Bill Maher and Keith Olbmerann‘s “Republican membrane man” routine happened last night. I’m also a huge fan of Maher’s analogy riff (delivered last summer) about Republican voters and the Casey Anthony jury. I laughed out loud (rare for me) at Maher’s riff about how Republicans are so insanely anti-Obama that if he said “I like your smile” they’d shoot themselves in the face.

I had one immediate reaction to last night’s Wrap report by Joshua Weinstein that Warren Beatty and Paramount Pictures have parted company over his Howard Hughes movie, and that Arnon Milchan‘s New Regency will now finance the film. That reaction, which I muttered to myself as I sat in a Brooklyn club listening to Starfucker, was “hey…Peter Bart predicted this!”

Three months ago Bart privately remarked to a journalist friend that Beatty’s Hughes movie probably won’t happen at Paramount. “But it was just announced,” I said. “With [Paramount chief] Brad Grey talking about what a delight the script is.” My friend replied, “I’m just telling you what he said.” Bart was probably alluding to the Beatty issues that have arisen when he’s made films before — costly exactitude, extra expenses, complications, disputes, slower progress than anticipated and all the other things that occur when a filmmaker is ultra-careful and particular.

Two or three weeks later I asked Bart about this when I ran into him at an event. He shrugged and smiled and said he might have been mistaken, and the subject was dropped. But Bart was a Paramount production exec in the ’60s and ’70s (and later worked in a similar capacity at MGM and Lorimar) and dealt with Beatty directly, and to some extent obviously knew whereof he spoke.

“Warren’s script is quintessential Beatty, elegantly written and wonderfully entertaining,” Grey said last June when the Hughes-Paramount deal was announced. “It is our privilege to have one of the great artists in the history of the film industry come home to Paramount.”

Everyone keeps repeating that the Hughes movie” is expected to go into production later this year.” I’ll believe it when it happens.

A N.Y. Times/CBS News poll has President Obama with a 43% approval rating, which “is significantly higher than Jimmy Carter, who had an approval rating of 31 percent at a similar time in his presidency.” Jeff Zeleny and Megan Thee-Brean‘s story adds that “Ronald Reagan had an approval of 46 percent” at this particular time in 1983 “and the elder George Bush was at 70 percent” at this juncture in 1991.

This Reno air show disaster video prompts every other person to ask the same thing of him/herself. Is it better to know your death is imminent and to prepare for it over days or weeks or months (which would naturally entail the usual fears and trepidations) or to slam into oblivion in the space of a few seconds?

A World War II-era P-51 Mustang crashed yesterday into “a box area in front of” a Reno viewing stand filled with spectators. Three have been reported dead, including the pilot, Jimmy Leeward . Over 50 injured, body parts and chaos. “Mechanical difficulties may have caused the crash,” officials are saying. That or Leeward suffered some kind of blackout or seizure and lost control, which sounds unlikely given his reported excellent health and decades of flying experience.

According to Moviefone’s Sharon Knolle (which is to say an Entertainment Weekly interview that she’s quoting), Brad Pitt agreed to do Se7en only if the ending with Gwynneth Paltrow‘s head in the box would definitely be stuck to, and if his Detective Mills character would absolutely shoot Kevin Spacey in revenge.

“I will do it on one condition: The head stays in the box,” Pitt told Knolle. “Put in the contract that the head stays in the box. And he’s got to shoot the killer in the end. He doesn’t do the ‘right’ thing, he does the thing of passion.”

But iffy test screening reactions led to “some execs” getting cold feet. “They go, ‘You know, he would be much more heroic if he didn’t shoot John Doe,” Pitt recalled. “And it’s too unsettling with the head in the box. We think maybe if it was the dog’s head in the box…'”

Se7en was a New Line release, so the execs who mostly likely suggested a dog’s head instead of Paltrow’s were….? If I had to guess I’d say it was probably former New Line toppers Bob Shaye or Michael Lynne. Or perhaps exec producers Arnold and Anne Kopelson.

My Porter Air flight leaves for Newark in 110 minutes and I haven’t fully packed yet, or even gotten fully dressed. That’s how I roll. At least the airport is less than a mile away. 3:45 pm Update: I made it with time to spare. I’m currently sitting in the Porter lounge and, uhm, typing this on the laptop. 5:20 pm Update: Just landed at Newark.

Poor Warrior under-performed last weekend, and odds aren’t with it this weekend either. The pre-opening word wasn’t just that director-writer Gavin O’Connor had made a near-great sports film, but that it was Best Picture material and that Tom Hardy might be singled out for some awards action. (I fully agreed on this last point.) So why did it fizzle? My guess it that the title scared women off — it suggested a film that would be all about muscle and blood and machismo. Other theories?

