The Bruno screening I spoke of yesterday came off as scheduled at 4 pm at Mann’s Chinese. 20% critics, 80% hoi polloi. It’s all cool and fine but no reviews or riffs until July 6th.

I finally got around to reading Steven Zaillian‘s 12.1.08 draft of Moneyball, or a portion of it. And I can kinda see why a producer-manager friend passed along word about it being “terrific, and why Brad Pitt signed on. But the entire Sony staff, Amy Pascal included, was shocked to read the new script which had been substantially rewritten — a whole different movie.” Again, if anyone can please send along the Pascal freak-out draft, I’ll read both and run a comparison piece.

Hats off to the ad agency guys who assembled this Inglourious Basterds trailer. It’s a very shrewd use of footage, cut together just so, that has actually boosted my recollection of how the film played when I saw it in Cannes. That’s impressive salesmanship.

MMC, the owner-operator of Movieline.com and HollywoodLife.com, has bought itself a handful — Nikki Finke‘s DeadlineHollywoodDaily.com. Great for Nikki, nice payday, etc. Except now the Movieline guys (Stu Van Airsdale, Kyle Buchanan, Seth Abramovitch, etc.) are going to have to adopt a certain position and attitude towards Finke…right? Play ball, get along, noblesse oblige?

1:53 pm update: Finke wrote at 11:04 am that “the site will become bicoastal and debut a New York City-based senior journalist soon.”

I’m sorry to be slow but I only began to pay attention last night to Neda, the young Tehranian woman who was killed last weekend and became an instant martyr and “central rallying cry” of the Iranian rebellion. Everyone’s sister, everyone’s daughter. Here’s the original video and separately shot footage.

Ed McMahon, who passed early this morning at age 86, was Johnny Carson ‘s indefatigable announcer and sidekick for 30-odd years. He was known for being likably jovial — a dependably upbeat middle-class personality. I knew him well because he was almost exactly my father’s age. To me he was always strictly a World War II generation guy. Yaw-hawh, scotch and soda, get out there and sell! He never got the transformational ’60s youth culture thing, never grew a moustache, never stopped being “Ed McMahon.”

McMahon played a straight supporting role in a 1967 Larry Peerce film called The Incident, which was about hooligan terrorism on a New York subway car. (He played a regular married commuter type, and wasn’t half bad.) There’s a McMahon tape loop from my teenage years that won’t go away. He’s doing a straight-to-the-camera ad on the Tonight show, and he finishes with this line: “Serve your man an Uncle Ben’s meal.” (An old ’70s joke. Q: “What’s white and crawls up your leg?” A: “Uncle Ben’s perverted rice.”) I still say McMahon’s biggest cultural accomplishment was inventing “Hiyohhh!” Ask Martin Mull.

I met concert promoter and original Woodstock producer Michael Lang socially last summer and again at a recent Woodstock DVD/Bluray press junket in Manhattan. At the time I told him my mezzo-mezzo feelings about Ang Lee‘s Taking Woodstock, and just now Lang has written and shared his own reactions. With his permission, here they are:

“Just thought I’d let you know that I’ve finally seen the film and thought it was very cool. It stayed away from the problems I had with the Eliot Tiber‘s book and I was really brought back to those days leading up to that magical weekend. Objectivity for me was, of course, out of the question, but there were some terrific performances and I think Ang Lee captured the spirit of those times.”

Lang has written a memoir called The Road to Woodstock (Ecco) that will hit stores on 6.30. I’ll give it a read soon

A three-mile-wide meteor is going to slam into Los Angeles within two or three hours. You’re the commander of a special titanium transporting device that can hold 250 people, and your mission is to save as many of the best and the brightest Hollywood professionals that you can — actors, directors, screenwriters, editors, dps, journalists, marketers — so the industry can start over after the dead have been buried and the wreckage has been all cleaned up.

You have speed-dial access to everyone of any importance, and you have less than an hour to call those you want to save and arrange to pick them up. Who would you call? Who would you definitely not call?

Suggest away but answer me this — would Lorenzo di Bonaventura, producer of Transformers: Rise of the Fallen and G.I. Joe, be on your list? Read this N.Y. Times Michael Cieply profile of the guy before answering.

Off the top of my head I would save Seth Rogen, Judd Apatow and his family, publicist Chris Libby, Michael Mann, Kim Masters, Rod Lurie, Steven Soderbergh (if he’s in town), Robert Towne, Pete and Madelyn Hammond, Tilda Swinton (if she’s in town), Ben Stiller, James Cameron (although I’d first make him promise not to take any more eight-year vacations), Universal marketing/p.r. guy Michael Moses, the 42West gang, publicist Jennifer Chamberlain, Cameron Crowe, MPRM’s Mark Pogachefsky, Laura Kim, Anne Thompson, Todd McCarthy….I can’t make a list of 250 people, takes too long.

…to be wearing this solidarity-with-the-Iran-protest ribbon, which I’ve had since last Saturday, I’d feel better if there’s was some way to really help. It would obviously be stupid and reckless and ruin everything, but my inner 12 year-old would dearly love to see dozens of teams of paramilitary hard-asses dropped into Tehran — cool guys like Chris Walken in The Dogs of War, I mean — so they could kick some mullah ass.

Not remotely my turf but how can anyone not be touched by Ryan O’Neal‘s announcement that he and the ailing Farrah Fawcett are remarrying? The future will last as long as it lasts so make the best of it while you can. I just think it’s awfully nice. God, I sound like Larry King.

“Perhaps it’s too early to be talking about Oscars at this point, but Kathryn Bigelow‘s The Hurt Locker absolutely belongs in the mix,” writes Hollywood & Fine’s Marshall Fine. “There’s more tension in this gripping tale than in the waistband of Oprah’s skinny jeans. [And] its commercial fate is fraught with as much suspense as its action sequences, which will have you chewing your fingernails.

“It seems cruel to suggest that it might face the same sorry commercial fate as such deserving films as In the Valley of Elah, A Mighty Heart and Lions for Lambs, simply because it too is set in the midst of the Iraq war. The Hurt Locker is one of the year’s best films so far, and could easily wind up on many ten-best lists at year’s end. It far outstrips any of the summer’s action films in terms of the jolt it packs. Erase the word ‘Iraq’ from your memory and go see it.”

Fine is too political to state a certain blunt truth so I will. If The Hurt Locker doesn’t catch on over the next three or four or five weeks it’ll be because of the general Iraq-movie stigma, yes, but primarily, I strongly suspect, due to women telling their boyfriends and husbands that they’d rather see something else.

I’m obviously not speaking of the multitudes of movie- and art-loving urban women with MFAs and cool apartments and hip attitudes. I’m speaking of the women who came out to support Sandra Bullock‘s The Proposal last weekend — the ones who will almost always say no to any film that doesn’t traffic in emotionality, romantic intrigue and some aspect of domesticity.

Mainstream-culture women are the blandifiers, the shallow enemy, the destroyers of go-for-it cinema. Stand up to them, break up with them, meet them later for drinks, etc., but don’t let them take The Hurt Locker down.

Today’s scheduled films: 40 minutes worth of Davis Guggenheim‘s It Might Get Loud at an LA Film Festival venue, the entirety of Sacha Baron Cohen‘s Bruno at an undisclosed location, and a final nostalgia screening of Kathryn Bigelow‘s The Hurt Locker.