Gary Sanchez, a former NFL football player from Paraguay, is the financial backer and “spiritual leader” of Will Ferrell and Adam McKay‘s new production company…what? McKay has told Variety ‘s Chris Gardner that Sanchez “provides moral support and finances outside entertainment.” Meaning what..that Sanchez conducts spiritual counselling sessions with candles and incense burning? He sends expensive prostitutes to Ferrell and McKay’s homes on occasion? He makes them feel better about themselves by playing touch football with them on his back lawn? This is easily the strangest Variety production-shingle story (Sanchez Prods. is starting a first-look deal with Paramount Vantage) I’ve read all year.

“Is it possible to be a great star without appearing in very many great movies?,” asks N.Y. Times DVD guy David Kehr in a brief riff on Clark Gable before getting into the subject of Warner Home Video’s new Gable box set. Gable, says Kehr, “is one of the few major box office stars of the 1930’s who might produce a glimmer of recognition from a contemporary audience, but after Gone With the Wind and perhaps It Happened One Night, most people would be stuck naming many more of his films.” That’s because Gable generally made run-of-the-mill programmers. I have a better example of this never-so-few syndrome — Steve McQueen. He made 23 or 24 films between 1960 and 1980, and his mythical reputation arose out of only five films, one of which — 1962’s Hell Is for Heroes — the public is barely aware of. His rep really boils down to four quintessential performances — Vin in The Magnificent Seven , “Cooler King” Hilts The Great Escape, Jake Holman in The Sand Pebbles and Frank, the taciturn San Francisco detective who drove a mean Mustang fastback and occasionally smiled at Jacqueline Bisset in Bullitt…and that’s all. Everything else he did was marginal, not bad, pretty good, so-so. There are several others whose esteem rests upon two or three or four films. Look at Willem Dafoe — Platoon, The Last Temptation of Christ and “Clark” in Clear and Present Danger…that’s it. Tom Berenger and Charlie Sheen have only Platoon. Most actors, I would venture to say, are lucky to star in only one incandescent classic film….just the way of the draw. Life is short, chances are few, count your blessings.

Several fashion industry veterans appraise and praise The Devil Wears Prada in this byline-free piece in last Sunday’s (6/25) Guardian‘s Sunday Observer. Includes a statement about the film from a spokesperson for Vogue editor Anna Wintour (the real-life Miranda Priestly) that I hadn’t seen before: “She thought it was very entertaining. It was satire. What’s not to like?’

Despite the understandably relieved announcement by Superman Returns naysayer David Poland that five big-name critics have joined him in panning Bryan Singer‘s film (the San Francisco Chronicle‘s Mick LaSalle makes six), the Rotten Tomatoes ratings are a bit more than 75% positive — 72% cream-of-the-crop, 77% overall — so there’s no turning of the tide. You just have seven sourpusses standing off in the corner along with the seven dwarves, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and the seven deadly sins…no biggie. Enthusiastic thumbs-uppers include N.Y. Daily News critic Jack Matthews, Newsweek‘s David Ansen (who says “from the start of this gorgeously crafted epic, you can feel that Singer has real love and respect for the most foursquare comics superhero of them all”), Time‘s Richard Corliss, Entertainment Weekly‘s Owen Gleiberman (enthusing that it “gets tighter and fiercer as it goes along…Singer does his grandest work to date”), the Atlanta Constitution‘s Eleanor Ringel Gillespie and so on.

So the word is out among the wicked-wordsmith film critics to rip into Superman Returns…right? Anthony Lane doesn’t exactly kill it, but he basically dismisses it the way Manohla did with his typical snide flavorings.

“Jesus of Nazareth spent 40 days in the desert. By comparison, Superman of Hollywood languished almost 20 years in development hell. Those years apparently raised the bar fearsomely high. Last seen larking about on the big screen in the 1987 dud Superman IV, the Man of Steel has been resurrected in a leaden new film not only to fight for truth, justice and the American way, but also to give Mel Gibson’s passion a run for his box-office money. Where once the superhero flew up, up and away, he now flies down, down, down, sent from above to save mankind from its sins and what looked like another bummer summer.” — N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis on Superman Returns. Websters.com defines “leaden” as (1) heavy and inert, (2) listless; sluggish, 3), lacking liveliness or sparkle; dull, (4) downcast; depressed: leaden spirits. Movies are all about the eye and soul of the beholder, but trust me, leaden this film is not.

“If a movie is good, consumers will go see it. Otherwise, they’ll choose to save gas and money and stay home and watch video-on-demand, cable or satellite, or a DVD. Or maybe they’ll just play a video game or listen to Ipods because most new movies suck big-time.” — a Nikki Finke summary in today’s Deadline Hollywood Daily of Nielsen Analytics’ and The Movie Advisory Board’s 100-page “Modern Movie Experience” study, described as “a report on moviegoer behavior today, possibilities for tomorrow, and the impact of digital technologies on the movie-value chain.”

