Aaron Sorkin‘s screenplay for The Social Network was made available a few hours ago on Sony’s Social Network site.

The spiking of Cari Beauchamp‘s 5000-word Vanity Fair piece about the aggressive Hollywood reporting wars between Deadline‘s Nikki Finke, TheWrap‘s Sharon Waxman and The Hollywood Reporter‘s Janice Min was not, I’m told, a “space issue.” Earlier today N.Y. Post media columnist Keith J. Kelly quoted “sources” saying that the story was killed “because it wasn’t catty enough…they wanted a catfight story.” He also ran an official Vanity Fair explanation that “with so many articles trying to get into the issue, it didn’t make the cut.”

Late this afternoon a person who had contact with Beauchamp during her research said that the Vanity Fair quote is bullshit. There was, I gather, some reticence from at least one of the subjects (and perhaps from all three) about participating in a story that, it was feared, might have become a semi-demeaning caricature — a chronicle of tempestuous personalities, perhaps something in the vein of those old Hedda-vs.-Louella duels of the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, three tough cyber-journalists overdoing the avarice in trying to out-scoop and out-maneuver each other, etc. Beauchamp tried to allay concerns by offering assurances that article would be a business piece, but toward the end, my source contends, it devolved into something that Beauchamp wouldn’t put her name on.

Beauchamp’s story would have appeared in VF‘s annual Hollywood issue, which will be out on February 2nd.

Since last summer’s Sad Keanu meme, Keanu Reeves has starred in Mark Mann‘s Generation Um…, spoken about wanting to make another Bill and Ted movie (middle-aged air guitar) and is moving forward on a 47 Ronin flick that sounds real. I’ve had this idea that The Day The Earth Stood Still hurt him, but that awful film grossed $230 million worldwide so it’s not like Keanu’s in “movie jail,” so to speak.

“Clint Eastwood is without a doubt the fittest and most active octogenarian on New York’s Park Avenue as he climbs spryly out of his black SUV and strides into the Regency Hotel, acknowledging the greetings of the staff with a friendly wave. ‘He can’t be 80,’ someone whispers in amazement. ‘No way.'” — from a 1.14 Telegraph profile by John Hiscock.

There’s like…uhm, a reason for that? For Clint looking as good as he does, I mean. It’s called working out every day for two hours. That, I’ve been told, was his regimen during the making of Invictus in South Africa. (Okay, maybe the source slightly exaggerated.) At 80, serious daily workouts don’t just make you look good — they fight the natural diminishings that happen in old age. When I visited Montana with my dad about 15 years ago we happened to speak to a couple in their mid 70s who were bike-riding and back-packing from state to state, and they had the vigor and muscle tone of 47 year-olds. So that’s the ticket if you don’t want to end up like most octogenarians. Kill yourself every day at the club.

The New Yorker cover, the first photo of Andrew Garfield in Sony’s forthcoming Spider-Man film and the 1.13 announcement that Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark was delaying its opening for the fifth time (the new debut is set for 3.15.11) all seemed to break at the same time.

Late last night Hot Blog commenter Scott Mendelson wrote that “Sony must be a little pissed at all the horrible press that Turn Off the Dark is getting. So no, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that they released the official still this week, since they don’t want people exclusively talking about Spider-Man in the same breath as Springtime For Hitler.”

I truly and honestly shrugged when I read last night’s “bombshell” headline about former Golden Globe publicist Michael Russell charging the Hollywood Foreign Press Association with fraud and corupt practices as part a lawsuit seeking $2 million in lost salary and additional damages. Isn’t “whores R us” the HFPA’s lifelong mantra? Hasn’t the town been snickering about these clowns for years? Ricky Gervais will kick this around in his opening monologue and…what else? Nothing.

This just-announced dramatic feature ACE (American Cinema Editors) nominees are Black Swan (Andrew Weisblum, A.C.E.), The Fighter (Pamela Martin), Inception (Lee Smith, A.C.E.), The King’s Speech (Tariq Anwar) and The Social Network (Angus Wall, A.C.E. & Kirk Baxter).

The Best Edited Comedy or Musical noms went to Alice in Wonderland (Chris Lebenzon, A.C.E.), Easy A (Susan Littenberg), The Kids Are All Right (Jeffrey M. Werner), Made in Dagenham (Michael Parker), and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (Jonathan Amos & Paul Machliss).

I’d really like to read a paragraph or two explaining how the cutting in Easy A, which I thought was perfectly fine, is so good that it deserves an ACE Award. I’m not disputing the reasoning behind this — I’d just like to hear it explained with precision and feeling.

The three nominees for Bst Edited Animated Film are Despicable Me (Gregory Perler & Pam Ziegenhagen), How To Train Your Dragon (Maryann Brandon, A.C.E. & Darren T. Holmes, A.C.E.) and Toy Story 3 (Ken Schretzmann & Lee Unkrich, A.C.E.).

