Jeffrey Wells

About 90 minutes ago I was soaking up some WGAW strike vibes at the Paramount Pictures’ Bronson gate. Some guy brought along a boom box and was playing some Motown, and some of the female picketers were doing a slow slinky shing-a-ling as they held their signs aloft and went “whoo-hoo!” to the cars that kept driving by and honking out their support. (Screenwriter Larry Karaszewski was calling it “the funky Bronson gate.”) Here are two slow-loading videos — one of the Bronson gang, the other of the picketers at the main Paramount gate.

Bronson gate WGA picketers — Wednesday, 11.7.07, 12:35 pm

With all the late-night talk shows doing re-runs because of the WGA strike, movie marketers are losing out on the big promotional bumps that come from celebrities visiting Leno, Letterman, O’Brien, Ferguson and Ellen DeGeneres. No way you can’t call that a signficant hurt factor. But the Oprah Winfrey show isn’t affected by the strike (it’s technically regarded as a news show, like Larry King‘s) and so the attention she’ll be giving to The Great Debaters (Weinstein Co., 12.25), which she’s one of the producers of, will be unaffected also. I’ve been told that research screenings have been “through the roof.” One report said that the number of people checking the top two boxes (very good or excellent) were in the low 90s, and that the “definite recommend” factor was 84%.

Here’s a clip of N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott and Richard Roeper going gah-gah for No Country for Old Men. Scott mentions at the end that Josh Brolin shoots a dog in both American Gangster (Denzel Washington‘s) and No Country (a pit bull that has it coming).

A 2 and 1/2 minute trailer for Bryan Singer‘s Valkyrie has been attached to prints of Lions for Lambs that have gone to theatres for debut this Friday. UA spokesperson Dennis Rice says the trailer will have its broadcast debut tomorrow (after being teased tonight) on Access Hollywood and online tomorrow at Yahoo’s trailer site.

There’s also a Valkyrie featurette on Apple.com today.

In any event, a U.K. projectionist has watched the trailer for the WWII thriller, which concerns a German military plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler with Tom Cruise playing ringleader Col. Claus von Stauffenberg, and say it’s “fairly gripping.” He adds no one in the cast is speaking with a German accent a la Marlon Brando in The Young Lions. “All of the [mostly British] cast members use their own accents,” he says. “Kenneth Branagh sounds English. And Cruise just sounds American, although maybe he’s softened it a bit to sound more English.”

“Another theory I’ve been working on is the ‘murder your darlings’ [one] that says that the film everyone thinks is the frontrunner, or the film a publicist or studio tries to position as the frontrunner, is the one that is doomed to lose the big prize,” Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone wrote earlier today.

Wildebeest herd in Masai Mara National Reserve, Kenya

“Murder your darlings — if you want a movie to win best pic, don’t position it as the frontrunner going into Oscar season unless it’s Schindler’s List, Titanic or Return of the King.”

In other words, Atonement — seen in some quarters as a kind of front-runner (i.e., not precisely “the” front-runner but a close approximation) from the end of the Toronto Film Festival until late October — is either slipping or slipped. Which is fine because now it doesn’t have to shoulder any kind of pseudo-front-runner status. Now it can kick back and gallop along with the rest of the panting wildebeests making their way across the plains of Kenya. But watch out for those lions!

Variety‘s Dave McNary wrote this morning about screenwriter Larry Karaszewski (The People Vs. Larry Flynt, Ed Wood) having “made a major fashion statement” outside Paramount Studios with a red T-shirt emblazoned with a reprint of a recent LA Times story headlined: “Viacom profit shoots up 80%.”

Fine, very clever, typical Karaszewski move . But why didn’t McNary’s story have a photo of Karaszewski’s actual T-shirt (i.e., with Karaszewksi wearing it) instead of a fake Photoshop simulation, and a simulation of a female T-shirt at that? If Karaszewski writes or calls, I’ll meet him tomorrow (or whenever) down at the Paramount gate with my camera and I’ll show Dave McNary how it’s done.

