Here we go with another Dead Sea Scrolls newspaper article that first appeared about 36 hours ago on the N.Y. Times website, making it barely worthy of comment due its withered condition and sad lack of relevance to the constantly evolving here-and-now. Written by director-screenwriter Nora Ephron, it nonetheless reads like a fairly acccurate piece of reporting, and amounts to yet another reason why it often seems like a more sensible idea to watch a DVD on your big-ass flat-screen rather than fork over $10 or $11 bucks at a neighborhood theatre. Ephron had a bad experience at Manhattan’s AMC Loews Orpheum 7, at 86th Street and Third Avenue…and I’ve been there. Oh, have I been there! And I know that indifferent ticket-taker as well as I do my brother (who’s currently living in Norwalk, Connecticut). But I have a different attitude than Ephron’s when it comes to pointing out that the framing or the focus isn’t right, or that the sound is too soft. This is where the fun starts, you see. It’s a game…heh-heh. You have to go up to those chunks of two-day-old Wisconsin cheese wearing those polyester AMC lounge shirts, and you have to be Sam Jaffe in Gunga Din. You have to smile and bend over slightly and apologize for being such a complication in their lives, but could they please ask the “projectionist” (i.e., the kid keeping an eye on the platters and other facets of the theatre’s totally automated projection system) to adjust the blah-dee-blah? And after the kid in the booth has either ignored your request or failed to tweak the projection so that the movie you’re trying to watch looks roughly 75% as good as it did when you first saw it at an industry screening room (or at an all-media theatre screening), you get to go back to the same ticket-taker or some dead-head assistant manager and be Sam Jaffe all over again. And all this back-and-forth, which can eat up as much as four or five minutes and sometimes a bit more, is what moviegoing sometimes is these days…what movies are like every so often if you’ve been unlucky enough to walk into the wrong plex at the wrong time. I’ve been saying for years there are three moviegoing realms — the first-class one you take for granted if you’re a journo-critic going to industry screenings all the time (or if you pay to see films at Hollywood’s Arclight), the second class one you get when you go to a not-sublime-but-pretty- decent theatre, and the unaccceptable third-class one in theatres like the AMC Loews Orpheum 7 (or even the AMC Empire on 42nd Street, where the projection standards vaguely suck also from time to time). In any event, Ephron’s piece almost made me forgive her for directing and co-writing Bewitched.

Case in point about shit-level projection: the first time I saw David Cronenberg‘s A History of Violence was at the Grand Theatre Lumiere in Cannes, and it looked pretty close to perfect. Then I saw it again at the Pacific Grove in Los Angeles and did a reaction piece, and somehow this local experience overwhelmed my recollections of Cannes because I included the following: “One beef with this film: Peter Suschitzky‘s cinematography looks like it was soaked in Bolivian coffee during lab processing. I started to wonder if the projector lamp at the Grove’s theatre #1 was dying, but the lamps in the other theatres were fine. The last film I remember being this muddy- looking was Fight Club.” Four or five days ago I rented a DVD of A History of Violence and it was back to looking like it did at the Lumiere again. So the coffee-soaked appearance was the Grove’s fault after all, and this is a theatre, mind, with a reasonably okay reputation.

I felt a bit deflated, frankly, after Thursday night’s “101 Greatest Screenplays” tribute at the Writers Guild theatre in Beverly Hills. It was nice to be there, and the WGA staffers were gracious, and I spoke to some good people during the pre- and after-parties (screenwriters mostly…Larry Karaszewski, Holly Sorenson, L.M. Kit Carson, Brian Herzlinger). But the the film clips were all AFI-level mainstream groaners. (I’m going to lose it if I see a clip of Marlon Brando‘s Terry Malloy lamenting his squandered boxing career one more time.) And the “101 Greatest” list is basically the same oppressive “best films of all time” list we’ve all been beaten over the head with for decades. It’s not that these screenplays aren’t crackerjack…of course they are…but there’s something oppressive about the same movies being toasted again and again, decade after decade. Who wouldn’t agree that Casablanca is a beautifully written work, but screenwriting instructor Robert McKee pounded this into my head 20 years ago (and probably a lot of other people’s heads) and I’m sensing a knee-jerk consensus. That and typically lazy choice-making. Paddy Chayefsky‘s script of The Hospital is a distinctly finer script than Network…less grandiose, funnier, more down-to- earth, a better ending…but Network has the money lines and has gotten much more hype over the years, so naturally it wins out. And like I said in yesterday’s lead piece about Zodiac, the bypassing of Andrew Kevin Walker‘s Se7en — the greatest cop-hunt movie of the last 15 years, and a major groundbreaker in that genre — wasn’t right. Why wasn’t Walter Newman, Lesser Samuels and Billy Wilder‘s Ace in the Hole on the list? It’s nice that the WGA membership saluted the relatively recent Sideways , Memento, Adaptation and Being John Malkovich… ahhh, forget it. I’m sweating this too much.

