I noticed something at my 25th anniversary high-school graduation party. There’s a special gleam in the eyes of high-school grads because they’re at the beginning of their adult lives and it’s all about what’s to come…can’t wait! That sparkle seemed diminished if not sedated in the eyes of 80% to 90% of my former classmates when they were in their 40s. Here’s to those 10% to 20% who presumably still have it. If you dont have curiosity and a sense of excitement about what that curiosity may lead to, you’re dead.

It’s generally understood that a measured application of a predatory/ruthless instinct is a necessary component in any successful showbiz career. But if clawing becomes the all of it, you’re submitting to a kind of self-poisoning. I don’t even know if the predatory shark ad below (which I found through a David Poland tweet) is real or a put-on, but there’s a vibe that comes off Nikki Finke’s Deadline Hollywood game that’s part put-on and part repellent, and which speaks in any event to the lesser angels of our nature.

Patti Smith perhaps wasn’t attuned to the full upside of social network vistas when this was recorded three years ago, but in the first portion of this clip she expresses the seed of the mentality that has fed the various Occupy movements happening now. (Thanks to Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone.)

My heart was light and gay when the news broke two months ago that Jerry Bruckheimer‘s The Lone Ranger had been kibboshed by Disney for being too costly. Now that the show is back on and set to open in May 2013, I’m sliding into the hole again. Barring some inspirational miracle, The Lone Ranger will primarily be about Bruckheimer, Depp, Armie Hammer, Gore Verbinksi and Disney stockholders making piles of money, and the rest of us submitting to a slow spiritual poisoning through IV tubes attached to our seats.

Hollywood Reporter award-season columnist Scott Feinberg invited me to talk about everything last Sunday morning. It finally posted last night. It was a good lively chat. Feinberg sounds fine. I sound like I’m talking into a tinny 1925 microphone on an overseas line.

The play bar is at the bottom of the page. There should be a separate, stand-alone mp3 URL so people can directly link to the sound file rather than Feinberg’s intro page.

When President Bill Clinton said to David Letterman last night that “one of the best things about Americans is that we don’t really resent other people’s success,” the retort should have been something along the lines of “okay, but I think they’re starting to on some level…no?”

“As the Occupy Wall Street message of representing 99 percent of Americans has spread across the country, news media coverage of the Occupy movement has spread to the front pages of newspapers and the tops of television newscasts,” The N.Y. Times‘ Brian Stelter reports in a 10.13 story. “Coverage of the movement last week was, for the first time, quantitatively equivalent to early coverage of the Tea Party movement in early 2009, according to data released Wednesday by the Pew Research Center.”

Related: “The U.S. anti-corporate movement has inspired an offshoot occupation in London,” reports The Washington Post‘s Suzy Khimm. “It will kick off this Saturday with a rally headed to the London Stock Exchange, as Dealbook notes today. OccupyLSX describes itself as part of a global movement against ‘corporate greed’ and inequality.”

Related: “With democracy in crisis a true grassroots movement pointing out the flaws in our system is the first step in the right direction. Count me among those supporting and cheering on the Occupy Wall Street movement,” Al Gore wrote last night on his online journal.

Back to Stelter: “The data confirms an anecdotal sense that the movement, which slowly gained speed last month, entered the nation’s collective consciousness for the first time last week, when President Obama was asked about it at a news conference and when national television news programs were first anchored from the Wall Street protest site.

“In the first full week of October, according to Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, the protests occupied 7 percent of the nation’s collective news coverage, up from 2 percent in the last week of September. Before then, the coverage was so modest as to be undetectable by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, which surveys 52 news outlets each week to produce a weekly study of news coverage.

“The study released Wednesday showed that cable news and radio, which had initially ignored the protests almost entirely, started to give the protests significant coverage last week, often with a heavy dose of positive or negative opinion attached.”

In the view of Movieline‘s Stu Van Airsdale, the Best Actress contenders with the most heat at this stage are The Iron Lady‘s Meryl Streep (based on nothing), My Week With Marilyn‘s Michelle Williams (good buzz on her performance last weekend at the NY Film Festival), The Help‘s Viola Davis (whose so-to-speak candidacy drew a “meh” response from a name-brand director last weekend), Albert Nobbs‘ Glenn Close (career referendum), and We Need to Talk About Kevin‘s Tilda Swinton.

The Outsiders, Stu seems to believe, are Young Adult‘s Charlize Theron (quite conceivably), Martha Marcy‘s Elizabeth Olsen (solid debut performance but unlikely because the character is written too vaguely), The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo‘s Rooney Mara (quite possibly), Like Crazy‘s Felicity Jones (nope, movie isn’t strong enough), A Dangerous Method‘s Keira Knightley (she belongs in supporting), The Help‘s Emma Stone (nope) and Melancholia‘s Kirsten Dunst (doubt it).

Van Airsdale naturally ignores Tyrannosaur‘s Olivia Colman, even as a totally hopeless outsider type. But of course! Let me tell you something right now. The idea that Van Airsdale considers the performances by Olsen, Jones, Dunst and Stone to be worthy of solid outsider status while declining to even mention Colman is absolutely sickening. Occupy Movieline!

What aside from the cutting and the choice of clips is different from the previous whatever-it-is-that-I’ve-seen-on-YouTube? The jaunty narration.

“The Occupy Wall Street crowd basically is saying, ‘I’m unemployed and the people that caused this have their jobs again and their bonuses again and their incomes are high again. There’s something wrong with this country. This is not working for me.’ So I think it can be a good positive debate.” — Former President Bill Clinton, whose “let the big boys have their fun” policies contributed to the current economic malaise, speaking Tuesday night at Chicago’s Chase Auditorium.