“I am of the opinion that inner happiness is impossible without idleness. My ideal: to be idle and love a fat girl. For me, the greatest delight is to walk, or to sit and do nothing; my favorite occupation: to collect what is not needed (papers, bits of straw) and to do useless things.” — Anton Chekhov…who couldn’t have spent too many days collecting bits of straw and making love to cute fatties, given what I know it necessary to keep the creative waters flowing, and also considering the number of plays Chekhov wrote and the debts he had to satisfy.

A fellow movie columnist (reputable, “name” guy, works for big-city newspaper) wasn’t permitted to post this, so he sent it to me: “Just about every movie now gets a ‘director’s cut’ DVD, but I must admit I still almost sprung out of my seat when I received a package containing Bambi: The Director’s Cut. What really got me was the sticker: ‘Contains never-before-seen footage of the death of Bambi’s mother.’ Holy moley! The original Walt Disney film never showed this traumatic event (it was signaled by the sound of a gunshot) and yet this sequence is credited with sending generations of children into therapy. I was neither here nor there when I saw it as a kid, but when I re-saw the film as an adult in a crowded theater in Boston, I could hear high-pitched voices in the audience whimpering, ‘Where’s Bambi’s mommy?’, ‘What happened?’, ‘Did Bambi’s mother die?’ and ‘Will you ever die, Mommy?’. And yet it turns out that the first cut of Bambi included an entire extra minute involving the death of Bambi’s mom, and the reaction to it wasn’t conclusively negative. There were some who thought — and some modern-day psychiatrists on the featurette agree — that the scene was quite moving and poetic. As Dr. Robert Bleb of the University of Pennsylvania states: ‘Children who see this [version] now are likely to become less troubled than audiences of the past because what they see is so much less horrific than what those other children had only to imagine.’ I’ve seen it and I think he’s right. Here’s how it goes: As in the released version, Bambi and his mom are happily frolicking to celebrate the new spring when the mom senses the approach of Man and tells Bambi to run. The two of them sprint across a field, and as the camera stays on Bambi, a shot rings out. But this time there’s a quick cut back to Bambi’s mother, whose head jerks back as her body hits the ground, sending up a thin cloud of snow dust. (A faint trickle of blood is visible behind her.) She lies on the snow, her breath vaporizing in the air, and she whispers with her last breath, ‘Bambi.’ After the vapor of the mother’s last words dissipates and her eyes become shrouded with what look like white drapes, her deer spirit levitates out of her body with newly-sprouted wings slowly flapping her heavenward while Edward H. Plumb’s lush score swells to a crescendo. A trio of sweetly chirping bluebirds escorts her up to a thick layer of white puffy clouds, which the mom’s deer spirit passes through alone. On the other side, she is greeted by a large gathering of similar deer spirits, including one who maternally licks her on the head and says in a soft voice, ‘Welcome home.’ (Gulp…talk about the cycle of life.) Then the action returns to Bambi alone in the forest as seen in the original release, with him calling for his mommy until he is greeted by his father, the Great Prince. At the end, when Bambi has triumph- antly taken his father’s place, a superimposed picture of the mother appears in the upper-left corner of the frame, in the sky. She’s smiling down at Bambi, though if you look closely her head appears to be mounted on a wall. That Walt Disney was a cruel ironist. By the way, Happy April 1st.”

“I’m on the same page with you about Dallas, but when it comes to actual Texas work being lost, that’s a whole different story. I’m a sometimes-employed actor here [in Texas], and for a lot of us the news of the Dallas shutdown is devastating. There are a lot of crew members who need something like this. (I’ve seen bumper stickers posted around sets saying ‘Shoot J.R. in Dallas’, which were made up by the Dallas Film Commission). I hope that when Fox gets this film rolling again that they hire Betty Thomas to direct because she at least knows how to do a good parody/tribute.” — Alfred Ramirez, Fort Worth, TX.

Huge earnings for Ice Age: The Meltdown (20th Century Fox), the Carlos Saldanha-directed sequel to ’02’s Ice Age, which was co-directed by Saldanha and Chris Wedges. One projection has the animated family film earning $69.5 million for the weekend. (Another studio is projecting just over $70 million.) Inside Man (Universal) will be #2, with weekend totals projected at $16,754,000. ATL (Warner Bros.) will come in second with close to $14 million. V for Vendetta (Warner Bros.) is projected to earn about $6,518,000…obviously losing steam. Stay Alive, She’s The Man, The Shaggy Dog and Slither will most likely finish in fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth place. Sharon Stone‘s Basic Instinct, which opened in 1453 situations, will end up in ninth place with an estimated tally of $3,385,000…right down the toilet.

