A noted filmmaker who read this morning’s link to Patrick Goldstein‘s story that named Paramount’s Brad Weston as the guy who passed on Twilight two years ago when it was being developed by MTV Films has a word of caution. Or lament, rather. Here’s how he put it:

“When Goldstein ran that story, it increased the level of paranoia in the studios and now people aren’t as likely to put projects into turnaround, which is what saves or releases some projects and results in their being made into films at other studios,” he said.

“Without turnaround we’re all going to miss out on a lot of great movies because stalled projects are now more likely to just sit there and collect dust. It’s going to increase this chilling effect.”

“Let’s say I have a property that’s owned by a studio and it’s not working out,” he said. “In this situation a studio exec saying to me ‘fine, I’ll put it into turnaround and let you have it, take it across the street to Warner Bros. and God speed’ is usually an act of benevolence. It saves a project from death.

“Now with this Weston thing, a lot more studio execs and going to say ‘sure, I let you take it elsewhere and then two years from now I’ll read about how I’m the asshole who let a big hit go to some other studio? Fuck it, I’m going to hang onto it. I’d rather have the project die here than have it go elsewhere than have an article turn up down the road that’ll make me look stupid.’

“Fear of failure has always been a greater force in this town than dreams of success,” he coincluded. “This is a town based on fear, and now that fear, that paranoia, has just been increased.”

Australia (20th Century Fox, 11.26) is extreme cinema by way of director Baz Luhrmann‘s massive ego. We all know Luhrmann is no fan of naturalism, but Australia‘s manifestation of ultramagical reality made me want to plotz. Call Luhrmann the anti-Budd Boetticher or Anthony Mann or Sam Fuller — a sworn aesthetic enemy of any solidly workmanlike approach to muscular outdoor filmmaking and telling forthright tales. Australia is a wackazoid big-canvas thing, and God help anyone who comes to it not willing to be injected with Baz serum.

Australia director Baz Luhrmann; Wizard of Oz costar Frank Morgan

And that’s fine if you can roll with it. I couldn’t. It put me off. It’s too spiked with mescaline. And I say this as someone “experienced.”

Partly a love story, partly about Nicole Kidman‘s strangely immobile forehead, partly about an ambitious Red River-ish cattle drive and lastly — you could almost say anecdotally — about the bombing of Darwin, Australia, in early 1942, there isn’t a frame or line or gesture in this whopper of a movie hasn’t been hugely futzed with by way of emotional investment and/or digitally reconstitution. To me it felt just as hyper, cranked up and visually steroid as Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge, Strictly Ballroom, Romeo + Juliet , etc. It’s nuts.

What is the primary focus of Australia? Baz Luhrmann’s big-dick imagination, and his determination and ability to visualize every last aspect of every last drop of rock-your-world razmatazz. He achieves that. A less talented fellow wouldn’t have tried, much less dreamt of such a thing.

All the rest of the elements and components — Kidman, the scenery, the cattle, the brawny and bearded Hugh Jackman, the cute Aboriginal kid Brandon Walters, the loutish big bellies in the bars, the evil-icious cattle barons David Wenham and Bryan Brown, the man-eating alligators, the Japanese planes that attack a tiny little island with nothing on it but a chapel, a minister and a bunch of intinerant children, the bloated and relentlessly rum-swilling Jack Thompson, David Gulpill ‘s Aboriginal spirit figure (called “King George”) and all the rest of it — are strictly secondary.

It all comes down to The Wizard of Oz, which is frequently and blatantly referenced. The bones of the story are told by Kidman to Walters, Judy Garland clips are shown twice, “Over The Rainbow” is sung, hummed and orchestrated. The metaphor is simple, mate. This is a film set in a country commonly referred to (certainly in the pages of old-time Variety) as Oz, and Luhrmann is the wizard — the puller of strings and levers behind the curtain, the kindly fellow pulling off a flim-flam, the rascal with the booming amplified voice, the releaser of clouds of billowing black smoke and other awesome effects.

Trust me — that’s all this movie is about. Look at me, I’m a wild man, look at what I can do, I’m so extreme I can barely stand it, welcome to my world, blah blah. It’s certainly eye-filling and, okay, emotionally gripping toward the end, but it taxes the soul and sets the foot a tapping.

