Day: February 9, 2006

The biggest-selling Oscar book that will never be written because it can’t be: Academy Award Vote Totals. Oscar know-it-all and Maxim critic Pete Hammond says he’s long wanted to write this but the Academy never reveals the numbers and they supposedly trash-can them after seven years so forget it. If the totals were known and published, the book would never stop selling. If there are any retired Price Waterhouse guys out there who wrote down the totals from years past and kept copies and want to talk about enhancing their savings account by getting into some Mark Felt parking-garage action, get in touch.

The biggest Best Picture embarassment wins of all time? I think it’s a three-way tie between The Greatest Show on Earth, Around the World in 80 Days and Driving Miss Daisy, with Oliver! and Chicago being the first runners-up. Which others…??

I can run links to photos of Jack Black in Nacho Libre also. It’s the new film from Napoleon Dynamite‘s Jared Hess and Paramount Pictures, due in early June.

I walked right into this one, but some low-life stole my clothes out of a dryer in a low-rent laundromat on Haley Street yesterday evening while I was back at the Santa Barbara Hotel. A loss of roughly $175, give or take, and nobody’s fault but mine.

Walk the Line director James Mangold was supposed to attend the Santa Barbara Film Festival today and do a chit-chat at the Lobero, but he had to cancel due to preparation for a pilot in three weeks time and being in the throes of casting. It was always a long shot to begin with, apparently. Too bad…

That late ’50s noir-whodunit formerly known as Truth, Justice and American Way, about the death of the TV-series Superman guy George Reeves (Ben Affleck) due to a gunshot wound in the head, has been retitled Hollywoodland, according to the IMDB. A 1.26 report by “Stax” in IGN Film Force said that Allen Coulter-directed film, which will be distribbed by Focus Features (even though it was finished a good while ago and still doesn’t have release date on its IMDB page),
had to surrender the Truth, Justice title because Warner Bros., the producer of the Superman movies (including Bryan Singer’s bewbie coming out in June), was threatening to sue Focus if they didn’t stop using the Man of Steel’s motto. Stax, who’s been writing about this film for eons and has good sources on it, said Hollywoodland is being scored and will be released “later this year.” I was talking to a film director pal about this movie last weekend, and he said he’s “heard so little about it” that he’s starting to wonder, etc….if you catch my drift. The Hollywood- land costars are Adrien Brody, Diane Lane, Robin Tunney, Bob Hoskins and the great Dash Mihok. (Seriously…Mihok is a really fine actor.)

What’s the worst (i.e., most irritating sounding) movie title ever? The Chicago Tribune‘s Mark Caro is asking on his “Pop Machine” blog.

Keep your eyes peeled for a forthcoming N.Y. Times Lewis Beale story on Cuba Gooding, Jr., and how he’s trying to put his career back together. Word on the street is that Gooding is being extremely frank with anyone of a serious bent who wants to know exactly how he screwed things up. I’ll tell you how he screwed things up. Snow Dogs and Boat Trip is how.

David Carr, the N.Y. Times “Bagger” blogger, says Paramount Picture’s calorically-challenged president Gail Berman (I’m sorry but c’mon, this is a distinctive characteristic…you can’t say it isn’t) may be toast after all, and that Endeavor’s Ari Emanuel may be coming in to take up Berman’s slack. Carr is calling Paramount topper Brad Grey‘s defense of Berman in that 2.6 Laura Holson Times piece “remarkably wan,” and saying that “two people” he’s spoken to have “suggested that Emanuel will be brought in to help run the place in Ms. Berman’s stead.” Strange and prejudiced and as un-p.c. as this may sound, I suspect that deep, deep down (and I mean down the elevator in a coal mine), Berman’s c.c. factor is not a political plus for her. Face it — there are next to no c.c. stand-outs in the film industry, and I think we all recognize there’s a reason behind this.

Everyone’s heard by now about Valley of the Wolves Iraq, the Turkish anti-American film that shows American soldiers in Iraq “crashing a wedding and pumping a little boy full of lead in front of his mother,” and “killing dozens of innocent people with random machine gun fire, shooting the groom in the head, and dragging those left alive to Abu Ghraib prison…where a Jewish doctor cuts out their organs, which he sells to rich people in New York, London and Tel Aviv,” according to a Feb. 2 Associated Press story by Benjamin Harvey. Wolves, essentially a Turkish variation on a mid ’80s Rambo film, opened in Turkey last Friday. “It feeds off the increasingly negative feelings many Turks harbor toward Americans,” Harvey’s story reports, and is “the latest in a new genre of popular culture that demonizes the U.S. It comes on the heels of a novel called ‘Metal Storm’ about a war between Turkey and the U.S., which has been a best seller for months.” What isn’t as well known is that Gary Busey and Billy Zane gave walk-on performances in the film, and that they’re going to take some heat from righties for helping to perpetrate anti-U.S. propaganda. A connected film guy from Manhattan (I’d give him credit but he might get pissed if I ran his name) confides he is “now hearing on the record that Busey signed on [to act in the film] without seeing a script and left for Turkey all in 48 hours. I am also told off the record that Zane did see a script but that the brutal stuff was added when he got to the shoot.” I’m told Wolves will screen at the Berlin Film Festival next week, but what about a U.S. screening for media types like myself?

Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter about an encounter he had with Capote star Philip Seymour Hoffman at the magazine’s pre-Golden Globes party at the Sunset Tower (i.e., the old Argyle): “Hoffman…is a terribly serious young man, and in an ill-fated attempt to lighten the moment, I told him that I too do a pretty mean Truman Capote. While he stood there, I did my own impersonation, including the high-pitched, fey, lisping voice and the waving of a crooked finger while I adjusted my eyeglasses. He gave me a pissed-off look and just walked away.”

A good Mark Lisanti/Defamer slash about Teri Hatcher‘s see- through outfit at Wednesday night’s Grammy Awards: ‘We did a few twirls around to make sure you weren’t seeing anything you weren’t supposed to be seeing,’ Hatcher told reporters. Unfortunately, the thing you really ‘weren√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢√É‚Äû√ɬ¥t supposed to be seeing’ — an aging, nighttime soap star clawing at the spotlight in an outfit that says, ‘Hey, everyone! Look at me! I’m in my underwear! Isn’t that outrageous?!’ — was still clearly visible to the naked eye.”