Poor Jared Paul Stern. A smart, on-top-of-it gossip journalist who, according to all the news accounts, has voluntarily and stupidly fried himself by recently trying to solicit $220,000 from billionaire Ron Burkle in return for a year’s “protection” against “inaccurate and unflattering items” about him in the New York Post‘s “Page Six” gossip column. Walked right into it…putz. And out of this comes a report that Harvey Weinstein , the co-chief of the Weinstein Co., has “finessed” his dealing with “Page Six” in the past. A 4.7 New York Times story is asserting that “while the accusations against Mr. Stern [are] serious, it’s the specter — raised by at least three people who said they knew what was on the tapes — that Mr. Stern [has] implicated several celebrities and New York power figures in an undisclosed, symbiotic relationship with ‘Page Six’ that prompted an extraordinary day of full-throated and at times gleeful gossip among those who love, hate and avidly read it. Those who said they know what is on the tape said Mr. Stern named Harvey Weinstein, the co-founder of Miramax films, and Ronald O. Perelman, the chairman of Revlon Inc., as among those who had finessed their coverage on the page. Through a spokesman, Mr. Weinstein flatly denied any improper relationship with the page and its main editor, Richard Johnson.” And Deadline Hollywood‘s Nikki Finke is disputing, based on recent research, whether Harvey’s statement to the Times was entirely candid.

A smart, attractive professional woman I know is into HBO’s polygamy series Big Love. She finds the notion of having a committed relationship without the full-time, the day-to-day maintenance vaguely appealing. And my ex-wife is a hard-core watcher. I haven’t read about any research but is this the Big Love deal? A show over-30 women? It’s not exactly surprising, but…

“For more than 30 days between 10.16.02, when [indicted-accused wiretapper-of-the-stars] Anthony Pellicano was told by his then-lawyer that he was a walking bulls-eye in the FBI investigation of the threats against Los Angeles Times reporter Anita Busch, and 11.21.02, when the FBI served a search warrant at Pellicano’s West Hollywood office and walked off with grenades, C-4 explosives, 11 computers, 24 external hard drives, a cache of zip disks, and a laminated card with computer user names and passwords on it, Pellicano sat on his butt.” — a graph from Ross Johnson‘s new SHAKEDOWN column on LA Indie. Contents include “a look at all the prosecutors who gathered scalps using Pellicano as an expert witness…a [debunking] of the great myth that a team of FBI experts spent years de-crypting Pellicano’s computers…(the first day the feds grabbed ’em, they probably got most of the user names and passwords)….Stephen Yagman, the civil rights attorney, calls Pellicano “a punk who left his Chicago punkdom.”…Pellicano’s former lawyer Victor Sherman calls Pellicano an “idiot..stupid…arrogant.” And a quote from journalist John Connolly, a Pellicano watcher since the early ’90s who’s co-written an upcoming Vanity Fair piece on the wiretapping scandal: “Pellicano was in MENSA? Blow me.”

It’s two days old (i.e., on par with the Dead Sea Scrolls), but check out this Dave Germain 4.4 AP story about distributors deciding not to show more and more movies — 11 haven’t been advance-screened this year, compared to two that had been hidden from the press at this time in ’05. It’s one of those “this is unfortunately the way things are” stories — a photo of the current malaise over the steady degradation of movie quality. Am I worried about not getting to see stuff? Naaah…you just have to set aside time each day to call your publicist friends and politely badger them into inviting you to this or that. But it’s hard to get the energy up to go to a lot of the advance screenings that are being held. I had to force myself to se On A Clear Day — I could smell the determination of this film to lift my spirits a mile off. We’re in the early April dog days, and every night before leaving for a screening a little voice says to me, “You don’t really want to see this thing…admit it.” You know they’re not going to show you The Benchwarmers or Phat Girlz and any of the other obvious-shite movies, but who wants to see Take The Lead or Hard Candy or Scary Movie 4, even? (The one knockout bit is Craig Bierko doing his Tom Cruise couch-jumping thing, but you have to wait for the end of the film to see it.) The Sentinel (20th Century Fox, 4.21) is one of those Washington, D.C.-based “who’s the real bad guy?” movies in the vein of No Way Out that might not be too bad…it’s obviously one of those heavily-pumped formula jobs…but they’re a little hesitant about screening it earlier than opening week. I’m just waiting for this season to end and for the mid-April festivals (San Francisco, Worldfest), the early summer flicks and the Cannes Film Festival to come into view.