Nikki Finke reported this morning that she’s “hearing there’ll be economy-related bloodletting in the form of layoffs of even very senior reps at major entertainment public relations firms before the end of the year,” adding that “some longtime vets who handle big clients [may be] getting fired in the next 24 hours.”

A senior p.r. exec told me he’s heard nothing about this, but if it happens he won’t be all that surprised.

“Layoffs are happening in every sector,” he said, “and of course historically the entertainment industry is funded by credit and everybody knows that has dried up in recent months, and so people are gearing for a downturn in production and production starts. Plus there are still issues related to the unresolved SAG strke situation and so a lot of companies are preparing to cope along these lines.

“The next six months are going to be very difficult, especially for p.r. agencies with major corporate clients. A loss of a major corporate client can really hurt a company. Those companies are owned by conglomerates and there are numbers that need to be met on a quarterly basis, and that translate into some hard decisions.”

Issues of quality and artistic merit aside, my Ray Walston Martian antennae readings are telling me that in terms of emotional mob-approval signals, Danny Boyle ‘s Slumdog Millionaire is beating out David Fincher‘s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button in the Best Picture contest as it currently stands. I’m just talking about a snapshot on a moving train, mind. Ten minutes from now we could be looking at different scenery.

But it’s fair, right now, to make a spitball call and say that Millionaire might be taking over the front-runner position. No, it is taking over. A lot of folks are applauding, loving it (Real Geezers included) and telling their friends, and that’s the bottom line in this game.

I’m saying this based on the various meh reactions to Button that have been flying around for the last couple of weeks. The first high-profile, big-crowd Button screening happens tonight at L.A.’s DGA theatre, and the first big New York screening happens next Monday night so it’s obviously a little early to be making any firm calls. But so far I’m just not detecting any kind of “wow, blown away” reactions to the Fincher flick, although I’ve been told that one former big-time journalist is a huge fan. I’m sure there are others. I may be one as of next Monday evening.

I know that older, seemingly more thoughtful early-bird viewers have posted admiring comments about Button, and I’m certainly not writing it off. (Please understand that!) But the general rule-of-thumb is that any presumed Best Picture favorite has to have a detectable wave of emotional enthusiasm behind it, and for whatever reason — so far, at least — the middle-aged-men-getting-all-teary reactions to Button that were passed along a few weeks back haven’t manifested with the smarty-pants know-it-alls. Reactions have basically been “good but not great, no crying at the end, great technical achievement, beautiful photography, fine film,” etc.

And reactions like that are basically an “almost but no cigar.” A Best Picture winner has to be a manifestation of someone’s idea of a great, drop-dead, grand-or-penetrating-theme art film or it has to get people emotionally in a big way. Sorry, but them’s the rules.

I’m not even mentioning the measured reaction to Button that Oprah Winfrey conveyed when her Brad Pitt-Cate Blanchette Button special aired yesterday. Say what you will about Winfrey but she’s thought to be a kind of emotional geiger counter regarding the penetration power of certain movies and books, and a friend who caught the show thought it was significant that she used the words “fascinating” and “interesting” more than once to describe her reactions to Button. Make of this what you will.

In a way, it’s good for Button to be out of the font-runner slot. Now it doesn’t have anything to prove. Now it can sink or swim or soar based on what it is or isn’t, and what people are saying to each other on a day-by-day, screening-by-screening basis. And that’s fine.

This Patrick Goldstein story is three days old and shame on me for not paying attention, but I didn’t understand the magnitude of Twilight until I saw it the night before last and particularly what a massive…no, titanic miscalculation it was for Paramount’s MTV Films to have put their development of the Twilight novels into turnaround back in ’06.

Brad Weston

Goldstein reports that “three ex-Paramount executives [have] all pointed the finger at Brad Weston, now the Paramount’s production chief.

Weston, naturally, “insists he never killed the project, saying it was the responsibility of Scott Aversano, who succeeded early Twilight champion David Gale, the MTV Films president who’s now a Paramount-based producer. “However, by the studio’s own timeline, the project was put in turnaround in early 2006,” Goldstein writes. “Aversano didn’t take over MTV Films until late August 2006 and had no functional budget to buy projects until the year’s end.

