) Steven Soderbergh and Terrence Malick’s Che; (8) Cabin Fever 2 by Adam Green (9.20.04); and (8) 300 by Snyder/Johnstad (11.22.04). If these scripts aren’t vital reading, which ones are?

Sir Carol Reed made three masterpieces in a row in the mid to late ’40s — The Fallen Idol, Odd Man Out and The Third Man And what does he win his Oscar for? Oliver (1968), a mediocre big-studio musical that seems a little less each time you reflect upon it. (Forwarded by reader Jeremy Fassler.)

“I was fortunate enough to meet Paddy Chayefsky at the Carnegie Deli very near the end of his life. I asked him if he had any idea, when he wrote Network, how life would follow art. He said that his original script had been twice as cynical but he had been forced to dilute it to get it made. When he asked why I was so interested, I told him I worked in TV news. ‘Oh wait’, he said, ‘just wait.'” — Christopher Dalrymple, Digital Verite.

The deadline for the Oscar ballots to be filled out and received happened exactly fourteen minutes ago — 5 p.m. Pacific on Tuesday, 2.28. Please, please…give us a surprise in one of the major categories.

I suggested a continuation of David Carr‘s
“Carptebagger”/Red Carpet column a few days ago, and now it looks like Carr is giving the idea some thought. “Although his ‘Carpetbagger’ movie awards season blog is supposed to go dark after the Oscars, Carr said that he might consider continuing to blog for the Times as an add-on to his regular media column. He told us that blogging has taught him spontaneity and gave him more confidence with his writing.” — Zack Barangan writing about Carr’s visit last weekend to some kind of NYU blogging class.

Toughest Job on Oscar Night Award contenders, from a piece in Time magazine: (a) Jennifer Aniston’s publicist: Has Jen seen Brangelina’s sonogram? Will she attend the shower? Red carpet chatterboxes have many rude questions for this presenter. Wells comment: Those fearless vampire killer questions asked of tabloid victims like Aniston, Brangelina and Tomkat are beyond sickening. (b) Isaac Mizrahi: the grabby E! co-host must keep his hands in his pockets, and off of starlets. Wells comment: More brash tittie feels…go for it, Isaac…make it a lifelong signature thing. (c) Dolly Parton’s stylist: O.K., we’re not sure she has one, but heck, fitting a gown on this buxom Best Song nominee for Transamerica‘s Travelin’Thru would be a real achievement. Wells comment: Zzzzzzzz. (d) Host Jon Stewart: Really, will there be any original gay cowboy jokes left by March 5? Wells comment : A Stewart bioographer will one day report that gay cowboy jokes were immediately dismissed when Stewart and his team started working on his monologue…done to death by Leno, Letterman and Nathan Lane. (e) Reese Witherspoon: Acting surprised when she wins Best Actress for Walk the Line will surely require Witherspoon to channel more of that June Carter-style class. Wells comment: There’s a belief out there that a Witherspoon upset by Transamerica‘s Felicity Huffman is possible. Not likely, but it could conceivably happen…maybe.

Guy goes to see The Pink Panther with his mom, laughs in a weird and too-loud way, audience members complain, and the guy gets thrown out. This is frontier justice, and if I were there I’d probably support the eviction. If you can’t keep it together in a movie theatre, you’re going to tick people off, and being handicapped is no excuse. This is where the DVD solution comes into play.

I failed to mention in an earlier riff about Warner Home Video’s All The President’s Men double-disc special edition DVD that it contains three brilliant mini-documentaries by Los Angeles-based documentarian Gary Leva, and that two of these are especially valuable and noteworthy because they’re serious looks at the state of U.S. journalism today rather than typical celebrate-the-movie puff pieces. They’re basically about how journalism has gone downhill since the days of Watergate and, by implication, how attempts to muscle journalists under the Bush administration are just as bad if not worse today than they were under the Nixon administration in the early ’70s. “Woodward and Bernstein: Lighting the Fire,” which runs 18 minutes, is an indictment of the current chicken-hearted state of corporate- controlled journalism, which a complacent public doesn’t seem to care very much about. The scariest remark comes from Newsweek reporter Jonathan Alter, saying that if Watergate were to happen today the story probably would have never come out. The second doc, “Out of the Shadows: The Man Who Was Deep Throat,” starts as a look at Mark Felt, the #2 FBI guy back then who was revealed last year as “Deep Throat. But it gradually shifts into an examination of the importance of unnamed sources, and how most news stories would just be press releases and pablum without them. Peter Schweizer (author of “The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty”) laments that Felt never tried to fix the corruption from within. Alter calls this notion a “preposterous canard,” explaining that “we simply can’t do our jobs without anyonymous sources… people will often not tell the truth if they have to be on the record.” Here’s an excerpt from the doc’s final moments. The talking heads appearing on both docs include Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward, Ben Bradley, Linda Ellberbee, Walter Cronkite, Oliver Stone, William Goldman and Oliver Stone. I spoke to Leva this afternoon about the unusually political and hard-hitting nature of these docs, and he said “it’s always a lot more interesting looking at the issues raised by a film in a broader context…rather than simply in light of the physical production of the film.” Leva says that apart from these docs, the piece he’s proudest of is one about ’70s filmmakers called “A Legacy of Filmmakers: The Early Years of American Zoetrope.” It can be found on the THX 1138: The George Lucas Directors Cut two-disc DVD that came out in September 2004.

Here‘s a gripping piece by N.Y. Times writer Juan Forero (it ran last Sunday, 2.26) about 32 year-old Rachel Boynton‘s just- opened documentary Our Brand of Crisis (Koch Lorber), a behind-the-scenes look at how U.S. campaign strategists (including James Carville) helped the faltering campaign of Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada during a run for president of Bolivia in 2002. Boynton asks “whether Mr. Carville and company, in selling a pro-globalization, pro-American candidate, can export American-style campaigning and values to a country so fundamentally different from the United States,” Forero writes. “I wanted to make clear that this is a story that does not happen just in Bolivia but all over the world,” Boynton tells him. “I’m much more interested about the consultants as a symbol for us, as a symbol for America and American assumptions. I chose the subjects because I wanted to explore America’s relationship with the rest of the world.” Sanchez de Lozada was elected, but left office 14 months later after protests rocked Bolivia to its foundations. Evo Morales, the leader of Bolivia’s coca growers, was elected to the Bolivian presidency two months ago (12.05) in a landslide.

“If Crash wins the Best Picture Oscar, it won’t just take home a statuette [but will] claim a new title: the most indefensible Best Picture winner since 1956’s tax shelter spectacle Around the World in 80 Days,” says Matt Zoller Seitz on his “House Next Door” blog. “Yes, I admit, the movie’s more primally exciting than, say, American Beauty or A Beautiful Mind or The English Patient, and more superficially ‘edgy.’ But it’s also dumber and meaner and uglier, an Importance Machine that rolls over you like a tank.” Wow…no one I’ve read has slammed Paul Haggis‘s film quite as heavily. I’d love to hear Seitz argue his point with unbridled Crash admirer Roger Ebert.

Does the crocodile grab hold of the bungee jumper and drag him under and presumably eat the poor guy in this “Crocodile Bungee” short? I’ve watched it six times and I don’t see any evidence of the bungee jumper bouncing above in the aftermath but…no! It’s bullshit, according to Snopes.com….fake footage put together by some guys working on a Foster’s TV ad.

Sidney Lumet talking about Network on the occasion of the new 30th anniversary double DVD, mostly for perspective but also because Lumet’s Find Me Guilty is hitting theatres on 3.17.