“I’ve always viewed life as material for a movie,” The Squid and the Whale director Noah Baumbach says to N.Y. Times profiler Deborah Solomon, and thereby flashing his hard-core obsessive filmmaker credentials. “I am sure there will be a backlash against The Squid and the Whale,” he also says, “but I am hoping it doesn’t kick in for at least three months. I do like having books on my shelves. I do value that life. I love Bob Dylan. And I love Philip Roth. I am reading ‘The Professor of Desire’ now, which is about the great Philip Roth struggle between being the good boy and being the bad boy. I have to remind myself to sit because my joints ache…I am the sort of person who is too anxious to sit down.” This settles it…anyone who frets and suffers and can’t sit down gets my vote.

That two-year Touchstone production deal that has been handed to Rod Lurie and his Battle Plan Productions in the wake of Disney-owned ABC bouncing him off the new ABC hit series Commander in Chief, which Lurie created, in order to make way for the new creative honcho Steven Bochco….well, I’m told it’s pretty rich. Like $4 million rich. It’s face-saving tribute money. Lurie created the show, wrote it, ran the whole ship…and then (a) “creative differences” arose or (b) Lurie was overworked or (c) Disney/ABC felt the show could be better sculpted…whatever. They got Lurie to be cool and gracious about bowing out by handing him the $4 million as a kind of we-love-and-respect-you- but-we-need-you-to-go-away payoff. Lurie, an adult and a good hermano, will keep his exec producer credit and move on to other things, etc., and life will go on.

Doctor: [Your wife is] not so sick, my lord, as she is troubled with thick-coming fancies that keep her from her rest.

Husband: Cure her of that! Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased? Pluck from the memory of a rooted sorrow, raze out the written troubles of the brain and, with some sweet oblivious antidote, cleanse the stuffed bosom of the perilous stuff which weighs upon the heart?

Doctor: Therein the patient must minister to himself.

There’s one curious statistic in Sharon Waxman’s N.Y. Times story about a new online study finding that Hollywood is “being jilted” by young males who are being lured away by video games and other digital activities. The readings said that guys-under-25 saw “24 percent fewer movies this summer than they did in the summer of 2003, when the same study was conducted. The drop in moviegoing was much smaller for women and for other age groups.” The study contacted 2000 people and used “a random, nationally representative sample of moviegoers who were queried online in August.” The odd bit comes at the end of a graph that says the study, conducted by a Los Angeles-based online reserach group called OTX, “echoed a finding about television viewing that was much disputed two years ago, when Nielsen Media Research charted a sharp decline in prime-time ratings among men ages 18 to 34. That finding, which delineated the growing fragmentation of the viewing audience…attributed to a rise in alternate activities, like video games.” And yet at the end of this graph, Waxman reports that “a year later, the viewership returned.” And what does that mean? (I’m lost.) Otherwise, the OTX study obviously reenforces last spring-and-summer’s concerns about a dwindling movie audience. It also seems to dispute the reported “new thinking” among studio execs, as reported by L.A. Times‘ Claudia Eller and John Horn not too long ago, that the fault, dear Brutus, lies in our crappy movies and not in the public’s changing entertainment habits.

There’s no rejoicing in Mudville over the weekend’s box-office tallies, and particularly Wallace & Gromit‘s $4.2 million on Friday, which indicates a $13 or $14 million weekend…along those lines. Industry spitballers looked at the tracking and figured it would do a lot better…in the vicinity of at least $20 million, if not higher. And something is certainly wrong with the world when Flightplan, a movie that loses its grip in the final act and is now in its third week (having opened 9.23), nudges out In Her Shoes, $3.1 million to $3 million per Friday’s reported estimates. It looks like Shoes is heading for a $10 or $11 million weekend at best, and possibly a bit lower, which is a good $5 or $6 million lower than what handicappers were projecting. And Two for the Money, that piece-of-shit Al Pacino deranged-mentor gambling movie, registers the same $3 million Friday haul as In Her Shoes…? Nice going, U.S. ticket buyers. Don’t consider quality…just watch the TV ads and go with your gut. Hey!