Some editor…actually probably at least a couple of editors at the L.A. Times thought the older beardo on the left with the Dodgers baseball cap was Steven Spielberg. My initial thought was that he looks like Art Linson. I’m presuming that when Matt Donnelly, author of the “Ministry of Gossip” story about Spielberg-Bay-LaBeouf-Fox, first saw the layout he said to himself, “Oh, Jesus God no…no!”

6.21, 8:30 am Update: The error was corrected last night around 11:15 pm. The Times‘ editor that “this post originally contained a picture mislabeled by the photo service as a shot of Steven Spielberg. It now contains a picture that’s definitely Spielberg.” Oh, I see….and if the photo service had sent the L.A. Times a photo of a giraffe and said it was Joel Cohen, the Times would just run it?

The only Warren Beatty project I know of that could reasonably deploy his talents as a director, producer, writer and star would be his Howard Hughes property. Because he’s too old to play Dick Tracy again…right? A septugenarian comic-book hero sounds like lunacy. TheWrap and Variety reported late this afternoon that a Beatty pic with the 74 year-old hyphenate doing all the above will roll later this year for Paramount. No title, no announced subject…keep ’em guessing.

Warren Beatty, Brad Grey at 2007 Golden Globes after-party. (Pic taken by yours truly.)

Deadline‘s Michael Fleming reported last night that the project was a comedy.

Variety‘s Justin Kroll wrote that Beatty “[has] been shopping the script for the past few weeks.” “Warren’s script is quintessentially Beatty, elegantly written and wonderfully entertaining,” Paramount honcho Brad Grey said in a statement. “It is our privilege to have one of the great artists in the history of the film industry come home to Paramount.”

Update: Former hotshot entertainment business reporter Anita Busch posted the following last night, a bit after 8 pm:

The gist is that (a) Grey owed Beatty for something, and now he’s paid him back with this deal, and that (b) Beatty, in Busch’s view, is some kind of coward because, she implies, he once refused to acknowledge and/or righteously respond to something heinous. It’s a very cryptic and teasing comment. Busch seems to be saying, “I remember and I know, and if you had my memory and knowledge of the dirty underbelly of things in this town, you would also. But I’ll never get specific because I’m out of the game.”

Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone, Boxoffice.com’s Phil Contrino and I recorded Oscar Poker #37 this morning. We spoke of Drive and The Green Hornet and The Broken Tower and I-forget-what-else…but we covered eight or nine topics. Here’s a non-iTunes, stand-alone link. The intro-exit music is from a Bruce Springsteen + Clarence Clemons track that Sasha hasn’t yet identified.

This is a minor deal, but the first time I heard the line “we had creative differences…I was creative, he was different” was from Nicholas Meyer. I heard him say it at a party at Michael Phillips‘ home in 1985. He was referring to a dispute he’d had about a Spanish Civil War movie with the late Stephen J. Friedman, whom he described as “that horrible man.” Does the line go back earlier? Did it come from someone else?

Hey, that’s an idea for a discussion thread. What people have you come to know in the film industry whom you would honestly and without reservation describe as “horrible”? People who give off a vibe that is so poisoned and mustard-gassy and spiritually deflated and dismissive of human potential that they could truly be described as having passed along almost nothing in the way of warmth or charity or wisdom or comfort or laughter — people who walk around with steam-blasts of rage and resentment hissing out of their ears?

Last week at the Landmark I happened to see this trailer for Michel Leclerc‘s The Names of Love (2.24). t played right after the trailer for Crazy Stupid Love, and it seemed right away that the French film is more relaxed, less formulaic, more mature, funnier, more natural and less agitated.

Directed and co-written by Leclerc (along with Bya Kismi), The Names of Love is “a semi-biographical film documenting the life of a young woman who uses sex as a weapon to influence right-wing individuals and conservative Muslims.”

Bahia Benmahmoud (Sara Forestier), a young left-wing activist, sleeps with her political opponents in order to manipulate them to her cause until she finds her match in Arthur Martin (Jacques Gamblin).

Love won three Cesar Awards earlier this year, including best female lead for Forestier and best writing. It opens stateside on 6.24.

I’ve been saying for years that many Saul Bass one-sheets have seemed “better” than the films they’ve promoted. But Bass doesn’t have a monopoly on this type of thing. One example is the one-sheet for Don Siegel‘s Baby Face Nelson (’57) which, I feel, is more successful as a piece of high-impact design than the film is on its own terms. I don’t think Siegel’s gangster film stinks — it’s good pulpy fun, but the intense poster promises more than Mickey Rooney and Carolyn Jones deliver.