A guy sent me a script this afternoon of Michael Cahill ‘s The King of California, a Michael Douglas-Evan Rachel Wood movie that Michael London and Alexander Payne are producing along with about ten others. The IMDB says it’s about “an unstable dad (Douglas) who after getting out of a mental institution tries to convince his daughter (Wood) that there’s Spanish gold buried somewhere under suburbia.” Under a Costco store, actually.

Michael Douglas

The guy who e-mailed it to me reads scripts all the time and claims “it’s one of the best I’ve have read in a while.” On top of the basic plot, which reminds me for some reason of Kurosawa’s Dodeska Den, it’s “a story about the history of California and the commercialism of the U.S…very quirky and sweet-natured with a lot to say. If the movie comes out as good as the script look for Douglas to get nominated for an Academy Award. He hasn’t had a role this great in years.” He says the film doesn’t have distribution because London and Payne didn’t want any interference from anyone while it was being shot. King wrapped a few weeks ago, and London-Payne, according to this guy, “are said to be so impressed with the assemblage that they might start start up with screenings for distributors as soon as possible so it might come out this year. If not, I assume it would go to Sundance.” I’ll read it tonight or tomorrow and render a verdict. I called London twice today and no callback yet. Has anyone else heard anything? Cahill has zip IMDB credits besides this one thing.

Four Billy Wilder Screenwriting Tips: (a) The more subtle and elegant you are in hiding your plot points, the better you are as a writer; (b) If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act; (c) Let the audience add up two plus two — they’ll love you forever; and (d) The event that occurs at the second act curtain triggers the end of the movie.

A friend who’s seen Woody Allen‘s Scoop…naaah, let it go. But his comments weren’t entirely in synch with those of New York magazine writer Logan Hill, who declares in the new issue that Allen’s two films with Scarlett Johansson — not just Match Point but also his forthcoming Scoop (Focus Features, 7.28) — “have been his best in years.”

Woody Allen, Scarlett Johansson in posed shot for New York magazine.

Hill calls it “an old-school Allen comedy — a murder mystery solved by an aging magician (guess who) and a na√É∆í√ǬØve young blonde (Johansson) — peppered with vintage-Woody one-liners. On how he maintains his svelte figure, his character responds, ‘I never gain an ounce. My anxiety acts like aerobics.’ And then there’s his religious biography: ‘I was born into the Hebrews, but as I got older, I converted to narcissism.'”

Here’s a reasonable-sounding analysis piece by Hollywood Wiretap‘s Josh Young that explains the Paramount/ DreamWorks “trojan horse” scenario, which boils down to Paramount chairman Brad Grey and president Gail Berman getting capped not too far down the road and DreamWorks chief Stacey Snider being brought in to run the whole Paramount/DreamWorks shebang. (I was told about this very scenario this morning before reading Young’s piece. I was told, in fact, that (a) “it’s gonna happen” and (b) “if it weren’t an embarassment [for Tom Freston], they’d be gone already.”) Young quotes “a top talent manager” calling this scenario “a reverse acquisition”, adding that “Paramount is (in) turnaround and they are being picked up by DreamWorks…the writing is on the wall.” The reasons for the rumored change, Young explains, are that (a) Snider could handle the top job herself and probably better than Grey and Berman have done so far, and (b) DreamWorks already runs marketing at Paramount so why not harmonize and universalize the attitude and direction of Dreamamount? Obviously the press is being nudged into running this speculation by enemies of Grey and Berman, but who are they and what are their precise motives?

The Islander guys — i.e., the creators and cast of Ian McCrudden and Thomas Hildreth’s Maine-based drama prior to its L.A. Film Festival showing on Sunday evening, 6.25 (l. to r.): composer Billy Mallory, star-producer Hildreth, producer Forrest Murray, director-cowriter McCrudden, co-producer Melissa Davis, costar Amy Jo Johnson

(a) I met the great Eliott Gould, the greatest Phillip Marlowe of all time, at a SAG party in Westwood last night, and I was struck by how amazingly thin he’s become since I last saw him as Reuben Tishkoff in Ocean’s 12….Gould actually looks a good deal thinner that he does in this photo — somewhere between this and his semi-emaciated Long Goodbye appearance…he said he’s taken the weight off because “I’ve accepted supervision”…I said there will obviously have to be some kind of explanation in Ocean’s 13 to explain his changed appearance, and Gould said “Yeah, there will be”, and I asked what it will be, and he said, “See the movie”; (b) Islander rep Jeff Dowd, Hollywood Reporter columnist Anne Thompson, L.A. Film Festival director of programming Rachel Rosen at Sunday’s steamed lobster, melted butter, cole slaw and potatoes party for Islander — Sunday, 6.2.06, 5:55 pm; (c) Marc and Marla Halperin of Magic Lantern, at same lobster-bib party.