“The Sopranos [has] sustained itself through sex, violence and some very effective, at times Luis Bunuel-ish black humor,” says N.Y. Press and Newark Star-Ledger critic Matt Zoller Seitz on his “A House Next Door” blog. “More a curdled social satire than a straightforward gangster story, it is arguably the most cynical long-running series of all time, a show in which nearly every scene depicts characters being confronted with the choice between selfish expediency and a higher good, and invariably choosing Option A. From Tony and Johnny Sack (Vincent Curatola) to Carmela and the kids to the FBI agents investigating the family and the various politicians and business people swirling around them, Chase’s characters rarely make choices out of altruism, a sense of cosmic rightness or simple kindness.”

“I am a liberal. And I make no apologies for it. Hell, I’m proud of it. Now fire away.” So says George Clooney in a Huffington Post piece that went up Monday, 3.13…which reads, of course, like an elaboration of his Oscar night comments after winning the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Syriana. My favorite passage: “In 2003 a lot of us were saying, where is the link between Saddam and bin Laden? What does Iraq have to do with 9/11? We knew it was bullshit. Which is why it drives me crazy to hear all these Democrats saying, ‘We were misled.’ It makes me want to shout, ‘Fuck you, you weren’t misled. You were afraid of being called unpatriotic.'”

All this hot copy generated by Sharon Stone about Basic Instinct 2 (Columbia, 3.31)…daring nude scene this, totally full frontal that, etc. Example: “By the time the film is released, I will be 48 and I wanted to do the nudity in a way that’s quite brazen. I wanted [Catherine Trammell] to be very masculine, like a man in a steam room, and I wanted the audience to have a moment where they realize she’s naked and then realize she’s a fortysomething woman and naked.” Whatever…barring a major God miracle, this movie is certain to be a Michael Caton Jones ickfest from start fo finish. What’s interesting is to compare these two trailers for it — an ample-nudity gymnastic-sweat trailer out of England that makes it look like pure tedium, and a much more sophisticated and classier preview now sitting on the Sony/Columbia website, one that suggests it might be half-tolerable due to the supporting player contributions of Charlotte Rampling and David Thewlis, both of whom are ignored by the cheeseball British trailer. That said, I have no particular interest in David Morrisey as Stone’s costar in this piece of shite. He’s a good British actor…knows his way around an odd line or a tough scene…but he’s not Stone’s sexy equal. His eyes are too small and his pale freckly face is a bit soft and puffy. Sorry, mate, but nope.

A very astute and satisfying analysis of last Sunday’s Sopranos opener (you know…the big shocker with Tony taking a bullet in the gut) by MSNBC’s Andy Denhart.

Another “web rumor” that Variety‘s Nicole LaPorte dismissed or made light of in her 2.5.06 piece (“Showbiz rumors tapped in web: online gossip goes haywire”) that condemned the willingness of showbiz websites to run unchecked rumors and thereby creating all kinds of havoc…another one of these merit-less rumors appears to have a little merit after all. That is, if today’s L.A. Times story about a possible merger between the ICM and Endeavor talent agencies, written by Claire Hoffman, is to be given any weight. The gist is that Endeavor partner Patrick Whitesell and ICM co-owner Suhail Rizvi — who’ve been close since the early ’80s when they were teenaged tennis-playing pals in Iowa Falls, Iowa — have been talking about following the pattern of recent Hollywood mergers (Paramount buying DreamWorks, Disney buying Pixar, the WB and UPN networks blending to form the CW) and trying to sculpt a deal by which ICM and Endeavor could become one combined super-agency. “In one oft-repeated scenario, the buttoned-down ICM could buy Endeavor, which has cultivated a renegade image that attracts younger and more cutting-edge talent,” Hoffman writes. “Or ICM could buy UTA, which is strong in television. Or William Morris, eager to smack down the A-list powerhouse CAA, could buy Endeavor or UTA. Or Endeavor and UTA could merge.” Spokespersons are denying or clamming up, but “in private, many in Hollywood say that talks are underway and that big changes may be on the horizon” for these firms.
I’m hearing that West Side Story song in my head…”Who knows? Could be…it’s only just out of reach, down the block, on a beach, under a tree.” The non-musical Laporte wrote on 2.5 about a rumor that “ICM was in talks to buy Endeavor…ICM chairman Jeff Berg and Endeavor partner Ari Emmanuel worked hard to tamp the flames…Berg even wrote a staff memo denouncing the rumor…the memo, naturally, wound up on Defamer.”

I’m told that another reason Universal president Ron Meyer is looking to pair his distribution and marketing vp Marc Schmuger with David Linde in the studio chairman (i.e., production chief) job vacated by Stacey Snider is that Schmuger’s talent relationships aren’t so much under-nourished as strained with certain producers. Particularly with Imagine co-chief Brian Grazer, who “was leaned on by Schmuger to release Cinderella Man last summer rather than last fall, and it didn’t work out and the result is that Grazer feels Schmuger basically ruined the reception for his movie, so there’s no love there.”

Everyone has now seen the first episode of the new season of The Sopranos, which means they finally know about the Big Thing that happens at the end. And sure enough, there’s a guy who’s found a way to be pissed off about that episode #4 sound clip I ran on 3.8.06 because it had James Gandolfini’s voice on it. “If I hadn’t trusted your fucking asshole self, I would honestly be wondering if Soprano producer David Chase didn’t have the balls to kill Tony,” writes Josh Massey of Atlanta. “Now there’s no mystery between this week and next. So this all boils down to a very basic ‘fuck you.'” To which I replied, “There are 12 episodes this year and then the final eight airing in ’07, and you think maybe David Chase might ‘have the balls’ to zotz Tony Soprano and put him in the ground within the first two or three episodes? What kind of Vietnamese heroin are you injecting, how much a bag, and what’s your dealer’s Vietnamese cell phone #?”

