For the last few weeks Woody Allen has been sussing casting picks for his 2018 film, which is some kind of late=teen or early-20something relationship film. I’ve known the name of the male lead for a while now, but the drag-ass agents don’t want anything announced until solid offers have gone out, etc. Suffice that every hot-shit actress around 19 or 20 has been eyeballed or seriously discussed or whatever. Not so long ago one of these candidates, I’ve been told, was Hailee Steinfeld. But at roughly the same time (i.e., mid to late May?) Steinfeld was offered Paramount and Travis Knight‘s Bumblebee movie, a Transformers spin-off thing. I’m not sure what the strategy was or wasn’t on the Woody side, but word around the campfire is that Steinfeld’s agent told her she couldn’t afford to do a Woody, that after the lousy $18 million earned worldwide by Kelly Fremon Craig‘s Edge of Seventeen (which I mostly hated) she needed to to go for the green, and so she said yes to the fucking Bumblebee.