Miramax president Daniel Battsek, a good man, has been given the boot. As part of a late September announcement about streamlining/downsizing the company, Disney management stated that Battsek would “continue to oversee all aspects of creative, development, production and business and legal affairs” out of New York. Nikki Finke is reporting that Miramax’s NY office will now be closed, and that the whole operation will now move to the Disney lot.

A studio spokesperson told L.A. Times reporter Claudia Eller on 9.24 that “we continue to look at the best way to run our lines of businesses most efficiently.” I said in a 9.26 posting that “rhetorical references to ‘efficiency’ by management are usually cause for concern.” So there you go.

Sorry for Daniel — a longtime supporter and friend of Hollywood Elsewhere — and for anyone else at Miramax who may also be thrown over the side. It’s tough rowing out there.

I’m sorry but I’ve never found locations in and of themselves to be remotely scary. I don’t even find them unsettling. It”s interesting when you can sense the aura around certain places — the White House, Ground Zero, Dealey Plaza in Dallas — but that’s a long way from scary. It’s fascinating to stand in areas and buildings that have been used in famous movies (like Mission San Juan Batista near Hollister) but again, no spooks.

I love the way Werner Herzog pronounces his “ohs,” as in know and though and so on. It’s a very special “ohheww” sound. He spoke the night before last about the casting of Eva Mendes in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (First Look, 11.20).

Amy Rice and Alicia Sams‘ By The People: The Election of Barack Obama will finally debut on HBO on Tuesday, 11.3 — precisely 365 days after the ’08 Presidential election came to an end. I reviewed the film in early August after catching a showing at the Sunshine Cinemas, and there wasn’t any way to be kind or charitable. It’s a political chick flick with no edge — butter wouldn’t melt in its mouth. And it’s way too easy in its depiction of Hillary Clinton ‘s campaign.

I began by calling it “a fairly bloodless portrait of one of the most fascinating, breathtaking, sometimes ugly, occasionally transcendent, up-and-down racial-tinderbox elections in our nation’s history. It’s up-close and somewhat intimate and sorta kinda dull at times. Not novacaine dull but glide-along, yeah-yeah dull.

“You’d never know what a heart-pumping ride Obama’s two-year campaign for the White House was by watching this nicely assembled but excessively mild-mannered film.

“Rice and Sams were given extraordinary close-up access to candidate Obama and his innermost circle (David Plouffe, David Axelrod, Robert Gibbs, etc.) as well as Michelle, Sasha and Malia. The co-directors caught some good stuff along the way (Obama tear-streaking when speaking about his recently-deceased grandmother, a ten year-old campaign worker patiently dealing with a contentious voter over the phone, etc.) but it almost seems as if Rice and Sams agreed to let Axelrod and Gibbs co-edit the film with an aim to de-balling and up-spinning the final version as much as possible.

“This seems especially apparent given the overly-diplomatic and toothless portrait of Hillary Clinton‘s campaign. Her current position as President Obama’s Secretary of State obviously means it would have been very politically awkward for a documentary to bring up her frequently ugly, race-baiting campaign tactics and so — I don’t mean to sound over-cynical and pat-minded but how else am I to process this? — Rice and Sams have given her a near-total pass.

“There’s no mention of Hilary’s incessantly playing rhetorical race cards, talking about how working white people support her, etc. There’s no footage or even a mention of Bill Clinton, and therefore no mention of his post-South Carolina primary remark that Obama’s victory in that state was somehow comparable to Jesse Jackson ‘s win there in the mid ’80s. There’s no mention of Hillary’s cynical campaign speech about how Obama “will bring us together and the heavens will part” speech, which she delivered, as I recall, during the Ohio-and-Texas primary campaign. There’s no mention of Hillary’s made-up Bosnia story about dodging bullets when she visited that country in the mid ’90s. There’s no mention of Samantha Power‘s “Hillary is a monster” comment. There’s no mention of Hillary’s bizarre refusal to concede when she should have (i.e., after Obama had his electoral-vote triumph sewn up) and how she had to be stern-talked into doing so by Congressional and Senatorial colleagues.

