A pretty tasty piece by N.Y. Times reporter Sharon Waxman about the temporary downfall of Amanda Scheer Demme. The widow of director Ted Demme ran the two hottest clubs in Los Angeles, Teddy’s and Tropicana Bar, at the Roosevelt hotel on Hollywood Blvd. That is, until Stephen Brandman, honcho of Thompson Hotels, which manages the Roosevelt for the owners, gave her the boot about two weeks ago. Demme’s clubs were very cool and attracted big stars, which made Demme herself a kind of star, and she certainly acted like one and so did other people who came to the clubs. (Anything goes!) But eventually the fuddy- duds just couldn’t roll with the shrieks and disturbances and that was the end of it. The lesson of the story is that if stars are royalty then the people who cater to their whims are very close to that royalty, and that often means they feel they should be allowed to live and work as freely and irreverently as the stars do. One motto to take away from this downfall-child story is “don’t fuck with the Godz!” Another would be, “You can push the fuddy-duds around and make fun of them behind their back, but if you push it too far they’ll come after you with knives in their fists and ice in their veins.” You’ll find the whole story alluded to in Charles Bukowksi’s poem, “The Genius of the Crowd.”

The 79th Annual Academy Awards will happen a bit earlier next year — on Sunday, 2.25.07. Nomination polls will close on 1.13.07 with the nominations set to be announced ten days later — Tuesday, 1.23.07. Final ballots will be mailed a week later (1.31.07) and final polls will close at the end of the day on Tuesday, 2.20.07. It’s been suggested that these earlier dates may make it appear as if the Broadcast Film Critics Association and their Critics’ Choice Awards are influencing things a bit more than their nearest competititors, the Hollywood Foreign Press and the Golden Globes. It’s obvious that the BFCA is as much into ass-kissing and whoring itself out as the HFPA, but the former apparently has hunkies on the first weekend (or the first workable Monday) after the New Year’s holiday weekend, which means the HFPA has to choose between Sunday, 1.14 or Sunday, 1.21, to stage the Golden Globes. Either way the HPGA won’t appear to be exerting much in the way of Oscar influencing, it’s being argued, because 1.14 is one day after Oscar polling closes, and 1.21 is just two days before Oscar nominations. But c’mon…take two steps back and smell the Starbuck’s. Many people feel that the Academy pretty much wiped Oscar off the map as the statuette with the Biggest and Classiest Pedigree…as any kind of vaguely legitimate barometer of serious cinematic distinction when it gave the Best Picture Oscar to Crash. So if you ask me the whole “Oscar, Oscar, Oscar” hoo-hah will be somewhat less important this year as a result, and it may keep going that way. The Globes are the Globes, the BFCA’s are the BFCA’s, the critics are the critics…everything is everything, baby. The Oscar Award show is on the ropes and closer than ever to irrelevance, and if you ask me nothing can be done to save it until the Academy fires producer Gil Cates.

Rudy Youngblood, who plays the lead character (called “Jaguar Claw”) in Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto (Touchstone, 12.8), has his own site. And on the main page he writes about how he’s unable to say anything about his part in Gibson’s bloody action film about war among the ancient Mayans: “I have had an amazing year and a lot of things have happened for me in my life,” Youngblood relates, “[and] I wish I could talk about where I am right now, but contractually I can’t.” In a piece about Apocalypto in the current Esquire, Luke Dittrich writes about an unauth- orized visit to the set in Mexico, which was somewhere south of Vera Cruz. On page 104 Dittrich offers a synopsis of the plot, which is basically “about good Mayans vs. bad Mayans,” he writes. Youngblood’s “Jaguar Claw” is “a Mayan prince who lives in a peaceful village,” but then Mayans “from a less peaceful but more powerful tribe invade Jaguar Claw’s village…raping, pillaging, burning. They kill many of Jaguar Claw’s friends and family and take others, including his pregnant wife, prisoner. The prisoners are hauled off to a city of massie pyramids, where they are to become sacrificial fodder. Jaguar Claw organizes the remnants of his tribe [and] trains them in the art of war” with the goal of “wreaking vengeance and liberating their people.” Basically, Dittrich concludes, Apocalypto is “Braveheart in the jungle.”

Oh…that item that mentioned a scene in Mission: Impossible III in which Tom Cruise “gets beaten up pretty badly” and an alleged “Paramount insider” saying that a “test audience clapped” when they saw it, and that “it was kind of weird…you’d think Tom√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢√É‚Äû√ɬ¥s people wouldn’t have allowed it to stay in the film”? It came from Roger Friedman‘s column from last Tuesday (4.11), which I obviously should have zeroed in on earlier.

