Howl co-directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman have announced their next feature -- a drama about the late oral-sex queen and subsequent feminist and antiporn activist Linda Lovelace, based on a script by W. Merritt Johnson.

Lovelace is "a story with great dramatic and psychological dimensions," said Friedman. "It's also set against a backdrop of shifting sexual mores, which should be a lot of fun to dig into."

Producers Laura Rister at Untitled Entertainment, Jim Young at Animus Films and Heidi Jo Markel at Eclectic Pictures are in "active negotiations" with Nu Image to finance the project. Johnson will executive produce.

"I have five or six feature films pushing me. You see, it sounds as if I have a career and I'm planning a lot. But no, the films come like a home invasion, like burglars in the middle of the night. All of a sudden they are there, and you have to deal with them." -- director Werner Herzog speaking to DGA Quarterly's Jeffrey Ressner in a fascinating, nicely edited q & a.

The snowflakes are very fine. The overall blanketing effect is kinda blizzardy. It's quite beautiful. I adore the aura of heavy snow. Taken from front stoop of Park City's Park Regency -- Thursday, 1.21, 7:50 am.

I'm calling it the John Cooper-Trevor Groth pawprint effect. Longtime Sundance director Geoff Gilmore has gone east and Coop-Groth are the new co-honchos so they get to do things a little differently...wheee! And so some minor (but not insignificant) changes have been implemented as far as the Sundance journalist environments and screening ops are concerned. Nothing to get nuts about, but definitely less cool.

One, no more press screenings at the Yarrow hotel -- they're now being held at the Holiday Cinemas. Except the Yarrow was/is a really nice environment for hanging out between screenings, and there's no schmooze or sit-down opportunities...Read More

Even though the Newark Continental flight left almost an hour late (around 9:20 am), it got to Denver at 11:20 am local time, and my Frontier connection flight to Salt Lake City has been delayed about an hour, so I'm in like Flynn with time to spare. And I managed to tap out a fairly readable freelance piece for Fandango -- "Confessions of an Oscar Blogger" -- on the plane. I'll be in Salt Lake City by 2:15 or so, Park City by 4 pm. Press credentials!

Denver Int'l Airport, Coucourse A -- Wednesday, 1.20, 11:50 am.

With the Academy's final nomination deadline only four days off, few if any voters are able to think of ten Best Picture nominees, reports Notes on a Season's Pete Hammond. They can name five or six and then they stall out. This conundrum, of course, is precisely what Oscar blogger lists are made for.

"In countless conversations with academy voters over the past two weeks it's apparent that not everyone is able to come up with 10 movies. In fact it's an epidemic. According to the overwhelming majority of members to whom I have spoken, they get to five or six...Read More

I have to get up in four hours and 15 minutes in order to get to Newark Airport by 7 am. I'd better pack it in. I'll probably miss my Denver connection flight to Salt Lake City, which will mean sitting around at Denver airport for at least five or six hours.

B. Ruby Rich has written a chummy piece about Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman's Howl, which she's apparently seen. Rich explains the history of the famous Allen Ginsberg poem, and how the filmmakers got involved and so on. But she reveals nothing about how the film plays. Only two or three days remain before Howl will be shown at Sundance, and she doesn't share impressions? This almost certainly means it's a problem movie. For some reason Rich's editor called the article "Howl Resounds on Film." Oh, yeah?

James Franco in Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman's Howl.

During his victory speech this evening Massachusetts Republican Senator-elect Scott Brown said that "both my daughters are available." The remark can be found around the 9:15 mark. The man is a cro-magnon pig.

"If you could have the power of a superhero, which power would you choose?" So asked a Vanity Fair/60 Minutes poll, and the biggest portion of respondents said they'd like to be able to read people's minds. (More so than being able to fly, become invisible, possess super-strength or have X-ray vision.) I'm amazed, frankly, because in all modesty I can read almost anyone's mind by simply studying their features and particularly their eyes. And I don't think I'm alone in this ability.

Democratic Senate candidate Martha Coakley is toast in Massachusetts, and with her defeat comes the prospect of the toothless health-care bill going down to defeat...unless Democrats in both houses push it through before Republican Scott Brown, who will apparently beat Coakley by a decent margin, is sworn in.

This is a referendum, of course, on the Obama adminstration, and the perception held by everyone that he's no change agent. He wants to make a difference, but not if it means getting tough and adversarial. His determination to always play it calm and mellow will be his etched on his tombstone. How...Read More

Eric Kohn has posted a lament about the inability of widely admired indie-type films -- Humpday, Moon, etc. -- to draw Oscar love. These specialty titles lack both the money and big names that could help get them into the race," he writes. "With virtually no traction in the industry, they sit on the sidelines by default."

