If anyone has a PDF of The Ghost, the Roman Polanski thriller written by Robert Harris, please forward. Thanks.

I haven’t time to review Ruben Fleischer‘s Zombieland (opening tomorrow), but it’s better than Dennis Harvey‘s Variety review indicated. I was basically pleased, amused and never bored for the first 45 or 50 minutes, and then came the Bill Murray Beverly Hills mansion sequence and I was flat-out blown away. For this sequence alone the movie must be seen, although generally speaking it’s an engaging zombie comedy with dabs of a marginal Wes Anderson attitude-personality. All to the good. I’ll amplify later today.

I heard from Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired director Marina Zenovich at 2:30 am this morning. She was ringing from Zurich, where she’s working on a followup doc about the Polanski brouhaha. She’s actually been working on it since last February, she said. I had urged her in an e-mail yesterday to respond to yesterday’s Marcia Clark-authored Daily Beast piece in which former prosecutor David Wells claimed that he lied to Zenovich on-camera about having goaded Judge Laurence J. Rittenband into throwing out the 1978 Roman Polanski plea deal, etc.

Zenovich said she’d send a carefully worded response, but the long and the short is that she’s flabbergasted. Suffice that I’m not alone in detecting certain suspicious currents and motives contained in yesterday’s reaction piece. And we’re both agog, we agreed, at Clark’s new blonde hair.

I’m leaving soon for Newark airport, where I’ll catch a jet to Houston and then a connection to Shreveport, Louisiana. A degree of revelry and exploration this evening followed by a day of Straw Dogs inquiry with director-writer Rod Lurie and the cast — Kate Bosworth, James Marsden, Alexander Skarsgard, James Woods and Dominic Purcell. A Shreveport Hilton staffer says their wifi is fast and steady, and if it isn’t they also offer ethernet cable connections in the room plus an in-house Starbucks with wifi of its own. So I can’t lose.

Shreveport, Lousiana — distinguishable, I presume, from Akron, Ohio, or Mobile, Alabama? Other than a few sound stages being there, I mean?

A 9.27 posting by The Atlantic‘s James Fallows presents two specially highlighted U.S. maps that reveal a very precise alignment. The areas with the highest levels of poverty and obesity voted the most heavily for McCain-Palin in last November’s election. “A minor point at such a moment,” as Rhett Butler once said.

Paramount has shifted the opening of Jason Reitman‘s Up In The Air back to December — 12.4, to be exact — to avoid any overlap with Overture’s The Men Who Stare At Goats. Both films star George Clooney. Air is expected to be a bigger commercial hit, but it can’t hurt to get out of the way of Goats just to be safe.

I should have run the news yesterday that screenwriter-director Roger Avary has been sentenced to a year in jail for causing a car crash on 1.13.08 that resulted in the death of a friend, Andreas Zini. Avary, the director of Rules of Attraction and Killing Zoe and co-author of Pulp Fiction and Beowulf, pleaded guilty last August to gross vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated and other charges in the collision. He also got five years’ probation.

Avary’s attorney, Mark Werksman, told the L.A. Times that his client is heartbroken over the Zini family’s loss. “Roger Avary is a decent man and a good man who has always strived to do the right thing in his life,” Werksman said. “He never meant any harm to anyone, and this was just a terrible accident.”

I posted the following about Roger and his situation on 8.22.09, to wit: “My basic feeling is that after a certain interval of mourning and atonement, you have to move on and make the best of your life in the aftermath of such an event. A writer like Avary should use this tragedy as material. Sometime down the road he needs to write or create something from this.

“I only know that no single event defines a life and that the only way to deal with monumental tragedy is to say, ‘Yes, that happened and I’ll deal with it for the rest of my life, but we all need to turn the page and try to strike a match.'”

Former prosecutor David Wells is claiming that he lied to Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired director Marina Zenovich about having goaded Judge Laurence J. Rittenband into throwing out the 1978 Roman Polanski plea deal.

Why, I’m asking myself, is the 9.30 Daily Beast article in which Wells recants, and which has suspiciously been written by former O.J. Simpson prosecutor Marcia Clark, appearing at this moment? It’s obviously a mortar shell intended to make the pro-Polanski (or forgive-Polanski) side look bad. It looks to me as if somebody friendly with the Los Angeles D.A.’s office wanted to compromise the integrity of Zenovich’s doc (which the D.A.’s team has reportedly been irked by) and made some calls and pulled some strings. Well, doesn’t it?

I wrote Zenovich for a comment and she didn’t reply. She really needs to put her notes and recollections on the line and set things straight.

Mel Gibson is only 53, but with that jowly, weathered face and heavily-graying hair and that thinning forward thatch and that burly, beer-gutty, don’t-work-out-much physique, he looks like a guy pushing 60 if not a bit older. I know guys who work in hardware stores or auto-parts stores who look like this. Nice dependable guys and all, but movie stars are supposed to look…I don’t know, a little trimmer and tonier. More of a Pierce Brosnan thing going on…right?

Mel Gibson in Jodie Foster’s currently-shooting The Beaver

There’s no contract that says a guy who nine years ago was regarded as moderately hunky or at least in very presentable shape for someone in his mid 40s (in films like What Women Want and Signs) has to remain that way as he gets older. But there is this admittedly old-fashioned idea that movie actors are supposed to look a little spiffier and more 24 Hour Fitnessy than Average Joes of a similar age. Gibson seems to have said to himself a while ago, “The hell with that…my hunk days are over…time for my Jack Nicholson phase, only grayer.”

This recording of a 1966 Stanley Kubrick interview by Jeremy Bernstein has been around for several years. (It’s on a disc inside Taschen’s Stanley Kubrick Archives book.) But listen to Kubrick’s voice — it could belong to a bright Bronx cab driver or a Bronx-born English teacher in a local high school — and compare it to the voice that Peter Sellers uses in Lolita (’62).

Boiled down, The Wrap‘s Sharon Waxman is reporting that Universal Studios President Ron Meyer intends to whack the studio’s two co-chairmen Marc Shmuger and David Linde and most likely replace them with marketing chief Adam Fogelson and head of production Donna Langley.

(l. to r.) Ron Meyer, Adam Fogelson, Donna Langley, David Linde, Marc Schmuger

It’s a tough game, running a big-studio film division. Hard to survive, much less “win.” I feel sorry for Schmuger-Linde if this is about to happen. And if it’s not, I still feel sorry for them.

Apart from weak or underwhelming performances of such Universal pics as Bruno, Funny People, Public Enemies, Duplicity, Land of the Lost and State of Play, the beef against Schmuger-Linde, Waxman reports, is that certain producers working with the studio — Brian Grazer, Sean Daniel, Working Title’s Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner — have complained about “being unable to get a consistent answer from a single executive to passive-aggressive eye-rolling from Universal colleagues.

“Producers and talent say they are unable to get clarity on their projects in the current climate ,” she writes. “‘If you’re a producer, you’re feeling chaos in ways that you’ve never felt before,” a prominent anonymous exec tells Waxman. ‘It’s completely taken the fun out of the process.'” Fun?