I got 11 right in this Ann Coulter-Adolf Hitler similar-quote quiz. Coulter’s prose style is a little simpler and less turgid than Hitler’s, and she doesn’t go for antiquated debating-society political terms like “bourgeoisie”.

There was a slight rigamarole in late April (or was it early May?) when Variety reported that Woody Allen‘s Scoop would be released in the late summer and one of my Focus Features pallies kept saying, “That’s news to us.” Anyway, it’s official: Allen’s comedy, a London-based runaround about a young reporter (Scarlett Johansson) and an older, somewhat suspicious man of wealth and schwing (Hugh Jackman), will open on 7.28 in the top 100 markets, at a running time of 96 minutes.

L.A. air-hockey fools will probably want to jot this down: Eric Anderson‘s The Way of the Puck, which I wrote about with affection and enthusiasm a little over two months ago, is being screened at the Speakeasy on Sunday, 6.25, at 7 pm and 9 pm. The address is 4607 Prospect Avenue in Los Feliz. (What exactly is a “Mt. Hollywood Underground”?) The admission is $7 general, $5 for members.

Two late-inning observations should be be kept in mind as you’re reading Claudia Eller‘s summary of “The Man Who Heard Voices: Or, How M. Night Shyamalan Risked His Career on a Fairy Tale,” which appears in today’s (6.23) L.A. Times.

The book, which Gotham will be putting in stores on 7.20, is Night’s traumatic first-hand memoir (as told to Sports Illustrated writer Michael Bamberger) about how his longtime relationship with Disney execs and particuarly production president Nina Jacobson went south last year over Jacobson’s blunt criticisms of Shyamalan’s script of Lady in the Water (Warner Bros., 7.21). At a 2.15.05 dinner attended by Shyamalan, Jacobson and Disney distribution chief Dick Cook at a Philadelphia restaurant called Lacroix, Jacobson reportedly said to the director, “You said [the script] was funny — I didn’t laugh. You’re going to let a critic get attacked? They’ll kill you for that. Your part’s too big — you’ll get killed again. What’s with the names? Scrunt? Narf? Tartutic? Not working, don’t get it, not buying it, not getting it…not working.” The two aftermath thoughts are (a) Shyamalan’s confession to Jacobson during a March ’06 breakfast meeting at the Hotel Bel-Air that Shyamalan “had realized that ‘it wasn’t Nina’s fault that she didn’t get the original Lady script, it was Night’s fault'”, and (b) a comment that Jacobson passes along to Eller about “the inherent difficulties of the ‘patron-artist’ relationship”, to wit: “Not seeing eye to eye on a particular piece of material doesn’t have to be the end of a relationship. It may not always be easy to have an honest exchange, but in order to have a Hollywood relationship more closely approximate a real relationship, you have to have a genuine back and forth of the good and the bad. Different people have different ideas about respect. For us, being honest is the greatest show of respect for a filmmaker.” I know how much it hurts to have people tell you that what you’ve written isn’t any good, but very few people in this town practice a policy of honesty between colleagues, as Jacobson advocates. Hers is a rare, mature, right-on way of going about it. The final perspective will be at hand when WB starts showing Water to critics, probably within the next couple of weeks.

There’s a relatively new introduction piece on the official WB Superman Returns site…funny.

The Devil Wears Prada costars Stanley Tucci to Anne Hathaway: “What do you expect? You’re flinging those melons around like it’s harvest season.” Flinging! A couple more items like this and “Page Six” is out of the doghouse.

Whoa, whoa…Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest runs two hours and 35 minutes, give or take? A cartwheeling fluffball mascara-and-attitude romp should run a minimum of three hours, I should think. If I were Jerry Bruckheimer I would add an overture, an intermission, and entr’acte and exit music.

“I’m beginning to wonder if Pirates is not only going to blow everything out of the water this year, but if it’s going to take the three-day record from Spiderman. I didn’t go to the screening last night, but I sent my girlfriend and she reported that it’s not only incredible, but that it had the junket audience applauding as well. If Jerry Bruckheimer, Gore Verbinksi and Johnny Depp can do that to the hard-core critics and cynics, think what it’s going to do for the civilians.” — Journalist colleague. Wells reply: You’re probably right about Pirates blowing everything out of the water, etc., but junket journalists have never been my idea of “hard-core”. They talk very cynically in private, but they tend to be generous in the presence of talent and publicists, so I don’t know how much stock you can put in their applaudings.