“MTV executives who were involved with the project say Weston questioned the genre’s commercial prospects, telling them to watch Cursed, a 2005 teen-oriented werewolf film that he’d made while an executive at Dimension Films, that had failed at the box office.”

All the cheapie tourist shops in the Times Square vicinity are selling Barack Obama T-shirts, you can’t find a newsstand anywhere not selling bullshit Obama magazines (some perfect-bound), and TV ads are hawking commemorative bullshit Obama coins. But Madame Tussaud’s on 42nd Street, something of a celeb-ogling gold standard experience for people from Indiana, won’t have its life-size Obama figure “until January,” according to a Tussaud’s employee I spoke to yesterday.

Tussaud’s, in short, could be enjoying a huge surge in business due to Obama fever (i.e., folks having their picture snapped as they pose with the wax BHO), but management, the guy said, held off on starting work on an Obama figure until the 11.4 election. Every pollster in the business ran numbers starting last summer that strongly indicated an Obama victory over McCain, but Tussaud’s execs, to go by what I was told, wouldn’t commission an Obama figure until McCain was officially beaten. Brilliant! To me that means they’re (a) stupid or at least cautious to a fault, or (b) cash-strapped. Or both.

Here’s a shot I took two or three years ago of a popular Morgan Freeman Tussaud’s figure, obviously taken around the holidays.

“With nearly 2,000 shows already sold out, Summit Entertainment’s teen vampire romance Twilight is looking more like a studio blockbuster than some of the blockbusters,” reports Variety‘s Pamela McLintock. “[The film] has whipped up such a frenzy among tween and teenage girls that advance ticket sales are the biggest for any film since The Dark Knight. How high Twilight, directed by Catherine Hardwicke, opens this weekend depends on whether the movie leapfrogs beyond its target demo. On the strength of girls and moms alone, Twilight could open in the $45 million-to-$60 million range. Some say it could go higher.”

So I’m not entirely alone. Pro-Twilight critics include Entertainment Weekly‘s Owen Gleiberman, the Village Voice‘s Chuck Wilson (“gives really good swoon”), the S.F. Chronicle‘s Peter Hartlaub (director Catherine Hardwicke “has a knack for making her young actors seem unpolished and real, even when the events from the book and the dialogue are inherently ridiculous”), the Star-Tribune‘s Colin Covert, the Orlando Sentinel‘s Roger Moore, etc.

For some reason I found myself unable to post anything after catching Australia yesterday afternoon at the AMC 25 on 42nd Street. I turned on the laptop-avec-aircard in some noisy irritating sports bar on Eighth Avenue….nothing. Some kind of lethargy virus had taken over my system. I tried later on at home…still nothing. Sometimes it’s better to just give in to the veg impulse.

Summit Entertainment is insisting on a no-review embargo on Catherine Hardwicke‘s Twilight for another 36 hours or so (12:01 am on Friday, 11.21), although the Chicago Tribune‘s Michael Phillips has said his review will be up tomorrow (i.e., presumably sometime late tonight online). It can be deduced that Summit is expecting a torrent of press negativity. Well, they’re wrong. At least as far as this horse is concerned.

Before last night’s all-media screening at Manhattan’s AMC 25 a publicist got a mid-sized laugh when she told everyone to “keep your reactions to yourself until Friday.” You could hear the murmuring responses…”right!,” “in a pig’s eye!,” etc. You have to give Summit’s top publicist Vivian Mayer props for laying down the law with such whip-cracking vigor, but not long after Twilight started I began saying to myself, “What are Mayer and her Summit bosses thinking? We all know that Titanic-level business among teenage girls this weekend is a foregone conclusion, but do Summit execs really understand what they have here?”

Due apologies to those middle–aged male journalists making smart-ass cracks outside the theatre after it ended, but they’re wrong. They’re living in their own world — blinded, blocking, reactionary. Because within its own emotional teenage-girl, imagining-and-longing-for-the-ideal-boyfriend realm, Twilight… should I say this? I don’t want to anger Vivian Mayer. But what publicist would be upset if a guy like myself, an unregenerate adult-movie, classic-movie, indie-movie, Pasolini-admiring, Kubrick-worshipping fan who hates sitting next to giggling groups of women in cocktail bars — what if a guy like me said that this sucker works?

