Slate‘s Edward Jay Epstein has written a blunt down-to-it piece about why Paramount honcho Brad Grey really bought DreamWorks, “according to people at Viacom, Paramount’s corporate owner.” When he took over in early ’05, Grey, who’d been handed a mandate by Viacom’s Sumner Redstone “to totally revamp moviemaking at Paramount,” got rid of just about every holdover project from the Sherry Lansing-Jonathan Dolgen (like that Secret Life of Walter Mitty film with Owen Wilson) along with the execs who had nurtured them. And yet Grey so vigorously swept the decks that Paramount, as of last summer, was looking at very little product for ’06 and ’07. So Grey bought DreamWorks in large part in order to make up for this vacancy, since DreamWorks has a good number of projects in various stages of development. There’s more to it, but Epstein’s story can be summed up in these two graphs: #1: “The true brilliance of Paramount’s high-profile acquisition of DreamWorks is that it will serve to divert from, if not totally hide, Paramount’s own failure to assemble a full slate of films for 2006-2007. Compared with the public-relations cost of revealing that managerial meltdown, the $1.6 billion price tag for DreamWorks must have seemed a bargain. And #2: “When [the acquisition] deal closes, Paramount will essentially become, at least for the next two years, DreamWorks. Of course, many, if not all, of the people who work at DreamWorks will lose their jobs, and the people at Paramount who created the near-meltdown will take credit for the films they’ve acquired. But, as they say, that’s show business.”

I haven’t heard anything about the Munich Academy screening at Wilshire and La Peer last night (sorry…I’m in New York now and running around) but I’m waiting with bated breath and will probably have something to report later on.

King Kong and Titanic both run over three hours and both have experienced an unspectacular first week at the box-office…fine. But take no notice of anyone trying to draw further further analogies.

Slate‘s Seth Stevenson has a riff about Spike Jonze’s “Pardon Our Dust” Gap ad. As noted in this column a while back, there are two versions of this ad — the much cooler Jonze-approved version that never played on TV or anywhere else, and the totally malignant, deballed-by-Gap-marketing-execs version (linked on the Stevenson column page), which uses a musical cut called “Don’t Stand Still” instead of Edvard Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King,” a Stanley Kubrick-like scoring that Jonze used. A Gap spokesperson told Stevenson that the company “tried several variations” of the ad, blah, blad. The truth is that The Gap didn’t use Jonze’s version because they thought it was too much on its own wavelength. Translation: it scared them. Truth be told, Jonze’s version doesn’t really deal with, much less convey excitement about, the idea of a forthcoming renovation of the Gap stores. What it does is comically express a fierce loathing of the Gap brand (or, if you go with my impression, of all corporate chain stores everywhere). Stevenson asks, “Did Gap not see the possibilities [in using the Jonze ad]? Were they too scared to go for broke?” The answer is that certain Gap execs saw exactly what Jonze’s spot was about and did what was necessary to eliminate the subversive element…simple.

The Producers star Nathan Lane had some fun with Brokeback Mountain on the Today show last Friday morning, as reported in Lloyd Grove’s “Lowdown” in the N.Y. Daily News. “It’s really when [Heath Ledger] says, ‘This thing gets hold of us the wrong time, the wrong place, we’re dead,'” Lane quipped in front of a reportedly giggling Katie Couric. “I thought, ‘What do you mean, like the A&P? You’re in the middle of nowhere! Get a ranch with the guy! Stop torturing these two poor women and get a room! What’s the problem?'” Gee…none, I guess. The more I think about it, the more I realize Nathan is so right. Those Wyoming gay guys who told New York Times feature writer Guy Trebay that being openly gay in Big Sky country is still a bit of a problem these days…what do they know? One imagines that the ghost of Matthew Shepard, the gay Wyoming student who was beaten to death near Laramie in October 1998, would probably agree with the guys quoted in the Trebay piece (I mean, if you could talk to him in a seance)…but maybe his ghost would be full of shit too. You could argue that the guys whom Trebay spoke to are exaggerating and that open-range homophobia has gotten less dangerous in recent years. But even if you stand with Lane and throw that piece out the window, conditions were certainly threatening for Big Sky gay guys in the rabidly homophobic late ’60s or early ’70s, which is when (as I recall) Ledger’s character mutters his “we’re dead” speech. “Much like the West and the democratic ideal of the cowboy, which helped create the myth of the American frontier and the freedoms it was meant to represent, the movies create fantasies of liberation that don’t always correspond to the world off-screen,” Times film critic Manohla Dargis comments in a 12.18 Times article. “In Brokeback Mountain, Jack and Ennis cling to the myth of the cowboy because it offers a freedom that only really exists when they cling to each other, a freedom that remains contingent even now.” Wait a minute… I see a great Lane vs. Dargis “he said/she said” piece that could run in the Times next weekend. Guys?

Reader Patrick Cassano thinks I’m “dead-on about women turning Brokeback Mountain into a financial hit. My married friend and I go to the movies all the time, and his wife usually stays at home with the kids. She burned out on going to the movies with us long ago after the bloody trifecta of True Romance, Pulp Fiction and Natural Born Killers. She hasn’t been to a non-kid movie in 9 years. But the other day she asked about this Brokeback Mountain movie on the internet (also new to her) and was intrigued, and told me she’d like to make plans to go see it when it comes out. She said it looked like a good romantic story, the kind of movie she would like to see, and if it happened to involve two men so be it. Here’s a woman who sees movies only on DVD going far, far out of her way to see Brokeback. I think it speaks volumes.”

Pre-Xmas family doings in Boston and Connecticut and no broadband to dip into last night (i.e., Sunday evening)…so “Elsewhere Live” fell by the wayside. Once you start a twice-weekly routine you have to stick to it or people will lose interest, so me bad. I’ll be running an interview with Werner Herzog on Thursday from my Brooklyn abode.

King Kong had a good weekend ($50.1 million) and has pulled down an estimated $66.2 million since it opened on 12.14. It’s had a successful start and will continue to be successful, etc. Why, then, do audience pulse rates so far seem so profoundly tepid? Why are readers saying over and over again, “I expected huge lines but we got right in wihout a wait,” etc.? It’s Christmas and King Kong is showing and people are going…fine. But if you’re in high school and it’s lunch time and you go to the cafeteria and there are three meals on the menu — meat loaf, coq au vin and hot dogs — and everyone orders the meat loaf, does that mean students are doing cartwheels in their hearts about how the meat loaf tastes? We’re talking King Meat Loaf here. Dull appetizers and overcooked vegetables, but the main order covered in hot gravy and fun to eat, mmmm-good!…but all you can do is shrug when your friends ask how it was.