In their latest Oscar Talk, presumably recorded a couple of days ago, Kris Tapley and Anne Thompson review the stand-out Toronto Film Festival films. I’m sympathizing with Thompson’s admission that she missed this and that, etc. Toronto is a tough beat if you’re going to file a lot of stuff every day.

Updated: As I listened on my Macbook Pro this morning I could’ve sworn I heard a passage in which they both flatly declare that Brad Pitt‘s Moneyball performance — the charismatic pinnacle of his career, vulnerable and angry and charming and delivered with such relaxed movie-star assurance — isn’t an Oscar-friendly, likely-Best-Actor thing. Tapley has since said no, he doesn’t feel that way and he’s a Brad fan…fine. But Thompson did say it, and she couldn’t be more wrong.

A “bruised-but-sweet flip side to Once‘s dreamy love song, The Swell Season — a handsome black-and-white film — sensitively captures frictions between characters who continue to love and respect each other. Performance footage may be briefer than some in the audience expect, but what there is is choice, capturing the contrasting kinds of vulnerability — Marketa Irglova‘s shy but gutsy, Glen Hansard‘s eloquently raw — that make the pair distinctive.” — from John DeFore‘s 4.22.11 THR Tribeca Film Festival review.

Roughly 13 months ago I took a couple of Manhattan street shots of director-screenwriter David Keopp filming Premium Rush, a bicycle messenger drama costarring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Michael Shannon and Dania Ramirez. Even back then it had a locked-in January release of 1.13.12, and it still does.

Check out this 8.20.11 N.Y. Times piece by Elizabeth Lesley Stevens about an allegation by novelist Joe Quirk that his book, “The Ultimate Rush,” about “an adrenaline-fueled messenger who tears through the city on rollerblades as he tries to deliver a mysterious package,” was/is the basis of Koepp’s script in some kind of serpentine way.

When Bill Clinton left office we had no wars and a nice budget surplus. After two terms with a corporate-kowtowing faux-Texas yokel we were in two hopeless wars and had $4 trillion added to the national debt plus a laissez-faire deregulatory wink-wink attitude towards corporate profiteering that led to the big crash of ’08.

And then Obama came in on a wave of hope, pushed through a relatively weak, watered-down health care bill, killed Osama bin Laden but failed to show balls in his dealings with the Republicans’ radical Tea Party wing. He’s now seen as a fairly weak go-alonger — a center-right corporate boot-licker.

And Americans, on top of detecting this lack of steel, are worried that our ponzi-scheme, funny-money economy will collapse yet again. So there’s actually a real chance that a majority may decide next year that the solution is Rick Perry, another Texas hee-haw, faux-religious primitive who mainlines corporate funding and makes even Bush look relatively moderate. Despite the absolute certainty that Perry will bring back the same old corporate-favoring, climate-change-denying policies and then some. Obama is dispiriting, yes, but Perry is suicide. And we might actually go there.

What a comedown from the elation of the 11.4.08 election. What an overall drag. If only Obama had a little of that scrappy, manipulative, bullying-S.O.B spirit of Lyndon Johnson. If only Eliot Spitzer had kept his dick in his pants or at least had been smarter about it.

My one ray of hope is that in a mano e mano, Obama-vs.-Perry race, voters will realize that Perry is just too nuts. Maybe. In a 9.15 Hollywood Reporter piece, Tina Daunt quotes a disappointed-in-Obama Hollywood executive as follows: “If Obama is suddenly in a competitive race with Bachmann or Perry, I’ll max out so fast it will make your head spin.”

Nicholas Winding Refn‘s Drive starts today with a 94% Rotten Tomatoes rating, making it easily the best-reviewed opener. Boxoffice.com is projecting a $12.7 million weekend tally in 2886 theatres, or $4400 per situation. The cool people are onboard, but the styrofoam ADD crowd isn’t…or not yet. Justin Lin‘s Fast Five, a synthetic, bloated car flick that’s unfit to wipe Drive‘s boots, took in $86,198,765 in 3644 theatres when it opened last April…go figure.

Here’s my one and only issue with Drive, apart from my general aversion to artery-slashing. It has two brilliant, super-cool, high-threat driving scenes. (It also has a nice happy-drive moment along the L.A. river bed plus a brief nighttime chase scene plus a movie-set stunt crash sequence.) My issue is that I wanted more visceral thrills . For a movie with this title, I would have preferred three high-octane, acute-danger sequences instead of two. That’s my only beef.