Because it does. On its own attitudinal terms and given what it’s addressing and saying. And you can take that to the bank and put it in your IRA account. I’ve been in this racket for nearly 30 years and I know when a film is working so don’t tell me.

Does saying “it works” constitute a review? I don’t think so. It’s a two-word declaration. Don’t reviews have to be at least two or three paragraphs long?

I can at least describe the vibe in the room as it played. The crowd , which admittedly was at least half-packed with under-25 women, was with it — engaged, attuned, emotional pores open. Some of them screamed when Robert Pattinson came on screen. Okay, the crowd chuckled here and there at this or that line of on-the-nose dialogue. Big deal. Forgive and forget. The movie had the crowd in the palm of its hand.

And I can at least describe a conversation I had with a sharp Manhattan female columnist in the outer foyer. “Whadja think?” I asked. “I liked it!,” she said, nodding and wearing a serene little smile that spoke of resolution. Then she quickly added, perhaps thinking I was a hater and not wanting to argue, “I’m a girl.” And I said, “And I’m a guy and I don’t think it was half bad! In its own realm it works. And Pattinson is great! And Kristin Stewart is such a good actress that she knows how to finagle her dialogue and it all goes down pretty smoothly.”

That’s what I said to a colleague, okay? Street reportage, not a review. I think it’s fair to say, eminently fair, that Twilight is a lot better than you might have been led to believe. Within the swoony romantic teen-girl ethos it’s an absolute bulls-eye. I suspect it’ll be the biggest power-hitting, repeat-viewing grand-slammer since Titanic. Possibly $200 million, I’m thinking. Young women were palpitating with pleasure as they spoke to a BBC video crew getting reactions outside the theatre.

Here are some talking points from the Tribune‘s Phillips:

Site of last night’s Manhattan screening.

1. Twilight “is low-keyed supernaturalism. Director Catherine Hardwicke (Thirteen, Lords of Dogtown) doesn’t go in for heavy blockbuster or franchise machinery. Likewise, Tuesday’s preview audience at the AMC River East 21 seemed relatively subdued on the way out.”

2. Kristen Stewart’s Bella Swan “is far less the Victorian teen simp than she is in Stephenie Meyer‘s novel.”

3. “The leads look pretty together.Stewart, who played the desert wild child in “Into the Wild,” enters Deep Smolder Mode (Celibate Division) earnestly and well with Robert Pattinson, who’s best known — prior to Twilight — as Cedric Diggory in two of the Harry Potter pictures and here plays Edward Cullen of the mysterious traveling Cullen clan.”

4. “The musical score by Carter Burwell, a frequent Coen brothers colleague, is effective, subtly creepy. No bombast or big orchestral wows.”

Sydney Morning Herald Critic Sandra Hall, who’s been on the beat for 30 years, has posted the best-written review of Australia yet. “Nothing succeeds like excess,” she begins. “Oscar Wilde coined the phrase and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Baz Luhrmann has it embroidered on scatter cushions all over the house.

This still of Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman exudes a certain you-know-what, in part because of the placement of Jackman’s right hand.

“Not that he needs reminding. It is a mantra stamped on everything he does and Australia is the apotheosis. It has become the movie as superhero, charged with the job of rescuing the Australian film industry and giving us a new and shiny view of ourselves. And shiny it certainly is.

“It’s also much too long at almost three hours, deliriously camp and shamelessly overdone — an outback adventure seen through the eyes of a filmmaker steeped in the theatrical rituals and hectic colors of old-fashioned showbiz. To quote Oklahoma, one of the few Hollywood classics not to lend its influence to Luhrmann’s style, or rather medley of styles, the corn is as high as an elephant’s eye.

“And so strong is his urge to celebrate the exoticism of old Australia that you half-expect to see the elephant, as well, lumbering across one of those majestic stretches of the Kimberley. Yet the film’s vigor and yes, its passion — that overused word — do engage you.

“Anachronisms abound. Kidman and Jackman speak quaintly of doing a drove. There’s an action sequence that pushes the concept of the cliffhanger much further than it was ever meant to go, and Sarah’s romance with the Drover is rife with Mills & Boon moments.”