I felt no love for Moon myself, but Humpday is delightful -- about as audience-friendly as films of this sort (mumblecore, bromance, GenX-y) get. Typical Oscar-calibre films tend to aim higher and appeal to a broader, less sophisticated audience. They need to emotionally...Read More

Last Thursday KTLA's Sam Rubin tried to prompt Mel Gibson into reviewing the infamous 2006 drunken Malibu "sugartits" episode, during which Gibson reportedly said anti-Semitic remarks. Rubin obliquely refers to this episode, and then Gibson says "who, what, me?" and then "not necessarily" and so on. Then he says to Rubin, "Do you have a dog in this hunt?"

This is what I honestly love about Gibson -- i.e., the Martin Riggs madman within, the hair-trigger ragehound. I love love love the way he leans forward and smiles and says to Rubin, "What happened?" He's a serious kookoo bird, Gibson...Read More

Bryan Burroughs' Vanity Fair synopsis of Oliver Stone's Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps informs that Michael Douglas's Gordon Gekko, fresh from a 20-year prison sentence, will return as a guy who's...gone soft. Okay, is looking to make amends. "When Gekko comes out of prison, in the beginning of this movie, he essentially has to redefine himself," says Stone. "He's looking for that second chance."

Wall Street 2 team ((l., to r.): Josh Brolin, Oliver Stone, Michael Douglas, Shia Lebouf, Carey Mulligan.

The plot involves Shia LaBeouf's Jake Moore, a hungry young hedge-funder who believes that his boss,...Read More

Inspired by Jason Spingarn-Koff's Life 2.0, the doc about an alternative fantasy cyber-realm that will show at Sundance 2010, I joined Second Life today and chose my avatar name -- Slick Furlough.

I've done some reading, heard some things, tossed some stuff around and finalized my essential Sundance 2010 must-see list. It comes to 26 films. Divide this by nine days, add the two or three surprises that always pop up, and then subtract five or six due to conflicting schedules, fatigue and occasional evening parties and I may see 23 or 24 films...but more likely 20.

Tommy Lee Jones, Ben Affleck in John Wells' Company Men.

If a film shows at a major venue (Library, Egyptian, Eccles, Prospector) during the first three or four days, it's a...Read More

A little more than four years ago Spike Jonze's phenomenal "Pardon Our Dust" Gap ad was first shown. In late '05 I called it one of the most outrageously brilliant TV spots I'd seen in a very long time. It was supposed to be about the coming of a new design for Gap stores, but was obviously about something more. With Edvard Grieg's "Peer Gynt Suite" on the soundtrack, it's about rebellion, revolution...a Fight Club-ish rage against corporate cultural domination.

It's still one of the most...Read More

Jerzy Skolimowski's Deep End ('71) is a highly absorbing, smoothly composed British noir about a withdrawn kid and his obsessive feelings for a co-worker. It's more than a bit creepy, unsettling, perverted. But coolly stylish. It's being restored by Bavaria Media for re-release as a DVD. It's crudely viewable right now on YouTube.

Skolimowski clearly had a thing for Jane Asher, the fetching red-haired actress who'd become famous in the mid '60s for being Paul McCartney's girlfriend. Her character, a duplicitous swimming-pool attendant, has an affair with an older guy, etc....Read More

Movieline's Stu VanAirsdale is asking why Carey Mulligan hasn't caught on as a formidable Best Actress finalist. I could feel this bizarre turn taking shape but I didn't want to face it. I finally did on 1.13 in a lament/argument piece. Mulligan will still be nominated, of course, but the race is now between Meryl Streep and Sandra Bullock -- we may as well face facts.

Carey Mulligan

But why? How did her handlers "utterly fail to build any public image or brand for their awards hopeful?," as VanAirsdale puts it. It couldn't have...Read More

I don't know what I was thinking. I wanted to be in Salt Lake City by the early afternoon, but the reality of getting three or four hours sleep at most and having to wake up with the stars still out has only just hit me. Tomorrow is the last day for all the stuff you always have to do before leaving. I'll be wearing a niftier black cowboy hat than the one I wore last year. The flight will be miserable, of course, and I can only guess what the airline will be charging me for baggage.

...

Apple's iPad/iTablet will be announced on January 27th, but won't be purchasable until March...is that right? Won't their presentation seem a little anticlimactic, given all the informational hubbub so far?