I don’t care that the real Richie Roberts has accuracy beefs with American Gangster. I’m glad Ridley Scott and Steve Zallian made stuff up…good! Russell Crowe plays the former detective in Scott’s film. Two days ago Roberts told N.Y. Post writer Susannah Cahalan that the film “whitewashes” the facts about former Harlem drug kingpin Frank Lucas and misrepresents aspects of Roberts’ life. Fine!

No surprise that the trailer for Denzel Washington‘s The Great Debaters (Weinstein Co., 12.25) is smart, engaging, and clearly presented. Since there’s no question about Washington (Antwone Fisher) being an above-average director it’ll be no surprise if it turns out to be a good or exceptional film.

But let’s be honest and admit it’ll be a surprise if this inspirational true-life story delivers any surprises. We all know the inspirational movie template. We’ve seen these films time and again (i.e., gifted teacher inspires underdogs to think and perform like winners, resulting in a third-act competition against a heavily-favored championship team), and we all know how they play. But I want to see it anyway. Washington obviously knows about the familiarity syndrome, and you have to figure he’s done one or two things differently.

The only present-tense surprise is that there’s a Great Debaters website, which is virtually unheard of for a Weinstein Co. release. I’m guessing Washington paid for it himself.

Catching a 2 pm plane back to Los Angeles. Back on it sometime late this evening, I suppose.

With the exception of four or five X-factor types, every person I spoke to at the No Country for Old Men premiere party on Sunday night said they loved it and called it beautifully made and superbly acted and all, but 90% also said “except for the ending, which I’m not sure about.”

That’s it, I said to myself. If supposedly hip industry types are saying this over and over, it’s inescapable. It’s going to be a huge refrain among the heartland ticket-buyers when No Country opens on 11.21.

The discomfort boils down to a certain level of passivity and inactivity on the part of the good-guy lawman played by Tommy Lee Jones. (That’s keeping things vague enough, I think.) And so I’ve come up with a way to process this so viewers won’t necessarily have this problem when they see it. And all you have to do to understand is to be vaguely familiar with Thornton Wilder‘s “Our Town.”

Jones sheriff character (his full name is “Ed Tom Bell”) has more or less the same function as the narrator in “Our Town.” Nobody complains about the narrator not falling in love or dying or being outside the action of “Our Town” when they see the play, and so nobody should complain about Jones’ character doing the same. He’s a Greek chorus. Is everyone getting this?

Yes, he’s a character in the film — standing around and sizing things up and signing checks and talking to this and that person (including his beautiful wife, played by Tess Harper) and riding a horse in one scene — but he’s not in the story. Period. So no bitching when he doesn’t do the righteous manly sheriff thing at the end of the film because that’s not the deal.

The Reeler’s Stu Van Airsdale has done some reporting on the WGA picket line in Manhattan. He got some fairly good quotes from Peter Hedges, Scott Coffey, Adam Brooks, etc. He meant to send it along earlier but, he says, “it’s still pretty fresh.”

I chose to attend Sunday night’s No Country for Old Men premiere and after-party rather than attend the Mighty Heart screening and Angelina Jolie q & a that happened at the same time at Paramount studios. I wish I could’ve done both because I respect Jolie’s performance as Mariane Pearl, the widow of murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, and would have liked to take it in again.

Roughly 450 people attended, according to a Paramount publicist who wrote me about it yesterday. The q & a between Jolie and Maxim critic and Envelope columnist Pete Hammond ended with a standing ovation. Angelina joined the after-reception and did the old schmooze-around.

Hammond handled the questions in his usual smooth way, she said. And yet Hammond told me later on he briefly had one of those mild freakouts that everyone has from time to time when interviewing a celebrity in front of a big crowd when you “go up” the way actors do when they forget their lines. These things happen to the best of ’em. I’ve been there. You’re trying to listen to what the actor or actress is saying, and at the same time unable to figure your next question.

The discussion was on the candid side. Jolie was “emotional and sometime teary-eyed as she shared details of her relationship with Mariane and the pressure of all those involved with the film that the movie tried to honor,” the publicist wrote. “She spoke of the improvisational-style on the set and shared that the climatic, emotional scene in which Mariane hears of Daniel’s fate was the first take and all the actors were crying as it happened.”