This dramatic feature noms echo the DGA nominations to the extent that True Grit again didn’t make the dramatic feature film cut. It’s generally accepted that Best Picture nominees are looking at diminished odds if they haven’t been nominated by the major guilds. In this sense MCN’s David Poland (“True Grit is now the Best Picture frontrunner“) has some ‘splainin’ to do.

My Canadian-bought Ishtar Bluray arrived today. Watching it now, smiling, going with it, chuckling now and then. It’s a comedy, yes, but you have to forget about it being one. Laugh or don’t laugh, but either way it’s Ishtar — one of the best faintly funny farces ever made. About delusion, middle-aged failure, life without a net, the unbearable absence of talent, friendship, futility, pretty eyes, idiot shenanigans and dumb luck.

Ishtar is a bit like a biplane that lifts off a partly muddy runway, rises 30 or 40 feet, comes down again, splashes through puddles, lifts off again…over and over, trying and trying, and you have to love it for that. The fact that it doesn’t roll strike after strike is what’s so endearing. Every so often you want to reach out and give it a nice hug. This is a great comedy about losing. And the Marrakech cafe sing-along (“There’s No Business Like Show Business”) is one of the happiest scenes I’ve ever known.

Annapurna Pictures’ Megan Ellison, 24 year-old daughter of billionaire Larry Ellison, will provide sole financing for Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal‘s untitled next film, which Variety describes as “the true story of a U.S. military black ops mission.” Cameras will roll in early summer with Bigelow directing and Boal having written the script.

Their long-planned Triple Frontier project, a larger-budgeted, big-star action thriller for Paramount, will presumably go sometime in 2012.

Ellison’s investment in True Grit bought her an exec producer credit. Annapurna will also reportedly finance and produce John Hillcoat‘s The Wettest County. a prohibition-era pic to star Tom Hardy and Shia LaBeouf.

I don’t see how anyone can declare that the box-office performance of Ron Howard‘s The Dilemma will “deliver some clarity on the immediate future of the adult comedy,” as Deadline‘s Michael Fleming wrote this morning. He doesn’t mean that the film itself will sink or swim based on how good it is. He’s saying that Average Joe expectations about whether or not to give this Vince Vaughn-Kevin James comedy a shot will amount to a kind of zeitgeist referendum on the vitality of comedies aimed at over-30s.

In other words, Fleming apparently believes that tens of thousands of seminal conversations are happening right now among potential weekend moviegoers. Conversations starting with Movie Guy #1 saying, “Whaddaya wanna go see tomorrow night, Katey? The Dilemma or The Green Hornet?” and Movie Gal #2 replying, “I don’t know, Marty…I was thinking maybe The Dilemma because Vince Vaughn can be funny, but I’ve also been thinking about the state of adult comedy over the last 15 or 20 years, and how the last one I really liked was The Wedding Crashers and before that David O. Russell‘s Flirting With Disaster and before that…I don’t know, Beetlejuice? So I’m starting to think that the culture has given up on adult comedy or maybe vice versa, and that the ghosts of Billy Wilder and Howard Hawks and Ernst Lubitsch and all the great sophisticated-comedy maestros are lamenting this state of affairs, and so our best bet is probably to just give up and go to The Green Hornet so we can sit there with our 3D glasses on and slowly die in our seats.”

I’ll tell you right now that the people who’ve already decided to wait for The Dilemma on Netflix streaming will leap at the chance to see a half-decent adult comedy, should one come along. Quality is quality and people can smell it a mile off. And none of this has anything to do with The Dilemma tanking or not tanking this weekend. I suspect nonetheless that most have decided by now that The Dilemma is some kind of not-quite-crackling problem movie (“gay” electric cars, bizarre behavior by Vaughn’s character, no big laughs in the trailer) and that it’s probably destined to earn a so-so tally or perhaps under-perform. And I’m saying this without looking at any tracking whatsoever.

Movies that open at South by Southwest tend to be boilerplate fanboy flicks (Kickass, anything from Robert Rodriguez, etc.) looking for an exuberant reception from a baseball- and cowboy-hatted throng that’s ready and willing to cheer any film with any kind of heat, if for no other reason than to celebrate Austin’s center-of-the-worldness. Jodie Foster‘s The Beaver is a different kind of deal (i.e., a mildly creepy oddball comedy) but it’ll still benefit from being exuberantly greeted, etc.

Following the 3.16 SXSW centerpiece premiere, Summit will open the Mel Gibson dramedy limited on 3.23 and wide on April 8th. In a statement festival director Janet Pierson has said that The Beaver shows “an actress/filmmaker carefully and beautifully tackling a heartbreaking subject in her finest work yet.” Duncan Jones‘ Source Code will open SXSW on 3.11.11. Greg Mottola‘s Paul — an almost whore-ishly typical SXSW-type entertainment — will also be shown.