Were you happy, sad or indifferent about the Variety story two days ago (Thursday, 3.30) that the movie version of Dallas, which 20th Century Fox wanted to start shooting in May so it would be in theatres by November, had fallen apart due to the sudden depature of director Robert Luketic (Monster in Law)? I was personally delighted. Fox may find another director and the film might get made down the road, but there would be a heavy spiritual price all around. Exposure to a thing like this can give you soul cancer. The rule, of course, is that you have to chuckle at gaudy garbage movies or people will shake their heads and call you a sourpuss. To hell with these folks and all the prescription drugs in their bathroom cabinet. Anyone panting to see a Dallas movie has a void in their soul the size of the Houston Astrodome. And who would want to see John Travolta and that bizarre tennis-ball haircut of his trying to re-invigorate the spirit of J.R. Ewing? (I can hear his drawling Texas accent in my head.) Why did Luketic bolt? I’m told that Fox honchos were “shoving casting choices down his throat.” If this is true, I wonder which actor or actors were the deal-breakers? The names that had been kicking in the trades included Travolta, Jennifer Lopez (Sue Ellen Ewing), Luke Wilson (Bobby Ewing) and Shirley MacLaine (Ellie Ewing).

So Hal the coyote had a year of roaming the planet and living off the land, and then a week or so ago some New York City health services guy zapped him with a tranquilizer dart, and then Hal was caged, muzzled, bound up and whatnot. And now the poor guy’s dead…inert matter. Coyotoes are renowned for their exceptional survivor skills — they’re wily, adaptable, resourceful — and know more about the ins and outs of big city life than most humans. If Hal had never been caught he’d still be alive. We all know this. The metaphor is obvious. This is a movie. Somebody should step up and do it. I’ll pay to see it in a theatre, and I’ll buy the DVD.

A couple of weeks after I called director-screenwriter John Milius about that issue of seeing parallels between the Wolverines in his classic Red Dawn (1984) and the anti-American resistance in Iraq, he finally called back. I’ve been speaking to him off and on since the late ’80s or early ’90s. We danced around the question for a bit, but that’s often what talking to Milius is like — circling, veering in and out. He’s one of the greatest guys in the world to talk to about the psychology of war and military history. We eventually sashayed into the subject. “I’m one of the few people who think that the Iraq war is a good thing,” he said. “It’s not the goal of it [that’s bad], but the way it’s being conducted…conducted for the beneft of the Halliburton corporation, and the fact that there is no cohesive policy. The resistance in Irag is seen by militants as the Third Great Jihad. The first two happened in the seventh century and in the fifteenth century…but Americans don’t pay any attention to Islamic history.” We somehow got off Iraq and started in on the movie industry. “The people in Hollywood…I refer to them as the Westside Manchus. The reason kids are so fucked up today is becaus they’re prisoners of cool, and Hollywod is the epicenter of that…the ultimate prisoner of cool, prisoner of hip. If you go against the prevailing cool, it’s as if you’ve got bubonic plague.” What’s Milius working on these days? “A war movie, a Korean war movie for those 2929 guys,” he said. “Based on a true story…a couple of guys who get swept up in events…it’s War and Peace in Korea, about a couple of common G.I.s.” Back to the Wolverines and Iraqi resistance: “You can say they’re separated by tactics and they are, but terrible things happen in every war of resistance” he said. “In any rebellion, any resistance by partisans…it will be the same. I took Red Dawn mainly from stories of Russian resistance…the Russians fighting against the Nazi’s…all of those images in Red Dawn are out of World War II.” We strayed into the prime failing of the Bushies, which is that “they’re soft on white-collar crime. There’s a much greater danger to this country from white-collar crime than terrorism.” Back to Iraq and a thought that pointing out the differences between the tactics of Iraqi fighters and the Wolverines is “probably splitting hairs….look at the Roman occupation of Palestine, and the vicious resistance to the Romans. Desert Storm was a clean war. This is not that. Resistance wars are always costly and brutal and savage.”

I’m reluctant to get into this because I know how venting about weight makes me sound, but funny-guy Vince Vaughn looks too bulky in the trailer for The Breakup (Universal, 6.2). I was half focused on the premise, dialogue and jokes, and half trying to ignore a voice that wouldn’t stop saying, “Whoa…guy’s gotta hit the treadmill.” But I lost the battle and the “whoa” voice, in fact, kept getting louder and louder. Forget Vaughn’s Swingers physique — he hasn’t had that for ten years. The problem is that he looks heavier in this trailer than he did in The Wedding Crashers, in which he was close to the edge but okay. Vaughn can relax and be zen about who he is, but there’s a line at which a slightly gutty bear-like physicality tips over into the realm of “uh-oh…he’s gone too far.” The last time I felt this way about a big-name actor was when John Travolta showed up looking “like a bull walking around on his hind legs ” (my words in a Reel.com “Hollywood Confidential” column) in The General’s Daughter (1999).

