wired

Paramount’s done it to Zodiac again!! David Fincher‘s hunting-the-zodiac-killer melodrama was going to open on 1.17.07 — now the national release date has been bumped to 3.2.07, according to Box-Office Mojo. And this for a movie that will absolutely be finished and ready to screen by 11.10 or 11.15, according to a well-placed source.
I’m sure we’ll be hearing a nicely measured, sensible-sounding explanation within the next day or two. Example: “March is a better release date than mid-January and we want this film to be as big a hit as possible .” I know they aren’t burying it — if they wanted to do that they’d release it in mid-April. One definite advantage from Paramount’s perspective is that now they won’t have to bother with Zodiac in the middle of their Oscar campaigns for Dreamgirls and World Trade Center, which will be more than enough fish to fry for their p.r. team. One other plus is that guys like me can no longer bellyache about their refusal to give it a late-December platform opening.
All I know is, Paramount just won’t stop treating this movie like a poor relation and kicking it around like a tin can. They obviously don’t feel it’s very commercial, they don’t want it in the way, and so they’re keeping it on the bench a few weeks more. The delay certainly isn’t due to any plans for extra work to be done. Even if Fincher wanted to go out and shoot extra footage right now Par could still release it by 1.17 — George Hickenlooper‘s Factory Girl is doing extra lensing as we speak and yet it’ll be shown to critics by early December and released into theatres about three weeks later.

In her N.Y. Times piece about the origins of The Nativity Story (New Line, 12.1), Sharon Waxman says it came about because three of the principals — director Catherine Hardwicke, producers Marty Bowen and Wyck Godfrey — wanted to make a film of lasting value that would reconnect them on some level with their rural/family roots. I’m not doubting their sincerity — who doesn’t want to make a film that means something and sticks to the ribs? — but I smell hucksters in sheep’s clothing.

Amazing…startling: New York City cops have arrested a blue-collar guy who’s allegedly confessed to killing actress Adrienne Shelly in a furious rage. The 40 year-old actress was found hanging from a shower rod in a West Village apartment last Wednesday. A New York Post story that ran on Friday said that “law-enforcement sources said they are inclined to believe Shelly’s death…was a suicide, noting there was no sign of struggle or forced entry in the fourth-floor apartment.” But a CBS News report says that a 19 year-old constructon worker named Diego Pillco has told cops that he “punched” Shelly “after she complained about the noise he was making in the West Village building where her office is located,” and that the blows killed her. (Unless he’s Joe Louis and he just hit her once.) Pillco then “allegedly admitted to dragging the body up to her office, and positioning her in the shower to make her death look like a suicide.” The CBS report says that “the medical examiner’s office had not yet ruled whether Shelly’s death was a homicide or a suicide.”

“I had lived my life believing two things — that pain should not be sought, but, by the same token, it should never be avoided, because there is a lesson in facing adversity. Having gone through that experience, I can attest, in a non-masochistic way, that pain is a great teacher. I don’t relish it, but I learn from it. I always say, even as an ex-Catholic, that God sends the letter, but not the dictionary. You need to forge your own dictionary.” — Pan’s Labyrinth director-writer Guillermo del Toro, speaking to The Guardian‘s Mark Kermode.

The highlights of Russell Crowe‘s “60 Minutes’ interview with Steve Kroft are all here. Fascinating stuff — you can’t just watch one clip. I liked Crowe’s statement that in Australia, the phone-throwing thing would have been resolved “with an apology and a handshake.” You know…the way John Wayne would’ve handled the after-effects of a fist fight in a John Ford film.

But in the world we’re contendng with over here (and this is HE speaking, not Crowe)…a world filled with manly hotel employees who say “whatever” when a customer has a problem and then run to their attorneys looking for a cash set- tlement to help them get over the shock of their little-bitch attitude coming right back at them, things are different.

On or about 6.1.06, when I was posting my daily material from a wi-fi cafe in Montmartre, I reported that Andrew Dominik‘s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford — i.e., Brad Pitt‘s other ’06 movie besides Babel — would not be released by Warner Bros. on the then-posted date 9.15.056, but rather some time in early 2007. This meant that some reconfiguring was going on and Team Jesse needed time to fix certain problems, etc.

Now comes a Kevin Williamson piece in the Calgary Sun reporting that the fillm’s “ambiguous” ’07 release date (not…it’s always been February or March) has been clarified by producer Tony Scott as February ’07. (I called a Warner Bros. p.r. rep for a precise date — she didn’t pick up.) Scott told Williamson that “we have to be careful how we market it because it’s like a Terrence Malick film. But it’s really good and Brad’s terrific in it — he just gets better with age.”
Pitt, naturally, plays the title character. His costars include the always-creepy Casey Affleck (as Ford), Sam Rockwell, Sam Shepard, Mary-Louise Parker and Zooey Deschanel.

“Hollywood is in the midst of a strategic shift,” N.Y. Times reporter Laura Holson writes for the Monday, 11.6 issue. “The average cost to make and market a movie has skyrocketed — to $96.2 million last year, from $54.1 million in 1995 — while lucrative DVD sales have flattened. Major film studios are fending off illegal piracy, which industry executives say accounted for $1.3 billion in lost revenue in the United States last year.
“The growth of new media threatens to undermine traditional businesses, while studios are flummoxed about how to take advantage of the new opportunities they represent. And movies and TV also face tough new competition from video games and online social networking sites. Even cellphones have become a favorite diversion among the young.
“As in so many other show business debates, money and control are at the heart of the matter. And without solutions to these problems in sight, relations between talent and the studios are more strained than ever.”

Empire is reporting that Spike Lee is in negotiations to direct a sequel to Inside Man — excellent news. Lee is said to be “already working with the original screenwriter Russell Gurwitz.” Insufficient details! This is truly a nothing item. It’s getting late, all right.

More reactions to Daniel Craig‘s James Bond, of a generally more positive nature than views spouted by “Manhattan Movie Guy” and assembled by the BBC. The London Times has said that Craig “is up there with the best — he combines Sean Connery‘s athleticism and cocksure swagger with Timothy Dalton‘s thrilling undercurrent of stone-cold cruelty.”

“Don’t quote me but Casino Royale is James Bland. And very long. Lots of cool little moments don’t deliver what America will want. And Daniel Craig isn’t Bond. He’s Jason Bourne in five years.” — Hotshot Manhattan movie guy who gets around and sees everything.

The N.Y. Times‘ David Carr — a.k.a. “the Bagger” — is back in action and making the claim that Oscar heat is somehow hotter in Manhattan than Los Angeles, and that Gotham Oscar campaign publicists cater more egregiously to movie journalists than L.A. flacks, some of whom say “no” or “later” or “let me get into it” or take an awful long time to return calls.