An HE reader "used to sell a lot of Apple computers," he claims, "so I know how their supply chain and marketing strategies have worked because they haven't changed. I have no inside knowlege whatsoever, and have just been putting together the rumors like any other outsider." But from all the sites and the consistencies and inconsistencies, here are his predictions:

1. What...Read More

The Envelope's Pete Hammond spoke last night to Avatar's James Cameron at the Fox after-party at Craft. His first question, naturally, was about Cameron's surprise Golden Globe win over Kathryn Bigelow in the Best Director category.

"I am still stunned," Cameron answered. "I was sure [Kathryn] was gonna win. I thought because it was the foreign press, they might appreciate our movie a little more, so best picture was a possibility, but not director."

As for Avatar being $200 million shy of breaking Titanic's worldwide box-office record, Cameron said he "always knew one day someone would do it....Read More

"I had to laugh after I saw Creation at the Toronto Film Festival last fall," writes Marshall Fine, "because I'd read speculation in the press that the reason it was having trouble finding an American distributor was its controversial content.

Paul Bettany as Charles Darwin in Creation.

"As if this weak-tea, droopy-drawers drama had a scintilla of anything that might be mistaken for controversy squirreled somewhere within its overlong running time. Perhaps I dozed through that part.

"What most people were too polite to say was that Creation (1.22.10) is a colossal snooze, a drama allegedly about...Read More

An announcement about April Criterion releases says that Sidney Lumet's The Fugitive Kind (1960), an under-appreciated adaptation of Tennessee Williams' Orpheus Descending starring Marlon Brando and Anna Magnani, will be among them. We're talking a double-disc special edition with a high-definition digital transfer plus extras, including a documentary about the making of the film and an essay by David Thomson.

Brando's Valentine Xaiver, a guitar-strumming drifter in a snakeskin jacket, was his second and last performance as a youngish moody type in a frankly sexual drama. (Val...Read More

HE reader Bobby Rivers has pointed out that during last night's Martin Scorsese montage before he accepted his Golden Globe life achievement award there was no clip from New York, New York, even though the band played the film's Kander & Ebb title tune as Scorsese walked to the stage.

Liza Minelli, Robert De Niro in Martin Scorsese's New York, New York.

The reason, of course, is that very few people feel much affection for New York, New York. I've never really liked it myself. (It has one electric scene -- i.e., when Robert De Niro...Read More

But what is this? I'm going to be blamed for linking to this so go ahead and trash me, but I honestly gasped when I laid eyes.

In the first post-Globes Oscar projection chart, And The Winner Is columnist Scott Feinberg has put James Cameron's name at the top of his list of Best Director Oscar-nominees (and with a little electric-green arrow next to his name) because he won the Golden Globe Best Director award last night. Stop that, Scott! And all the other giddy-golly Globe rebounders -- cool your jets, please.

Kathryn Bigelow, James Cameron, Scott Feinberg

The Golden Globes are a bellwether of nothing except ethereal mood and easy-lay emotionality expressed by a group of pseudo-journalist whores...Read More

Two days ago (on 1.15 at 5:54 pm) L.A. Times/"24 Frames" columnist Steven Zeitchek posted the clearest explanation I've read about the apparent Up In The Air acrimony between Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner. Reitman seemed to radiate a certain coolness toward Turner when they took the stage tonight to accept the Golden Globe award for screenwriting.

DVR capture of Jason Reitman after the announcement of Avatar's Best Picture win at the Golden Globes.

Unable as I've always been to separate my feelings from my pulse-readings, I wasn't very accurate with my Golden Globe predictions. Correct calls: Avatar for Best Picture, Sandra Bullock for Best Actress in a Drama, Jeff Bridges for Best Actor in a Drama, Meryl Streep for Best Actress in a Comedy/Musical, Mo'Nique for Best Supporting Actress, and Christoph Waltz for Best Supporting Actor.

I got everything else wrong. But everyone got Best Director wrong. It had been signed, sealed and all but delivered for Kathryn...Read More

My guess is that Robert Downey, Jr. has just won the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Comedy/Music award because he's sharp and funny and well-liked for his amusing way of riffing on the truth. Because the idea that he gave the best performance in this realm is a joke. He got through Sherlock Holmes with a slightly wiggy deadpan attitude...fine. But hardly the stuff of tribute. Any rational body would have given the award to Michael Stuhlbarg or Matt Damon. "Art in the blood is likely to take the strangest forms," Downey said. "The Hollywood Foreign Press is a strange bunch."