(l.) Late ’90s — (r.) The Breakup

Being something of a talent-spotter, I agree with Anne Thompson‘s recommendation about Movie Marketing Madness. It’s a site about the latest scientific techniques to strengthen soil nutrients in water-depleted areas…a site about the business of selling movies, I mean…and it’s pretty damn good. The author is Chris Thilk, a 31 year-old Chicago-based writer and married guy with two kids. (I wrote earlier that Thilk is most likely single and lonely, since happy fulfilled guys don’t bang out blogs….not this time! Thilk has also never toiled in any ad agencies.)

The smartest thing that Business Week columnist Jon Fine says in his riff about New Line’s Snakes on a Plane (8.18) is “I can’t wait till this comes out…although on a certain level, I guess it already has.” Precisely. Snakes is the internet rumble about it…I’ve had lots of fun and laughed at a lot of hand-made songs and video spots…and I’m starting to think the hoopla has probably already peaked, in fact. (I told this to a Washington Post staffer who interviewed me for a Snakes piece yesterday morning — file it quickly!) Richard Williamson at Adfreak has suggested a headline for the final one-sheet, although he’s really suggesting an attitude: “You’ve read the title — why see the movie?” A certain snob know-it-all says the Snakes hoopla has been building for months (“since Comicon last summer”) and maybe it has, but by my sights it started to catch on only a couple of weeks ago. My son Jett (17) and Dylan (16) are only just starting to get wind of it, they told me last weekend, and they say their high-school friends in Brookline aren’t talking it up very much at all. Another week or two and the media will get bored, I guess, and then the Snakes thing will start to downshift…or will it? (Maybe not.) But the cynical view is that once the 2006 Summer of Hell begins it’ll be business as usual…one soul-suppressing, big-budget, heavily-branded film after another will open from early May and all through the hot months, and The Mob will run off the cliff like lemmings for each one, and then New Line will start in with the trailer and other aspects of the campaign in late June or July. I still say it would be smarter to get Snakes into theatres by June, say, rather than wait for August 18th to roll around. I’ve heard the estimates that the hard-core geek audience is only supposed to be worth $7 or $8 million dollars on opening weekend, but who’s not going to know about Snakes on a Plane two or three months from now? I’m just saying that four months and 20 days from now seems like a long time to wait.

There’s a boo-boo in Borys Kit‘s Hollywood Reporter story that’s partly about Stone Village Prods. having hired Bo Goldman to pen an adaptation of a forthcoming remake of Jules Dassin’s Rififi, which will star Al Pacino in the Jean Servais role. The piece names the director of the remake as “Walt” Becker. Referred to in the story as Pacino’s collaborator on Sea of Love and City Hall, the guy’s actual name is Harold Becker. Walt Becker, an actual guy, directed Van Wilder.

“Page Six” says in a lead item today that “embattled Paramount chief Brad Grey‘s days seem to be numbered” and that “speculation on a possible replacement for him is running rampant.” Okay, maybe…but does anyone really think Viacom president and CEO Tom Freston and the Paramount board are going to jettison Grey because federal prosecutors are rattling their sabers about some wiretapping mucky-muck that went on back in the ’90s when Grey was a talent manager, and because reporters are writing stories about this? LA Indie‘s Ross Johnson believes that upper-level executives relish wrestling matches of this sort, and that the pressure from the Pellicano case may actually strengthen the bond between Grey and Freston, who hired him. But all bets are off if prosecutors get the goods on Grey. “If the heat gets to be too much, they’ll all scatter,” a retired big-studio veteran believes. The “Page Six” item doesn’t even allude to the identity of the people passing this Grey-is-finished view along…just the usual “insiders” and “observers.” The only attribution mentions that week-old (3.24) scenario floated by British gossiper-blogger Toby Young about Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter being in the running — or wanting to be thought of as being in the running — to replace Grey. (I linked to this in a 3.25 item). It’s not wildly irrational, in any event, to suspect that friends of Carter (or Manhattanties with ties to the Tina Brown-Harvey Weinstein-Graydon Carter political demimonde) are pushing this buzz along. There’s a Vanity Fair story in the works about the Pellicano scandal, and Johnson believes that the writer (or at least a contributing reporter) is probably John Connolly, who has been reporting off and on about Pellicano since ’94 or thereabouts. “A damaging story” in Vanity Fair, the item warns, “could well be the nail in Grey’s coffin.” It also says that “while Carter’s name may be in play, others say it’s more likely the gig” — the top Paramount job now held by Grey — “will go to former Universal Pictures Chairman Stacey Snider, who’s due to start as CEO at Paramount-owned DreamWorks SKG on April 10. Some say Snider was brought over to Paramount specifically to replace Grey should the need arise.”