I feel roughly the same way about the poster for Robert Altman‘s 3 Women, which is reflected to some extent in the jacket art for the forthcoming Criterion Bluray. I’ve seen 3 Women only once, but it just doesn’t “do” anything. Sand and windstorms and Sissy Spacek and Janice Rule and Shelley Duvall and empty swimming pools with tiled mosaic floors and gunshots and more windstorms and sand.

I’ve worshipped the poster for The Man With The Golden Arm all my life, but I’ve only been able to watch Otto Preminger‘s 1955 drama once or twice. Bass’s one-sheet for Preminger’s Such Good Friends (’71) is a more extreme example. The line-drawing artwork is Matisse-like in its simplicity, but the movie is all but unwatchable.

So what other posters are significantly more engrossing or profound or pleasurable or more satisfying on some level than the films they’ve been created to promote?

The LA Film Festival information page for James Franco ‘s The Broken Tower, a black-and-white drama about gay poet Hart Crane, says that “this program contains mature content…no one 17 and under will be admitted.” That’s one way of confirming that the film contains a graphic gay sex scene. It shows tonight at 8 pm at LA LIVE Regal.

I still don’t have a ticket and no one I’ve appealed to has responded, so I guess my only shot is to wait in the rush line and hope for the best.

The Broken Tower had its very first screening at Boston College’s Robsham Theater on 4.15.11. Here’s a brief video clip of a post-screening chat between Franco and Paul Mariani, whose 1999 biography, The Broken Tower: The Life of Hart Crane, was the basis of Franco’s film. Mariani consulted on the screenplay and had a cameo in the movie as photographer Alfred Stieglitz.

In a January 2011 interview, Franco told EW‘s Keith Staskiewicz that his decision to portray gay characters in three recent films (Milk, Howl and The Broken Tower) and an announced intention to write direct a biopic about gay actor Sal Mineo is more about the quality of the material than any personal inclinations on his part.

Franco nonetheless ended the interview by saying to Staskiewicz, “You know what? Maybe I’m just gay.”

In a recently-posted Vanity Fair article about Crane, Franco wrote the following:

“[Crane’s] poetry was damn difficult, and he knew it. The poems are thick with metaphor, high diction, and compulsive allusions to myth. Not for Crane the accessible American idiom of a William Carlos Williams. He loved Whitman and filled his poetry with references to the modern era, but he wrote more like an Elizabethan. Nobody got it. People still don’t get it, at least not without effort.

Crane’s life was “about being unappreciated, gay, a romantic in an age of modernism. Crane loved movies, and actually likened himself to young adu’s tramp, downtrodden but skillfully using (and disposing of) the mechanisms of the industrial age. Poetry is not a form that is easily adaptable to film, and Crane’s is denser than most. The trip from the page to the screen is a long one. But what is most vital in Crane is the way he lived and his devotion to his work. And it is what I have tried to capture on film nearly 80 years after Crane’s death.”

This 24-minute clip is a couple of days old. I only just got around to it late last night. But this is my idea of stirring gladiatorial combat between a highly intelligent, fast-footed leftie comedian-commentator and an opportunistic, stonewall-minded rightwing TV newsman.

42West announced the full cast of Woody Allen‘s The Bop Decameron, which will begin shooting in Rome on 7.11. And it’s hard to imagine that a film costarring Jesse Eisenberg, Greta Gerwig, Penelope Cruz, Roberto Benigni, Woody Allen, Alec Baldwin, Judy Davis and Ellen Page could be a problem. Costars include Ornella Muti and Alison Pill (i.e., Zelda Fitzgerald in Midnight in Paris). I’ll be expecting at least one scene featuring Eisenberg or Gerwig buzzing around on a scooter.

Warner Bros. marketers are trying to sell the notion that Glenn Ficarra and John Requa‘s Crazy Stupid Love (Warner Bros., 7.29) is another Steve Carell formula comedy in the vein of The 40 Year-Old Virgin (i.e., insecure, socially clumsy, sexually-inexperienced schmuck tries to make out with girls). But I’m told the film is more of a La Ronde-type ensemble piece with all kinds of criss-crossing fates, and that it’s nicely written by animated-feature and Fred Claus screenwriter Dan Fogelman. We’ll see.

It turns out that in the separation of Megan Fox from Transformers 3, Michael Bay, who ostensibly fired her, was only Charlie Partanna. According to a statement made by Bay to London’s Daily Mail, the whacking of Fox was ordered by none other than Don Corrado Prizzi — i.e., Steven Spielberg, the film’s executive producer.

Fox, who costarred in the first two Transformer pics, had been cast in Transformers 3. But in September 2009, shortly before production began, she gave an interview to Wonderland, a British rag, in which she said Bay was like Hitler on his sets. Bay told a Daily Mail reporter, “You know the Hitler thing? Steven [Spielberg] said, fire her right now.”