No one with an understanding of anything would suggest that The Hangover is a better, more valuable film than (500) Days of Summer. Nobody would even dare to compare the two in conversation. And yet the HFPA has just given The Hangover its Best Comedy or Musical award. "Wow...we didn't expect this," said director Todd Phillips.

Avatar's James Cameron has just won the Golden Globe for Best Director. A shocker. The question would be "why?" when the award seemed to be Kathryn Bigelow's. The answer would be that the HFPA members are hugely impressed by Avatar's worldwide reach and sweep. "I'm not prepared 'cause I kinda thought Kathryn was gonna get this," Cameron said, "and she deserves it."

Martin Scorsese's life achievement award speech is by far the most elegant and movingly phrased. Clean, clear and very much the words of a man who is alive and hungry for bear. I love that William Faulkner quote: "The past is never dead. It is not even past."

HE to Chloe Sevigny: If you don't want an escort to accidentally get his foot caught on the hem of your dress and (reportedly) rip it, don't wear a dress with a train that drags on the floor, sticking out a couple of feet. Make sense?

An elegant heartfelt speech from Jason Reitman after winning the Golden Globe for Best Screenplay for Up In The Air. Reitman's credited cowriter Sheldon Turner has been a phantom for the last several months, and suddenly he's gleaming and taking a bow with an award in his hand. I've been making the rounds and haven't seen him anywhere. A wee bit strange.

I had conflicted feelings about Ross Katz's Taking Chance , to say the least, but Kevin Bacon's lead performance as a sad Marine was perhaps his finest ever. I still say Taking Chance is a sneaky Iraq War sell-job in sheep's clothing, but Bacon has just won a Golden Globe for his performance. No argument whatsoever.

Because Ryan Bingham's "The Weary Kind" (from Crazy Heart) won the Golden Globe for Best Song, I guess it's all the more certain that Jeff Bridges will win for Best Actor. (Not that there was much doubt about this.) I suspect that if anyone in the HFPA had even half-liked Everybody's Fine, Paul McCartney's song would have won.

"One thing that can't be bought is a Golden Globe. Officially." -- host Ricky Gervais, speaking about three minutes ago.

The unstoppable Mo'Nique has just won the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress. Had to happen and it did. But in her damply emotional thank-you speech, and after thanking her husband and Lee Daniels and so on, did I not hear Mo'Nique say, "I celebrate this award with all the Preciouses, with all the Marys"?

In his thank-you speech after winning Best Actor for The Silence of the Lambs, what would the reaction have been if Anthony Hopkins had said, "I celebrate this Oscar with all the serials and cannibals out there...may they learn to heal their ways"?

I don't actually believe that A Serious Man's Michael Stuhlbarg will win the Golden Globe for Best Comedy or Musical Performance, as stated two days ago. I recognize there are problems in playing a whiner. It's just that the idea of The Informant's Matt Damon, Nine's Daniel Day-Lewis or Sherlock Holmes' Robert Downey Jr. winning seems ludicrous. And that there doesn't seem any chance for (500) Days of Summer's Joseph Gordon-Levitt to win (although I'd be cool with that).

Either you recognize this frame-capture right away or you'll never know unless someone tells you. There's no middle path.

Two hours before the Golden Globes and I'm listening to Movie Geeks United!. A general discussion about the last ten years, the best films, trends, the Avatar phenomenon, the irrelevance of fanboys, etc. On 1.20 the Movie Geeks will speak with author/journalist Peter Biskind about "Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America."

Saturday morning's estimate saw Avatar beating The Book of Eli by $41,750,000 to $32 million. Today's Reuters' estimate projects $41.3 million for Avatar vs. $31.6 million for Eli -- a very decent showing for the Hughes Brothers and Denzel Washington although they still got whipped. James Cameron's 3D epic now has a domestic tally of $491.8 million and a worldwide total of $1.6 billion -- just $237 million short of Titanic's $1.8 billion all-time record.

New York's "Daily Intel" is reporting that "sometime this spring" the New York Times will start charging for content. They'll be using a metered system "in which readers can sample a certain number of free articles before being asked to subscribe." Meaning you can read...what, ten articles before you have to fork over? Just tell me what the unlimited-read monthly access will be -- that's all I want to know. I'll go $30 monthly, a buck a day.

The Letterman giggling thing is awful, but otherwise this worked. Sort of. Here's an '04 Leno clip, posted this morning by Gawker: "You know, this show is like a dynasty -- you hold it and then you hand it off to the next person and I don't want to see all the fighting and all the who's better and nasty things back and forth in the press so right now, here it is...Conan, it's yours. See you in five years, buddy."