The ten year-old ties between Paramount Pictures chairman Brad Grey and indicted wire-tapper and onetime private investigator Anthony Pellicano are a bit clearer and more detailed due to a Page One story in Monday’s N.Y. Times, written by David Halbfinger and Allison Hope Weiner. The story is mainly about past acrimonious relations between (a) Grey, a big-time talent manager before being hired to run Paramount, (b) his former client Garry Shandling (whom Grey managed and also collected a fat fee for producing Shandling’s “The Larry Sanders Show”) and (c) former actress Linda Doucett, who briefly co-starred on “Sanders,” was engaged to Shandling in the early to mid ’90s and fell into (or maneuvered herself into) a position to collect money from the show, Grey and Shandling over this and that touchy matter. The long and the short, as indicated by the Times story, is that Grey may have hired Pellicano (or had his attorney Bert Fields hire him) to lean on Doucett over matters of money and testimony. (Read the Times story for the details.) Grey has been interviewed by the FBI and testified before the grand jury investigating Pellicano, and his lawyer “has said Grey has been repeatedly assured that he was not a subject or a target of the investigation.” In a “terse” statement released Sunday afternoon by Paramount spokesperson Janet Hill, Grey told the Times that he had been “casually acquainted with Anthony Pellicano” but “had no ‘relationship’ with Pellicano until my attorney, Bert Fields, hired him in the Garry Shandling lawsuit.” He also said that “the fact remains that I had no knowledge of any illegal activity he may have conducted.” Fields “also has denied knowing of Mr. Pellicano’s illicit activities,” the story said.

Sharon Waxman is reporting in the N.Y. Times that Universal president Ron Meyer is about to appoint the studio’s distribution and marketing vp Marc Schmuger to fill the departing Stacey Snider‘s job as president of production…half of it, that is. Schmuger, presumed by Meyer to be not fully up to speed on relationships with the talent community, may wind up sharing the new job, according to speculation, with either Focus Features co-president David Linde or Sci-Fi Channel and USA Network topper Bonnie Hammer. L.A. Times reporters Lorenza Munoz and Claudia Eller are hearing it’s basically Schmuger-Linde… forget Hammer. They’re also reporting that “Meyer’s first choice for the job was Universal’s former co-production head Scott Stuber. But Stuber, who has a rich producer’s deal at the studio with partner Mary Parent, was not interested in returning to the executive ranks.”

Hooray for Dave Cullen and the Ultimate Brokeback Forum for landing a story in Monday’s N.Y. Times about the full-age ad they paid to run in Daily Variety last Friday (3.10) lamenting Brokeback Mountain‘s having lost the Best Picture Oscar to Crash. The UBF-ers raised more than $24,000 — the ad cost $15,435. Variety president-publisher Charles C. Koones told Times writer Stuart Elliott that Brokeback “really touched a chord with certain audiences…there are those in Hollywood who feel it was robbed.”

Time magazine and writer Lev Grossman have stuck it to the Wachowski’s V for Vendetta (Warner Bros., 3.17) in their story called “The Madman in the Mask“. Grossman begins by asking if it’s “possible for a major Hollywood studio to make a $50 million movie in which the hero is a terrorist? A terrorist who appears wearing the dynamite waistcoat of a suicide bomber, and who utters the line — from beneath a full-face wooden mask that he never takes off — ‘Blowing up a building can change the world’? Starring Natalie Portman, shaved as bald as Demi Moore in G.I. Jane? These are not rhetorical questions. V for Vendetta is that movie, and it is the most bizarre Hollywood production you will see (or refuse to see) this year. It’s the kind of film that makes you ask questions like, Who thought this was a good idea?” And yet V is going to do good business next weekend. It’s been tracking pretty well all along, and it’s expected to earn between $25 and $30 million, and probably closer to the latter figure.

I have a Rob Marshall question…well, actually a comment …that applies to Clint Eastwood‘s imminent filming of Red Sun, Black Sand, the companion piece to his Iwo Jima drama Flags of Our Fathers. Sun will cover the same conflict but tell the Japanese-soldier side of things with Ken Watanabe playing General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, who led the battle against American troops for 40 days, according to Variety. The comment…okay, a jibe…concerns a statement Marshall made after his Memoirs of a Geisha opened late last year, which was that the reason he didn’t shoot it in Japanese is that he can’t speak the language and therefore couldn’t direct actors speaking it. And yet the Variety story says that Eastwood will shoot Red Sun, Black Sand entirely in Japanese. I’ll bet dollars-to-donuts Eastwood doesn’t speak any more Japanese than Marshall does — the difference is that one director seems to trust himself (and his audience) a bit more than the other. Iris Yamashita has written the script, based on a story by her and Oscar-winner Paul Haggis, who adapted Flags of our Fathers. That American vantage-point story is now in post-production and is expected to come out before Red Sun, Black Sand. Paramount will release the films domestically, while Warner Bros. International will distribute overseas. In Japan, Red Sun will be titled Letters from Iwo Jima. Eastwood will begin filming it next week in Los Angeles, but also has plans to shoot exteriors on Iwo Jima.