There’s a clip in the trailer for Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbatos’ Inside Deep Throat Inside Deep Throat (Universal, 2.11) quoting a guy involved with the distribution of this infamous 1972 porn film saying, “We have so much cash, we don’t even count it — we weigh it!” This alone supports my long-held suspicion that this will be one very cool documentary…fascinating, hilarious, whatever.

With Miramax’s Bob and Harvey Weinstein only two or three weeks away from signing final divorce papers with Disney, there’s a rumble (about two or three weeks old, apparently) about Mouse execs offering Warner Independent Pictures chief Mark Gill the job of running Miramax after the brothers depart. It’s a flakey rumor, apparently…but not entirely flakey, as as the Miramax gig (presuming Gill has even discussed it) might carry a certain allure, given WIP’s so-far mixed track record. As he was just starting the WIP gig in August ’03, Gill told the Hollywood Reporter‘s Stephen Galloway, “The biggest pitfall is if you choose and market the wrong movies — then you’re dead. The second danger would be to find yourself working for people who are not fully committed, [but] I am not worried about that. They are willing to give this (division) that fullness of time — three or four years, to be sure, and maybe more. I know I have got three years (contractually) to make it work — and I intend to do it in a third of that time.”

To the list of presumed front-runners for the Best Foreign Film Oscar(Cronicas, Downfall, Les Choristes, The Sea Inside, House of Flying Daggers), I’m told I should add Darrell Roodt’s Yesterday, a South African drama about a struggling AIDS-afflicted couple with a young daughter. (“Yesterday” is the name of the mother character, played by Leleti Khumalo.) I missed seeing it on Friday night (1.14) because the screening coincided with my son’s flight to Boston from Long Beach Airport. HBO had something to do with making (or financing) it, although they aren’t mentioned on the IMDB, but I’m told the film may open theatrically in February.

There’s this extremely weird, slightly satiric, observational fly-on-the-wall piece by Christian Moerk in Sunday’s New York Times about the first meeting between Paramount Pictures’ recently hired film division chairman and chief executive Brad Grey and the studio’s “entire senior-executive phalanx” in an executive boardroom last January 6th. There’s no angle or point to it — it’s not some thoughtfully considered New Yorker or New York Observer-type thing. It just says to the reader, “Our guy was told about this big meeting, and here are the details he was given…ten days after the fact.” The three funniest bits are (a) Moerk’s stating for the record that Grey “declined to comment for this article,” (b) reporting that Grey is “likely to focus on completing titles like Charlotte’s Web” — a big family-friendly animated thing, I gather — for which he’d like to snag the voice-acting talents of Tom Cruise and Julia Roberts, and (c) Moerk’s passing along the view that “nobody [expects] the new boss to replace senior staff or production deals immediately.” Hah!