The point of this David Poland piece seems to be that the traction-penetration effects of marketing campaigns aren’t showing up in surveys until…what?…two weeks before the nationwide release date (or is it one week?), so anyone who runs tracking data on a film three weeks out is misunderstanding the way things work and creating unfair havoc in the process. I certainly experienced the downside of this when I ran those negative early-bird numbers on The Break-Up, and I’d like to think I’ve learned something from this. But of course, Poland has to get ugly by referring to a wave of “journalists” who are fixating on tracking…the quote marks meaning, of course, that people who’ve reported tracking aren’t journalists, and that “they are proving that a small amount of information is truly a dangerous thing,” he says. Well, I try to double-check tracking figures at all times. Three companies provide regular data, and it’s out there, and I’m certainly not passing along anything that any distributor or marketing outfit hasn’t already read or heard. I’m presuming that the readership knows that tracking data, like any political survey, always follows by a few days what people are ostensibly thinking and feeling. It is never in front — it always chases. And sentiments about upcoming movies can turn on a dime, as we’ve recently seen. That said, are we supposed to regard the consistently lower-than-they-should-be numbers for Superman Returns as complete poppycock? Sometimes tracking tells the wrong story and sometimes it doesn’t. One company reported this morning that Adam Sandler ‘s Click has a 44% definite interest and that Pirates of the Caribean: Dead Man’s Chest has a 68%, and it means absolutely nothing that Superman Returns has a 41% definite interest? The fact that SR‘s definite interest tallies have never crested 50% almost certainly means something. You can’t say it’s absolute total balderdash. Somewhere out there people seem to be saying to themselves, “Who needs another Superman film, especially one that wants to pretend it’s 1983 and that Richard Pryor‘s Superman film never existed.” What matters, of course, is what will happen when people finally see it starting next Wednesday. We all know it’s going to “open”, but who knows what the vox populi shakedown will be? To me Superman Returns is a moving and very personal film, but a journalist pal who’s seen it told me this morning he’as flabbergasted by the rave reviews. I’m hoping he’ll be in the minority, but let’s see.

Nobody ever seems to destroy anything in low-budget films, but expensive stuff often gets blown up and inferno’ed in big-budget franchise pics. Is there anyone in the world who finds these spectacles exciting in any way, shape or form? Is there a metaphor I’m missing that action fans have understood all along? That beautiful yellow whatever-it-was sports car that was blown off the ground inside the gates of Vatican City in Mission: Impossible III…an absolute flat-liner. Like all explosions. Filmmakers keep using them, I assume, because they’re a kind of visual punctuation. This would be fine if fireballs were the equivalent of a simple period, but they’re not — they’re exclamation points, which only bad writers resort to. All I know after reading this item is that I’m now a lot less interested in seeing Casino Royale.

Billy Wilder was born 100 years ago today in a village now known as Sucha Beskidzka, Poland. He left us four years and three months ago, or roughly seven months after the best book about him — Cameron Crowe‘s “Conversations with Wilder” — hit the book stores.

You could argue that the last “real” Billy Wilder film — The Fortune Cookie — came out 40 years ago, and that the guy’s a relic by 2006 measurings. But all that goes away when you sit down and watch his better films. Not the stodgy ones…not Love in the Afternoon or The Spirit of St. Louis (a personal soft spot) or The Front Page but (I have to remind myself there are hundreds if not thousands who’ve never heard these titles) Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, Some Like It Hot, Stalag 17, Sabrina, One, Two, Three. Here are three dialogue excerpts — from Sunset Boulevard , The Apartment, and One, Two, Three. Which reminds me…where’s that DVD of Ace in the Hole?

Former N.Y. Daily news critic Jami Bernard‘s “Incredible Shrinking Critic” blog (which I really shouldn’t be linking to, given her alliance with a certain hammerhead), and a video piece she’s recently thrown together about how life feels now without a portfolio.