The arrival date of John Connolly‘s “The Sin Eater” (Atria), expected to be a juicy expose about the adventures of indicted Hollywood wire-tapper Anthony Pellicano, will reportedly hit book stores sometime in early 2007. Connolly will also have a reputedly hot piece about Pellicano in an issue of Vanity Fair coming out in, I think, May. But help me out…”The Sin Eater”? Like a guy who eats sin for breakfast? Who eats other people’s sins only to spit it back in their face? It doesn’t mean a guy who eats sin and digests it and then…this is getting gross. The title sticks in your mind, okay, but what the hell does it mean? It reminds me a little bit of the title of that Charles Horman book “The Sunshine Grabber.” How do you grab sunshine? Is sin an edible commodity? Here’s the Wikipedia page on “sin eater.” The first definition comes from olde England, when sin eating was a kind of profession or calling. A sin-eater “would be brought to a dying person’s bedside, and there either he or a relative would place a bit of bread on the breast of the dying…after praying and/or reciting the ritual, he would then remove the bread from the breast and eat it, the act of which would remove the sin from the dying and take it into himself.” How this applies to Anthony Pellicano is escaping me at the moment…maybe it’ll hit me later this evening.

There’s an Associated Press story by the London-based Tariq Panja that just went up saying the fatal shooting of British filmmaker James Miller near the Gaza-Egypt border in May 2003 by an Israeli soldier has been called an act of murder by a British coroner’s jury. But for some weird reason, Panja fails to mention the title of the doc that Miller was shooting at the time, Death in Gaza, which I happened to see on DVD about two or three weeks ago. The story also doesn’t mention that Gaza makes it clear that Miller’s shooting happened at night, in total blackness. Miller’s shooting partner had her camera running when the shots rang out, and this footage is on the DVD. The Israeli soldier who shot Miller in the neck may have been foolish or careless, but how can anyone say Miller was a murder victim in the middle of a war zone in which combatants commonly shoot at other combatants, and especially when the soldier couldn’t see Miller with his own eyes, and at best might have seen a figure with green-tinted night-vision goggles? (I’ve looked through these things at night and that what they allow you to see is never very clear.) Coroner Andrew Reid told the inquest jury at King’s Cross Coroner’s Court that Miller “had either been murdered or was the victim of manslaughter, but that the law drew no distinction,” Panja reports. Brilliant!

A 20-minute preview reel of Oliver Stone‘s World Trade Center (Paramount, 8.11) will be screened at the Cannes Film Festival in mid-May. Of course, a good editor can make almost any film look pretty good if all he/she has to do is show a “taster” reel. Columbia once invited the press to see a short reel of Roland Emmerich‘s The Patriot (’00), which was mostly taken from the film’s first act, which was the best part of the film, and pretty much everyone came out saying, “Looks pretty good!” Then everyone saw the full-length version and realized they’d been had. Less than a year later I was shown a taster reel from Charles Shyer‘s Affair of the Necklace (’01), and the costumes and the dialogue and everyone else seemed so quality-level that I came away thinking it might be a close relation of Barry Lyndon. Fooled again! And then Harvey Weinstein and the Miramax hustlers showed that short reel of Gangs of New York at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival, and once again everyone said, “Great footage…very promising!” And then the movie came out in December ’02 and everyone went, “Hey…what happened?” So we’ve been burned three times now with this hat trick, and I’m frankly suspicious, at this stage, of anyone trying generate heat on a big feature by showing a 20-minute reel. Wouldn’t you be, in my position?

I’ve been noticing guys over the last three or four months wearing “Wolverine”-type sideburns. This is a pretty awful style thing, assuming it’s caught on in some kind of bona fide way. (Has it?). I suppose there’s a kind of rad distinction in being willing to look like a Hugh Jackman X-Men wannabe. I’m assuming right now it’s an urban blue-state thing, but maybe not. Has anyone seen Wolverine chops in rural Utah?

It’s Thursday? What happened? I thought it was Wednesday.