On 12.1.05, a story about Emilio Estevez and the making of his film Bobby , a portrait of Robert F. Kennedy through the eyes of his supporters and admirers just before, during and after his assassination on June 4, 1968, at L.A.’s Ambassador hotel, ran in the New York Times. Staff writer David Halbfinger covered the basic points — Estevez’s struggle to get at least a portion of the film shot at the Ambassador before it was torn down, how he broke through on the writing of the script (i.e., by absorbing the recollections of a former Kennedy volunteer, a desk clerk at a Pismo Beach motel where Estevez just happened to be staying, who was at the Ambassador that night in ’68), his finding financing through the curiously-named Bold Films and “its Belgian principal” Michel Litvak, etc. But if you want a real lip-smacking account, you have to read Nikki Go‘s rundown of the Bobby situation (“What Have They Done to Bobby?”) in the current issue of Esquire. (It’s not on the site — you’ll have to buy a copy.) I have it on good authority that “Nikki Go” is actually screenwriter John Ridley (U-Turn, The Night Watchman), who briefly worked on the Bobby screenplay. (Ridley tries to obscure things on page 169 by writing that Bobby producer Gary Michael Walters “concedes that novelist John Ridley, who’s got a producer credit on the film, also did a ‘polish’ on the screenplay.”) Ridley’s piece definitely pushes a sassy, smarty-pants attitude about Estevez and his film, which has a huge “name” cast (Anthony Hopkins, Elijah Wood, Demi Moore, Christian Slater, William H. Macy, Sharon Stone, Helen Hunt, Lindsay Lohan, Heather Graham, Lawrence Fishburne) and is described by a Bobby crew member as “an episode of Love Boat ’68 .” What’s especially funny is the way Ridley describes the disputes over finance and script-trimming between Estevez, Litvak (who not only made sure that his wife, the Russian-born Svetlana Metkina, was given a part in the film but managed to arrange for her to appear in “more scenes” just as principal photography was about to begin), and a scrappy, budget- conscious producer named Edward Bass, who has since left Bold Films. The story says that Estevez was “faking heart attacks left and right” as a way of gaining a psychological advantage during budget battles. It also says that when Estevez triumphed over Bass after a late-inning sitdown with Litvak, his “parting salutation” to Bass was “checkmate, asshole!”. The IMDB says that the Weinstein Co., which picked up Estevez’s film for “an undisclosed amount,” is intending to release it on 11.22.06. Does opening a film about Robert Kennedy on the 44th anniversary of the assassination of his older brother, President John F. Kennedy, strike anyone as (a) a blatant swipe at the younger Kennedy’s reputation and (b) a wee bit tacky?

“In about 15 years, when the studios and exhibitors finally get their acts together and come up with digital delivery systems and digital projectors, it’s my belief that film will be dead… images will never touch emulsion again . And from what I’ve seen, abandoning film will cost us little or nothing in warmth and quality, and gain us so very much more.” — Craig Mazin posting to “The Artful Writer” about the Panavision Genesis HD system, which Scary Movie 4 and Superman Returns were shot with.

“You’re forgetting another primary reason for [potential] animosity towards The DaVinci Code. I think the religious aspect has both extremes — devout Catholics and Jesus followers on one side, and agnostic-atheists on the other — sneering. And I think the word you’re looking for with the Tom Cruise situation is his ‘Q rating.’ It may be on the downswing, but my 16-year old is oblivious to his antics and can’t wait for M:I:3.” — Doug Pratt, editor, DVD Newsletter

“The Celestine Prophecy played two days in Portland (the town that gave What the Bleep? its boost) at the beginning of April, and no press previews were involved. As I wasn’t gonna pay money to go see this thing on a weekend, and that was that. I have heard exactly nothing from anyone who saw it.” — Shawn Levy , film critic, The Oregonian

Newsweek is doing a double-track, opening-round trashing of The DaVinci Code. That is, reporting that people around town (i.e., Newsweek‘s sources) are trashing Tom Hanks‘ longish, vaguely unwashed-looking hair in the film, and then going, “Tsk-tsk…those sources sure are shallow, but it’s fun to report on what they’re saying!” And here I am doing the same thing, dinging Newsweek a bit but at the same time spreading the bad word about Hanks’ hair. And I don’t even see anything wrong with it. A little long in the back, a little unkempt…so what? The guy’ has to wear the same You’ve Got Mail haircut in film after film? And yet I agree that Hollywood’s “favorite parlor game” is “trying to put a dent in a rival movie’s prospects by quietly trashing it.” And I love this quote from a studio executive in the Newsweek piece: “People are really trying to sabotage each other. It’s not a sport anymore…it’s a science.”

Don’t get me wrong — I understand the need to trash The DaVinci Code. Like I said earlier today under that photo of that big fat DaVInci billboard, I can feel the urge building without really knowing why. Okay, here’s why: book too successful, ads too big, Tom Hanks and Audrey Tatou running everywhere and always holding hands and always frowning, too much money likely to be made…Ron Howard, Dan Brown, Brian Grazer…that dead naked bald guy on the floor…Alred Molina sneering and hamming it up…you just wanna throw a spitball at all of ’em. Consider this snapshot of DaVinci costar Ian McKellen , which I feel speaks volumes. I mean, it seems as of this photo is the movie…y’know?

Speaking of Hollywood’s favorite parlor game, I’d say right now that Tom Cruise is against the ropes and has a cut over his left eye, and that the industry crowd is starting to get a little bit excited at the possibility of seeing him hit the canvas, or at least watching him get slugged so many times he goes all wobbly in the knees. And yet Mission Impossible III (Paramount, 5.5) is paradoxically hanging in there , if for no other reason than the fact that people are hot for Phillip Seymour Hoffman‘ s bad-guy performance and, to a lesser extent, are up for what might happen with J.J. Abrams at the helm.

I missed this when it went up last Wednesday, but Steve Berry does a this-and-that column for the Columbus Dispatch, and the 4.12 edition has the following Tom Cruise items: (a) a “Quote of the Day” in which a “Paramount Pictures insider” comments about an “audience reaction” to a Mission: Impossible III test screening, to wit: “There’s a scene where Tom (Cruise) gets beaten up pretty badly. And the test audience clapped…it was kind of weird“; and (b) “In a new poll at Parade.com, 84 percent of respondents blame the media for the negative publicity that Tom Cruise has received during the year since he began squiring Katie Holmes.” Don’t these items kind of argue with each other a bit? And what’s the origin of the alleged test screening story? Why didn’t Berry say when and where it allegedly happened, and who reported the comments of the alleged “Paramount Pictures insider”?