“It’s even more bizarre that the racial resistance factor among white voters — surely the central hurdle of Obama’s campaign — is only faintly acknowledged. We’re shown a clip of a couple of younger Bubbas stating that Obama’s ancestry is a problem, but that’s just about it in terms of Rice and Sams catching the backwater attitudes that were brought up by reporters and the political talk-show crowd nearly every damn day during the primaries and the general election,

“The Reverend Wright issue is raised (how could it not be?) along with Obama’s historic Philadelphia speech about racial relations. But there’s no mention of Michelle taking heat for saying that the positive response to her husband’s campaign was cause for her feeling proud of the U.S for the first time in a long time. There’s no mention of that idiotic terrorist fist bump flap. No YouTube clip of that West Virginia cracker lady on the back of that motorcycle expressing cultural shock at the sound of Obama’s name. There’s no mention whatsover of the fear of the Bradley Effect, a now-discounted concern that white voters might change their minds about voting for a black candidate in the privacy of the voting booth due to latent racism. And Obama’s decision to finally cut all ties with Reverend Wright is completely ignored also.

“And there’s very little mention of the general campaign against John McCain and Sarah Palin. It accounts for maybe ten minutes out of the film, which runs somewhere close to two hours. (I should have timed it but didn’t.) No right-wing stirring of the racial pot, no mention of McCain’s ‘The One’ ad (and no clip of David Gergen explaining that the racial coding of that ad was clear to anyone who grew up in the South), no expressions of bone-dumb ignorance (‘He’s…I think he’s an Arab’) and/or racial hatred at McCain and Palin rallies (‘Kill him!’).

“There’s some good B-roll footage of Obama playing basketball with friends, but the best photo-op basketball moment of the entire campaign — i.e., the moment when Obama made a near-perfect shot from outside the penalty circle in front of an audience of troops in Iraq — is missing. It leads you to suspect/presume that Rice and Sams didn’t cover last summer’s Middle East/European tour, and to ask why.

“In sum, For The People emphasizes emotionality and intimacy at the expense of the fierce melodrama and primal intensity that were fundamental aspects of the story. I could be mean and call it a puff piece and….you know something? It’s not being mean to say that because it more or less is that. I’m not saying that Rice and Sams were in fact emotionally entwined with the Obama campaign, but the doc makes it seem as if they were. And that’s a no-no. You have to step back and disengage and be merciless, if necessary.

“There are several little things in the film that are pleasing or revealing in this or that minor way. But the fact is that most of the film is not focused on Obama himself as much as his campaign staff, and much of this footage feels like B roll. The narrative emphasis in the doc is akin to the kind of backstory you might pass along to your grandmother as you show her your family photo album and explain this and that. It’s too kindly and considerate and smoothed over..

“It’s been pointed out by a friend of Rice and Sams that ‘the filmmakers made the film they wanted to make…it’s called By The People. And they captured the emotion of the campaign.’ On this last point I respectfully disagree.”

I don’t know what I was doing when this Matt Zoller Seitz video essay about Elia Kazan ‘s On The Waterfront went up almost a month ago. The more-or-less conventional view is that the story of Terry Malloy vs. Johnny Friendly is “a rat’s fantasy” or “a stoolie’s defense.” Seitz argues otherwise, or at least that a fairer, more perceptive reading is somewhere in the middle.

Kazan’s rep has long been tarnished by his cooperation with the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952 by agreeing to confirm names of Hollywood professionals who had named by others as having once had Communist affiliations. Seitz, however, says he agreed to “name names,” which isn’t quite the same thing and is therefore, to my knowledge, not precisely true.

Hollywood Reporter critic Ray Bennett, not exactly known for his no-holds-barred contrary opinions, shocked the film industry yesterday by calling Sam Taylor-Wood‘s Nowhere Boy, which had its premiere last night in London, a “passable look at the early life of John Lennon…quite a dull film.” If Bennett, who gave a pass to Amelia and Momma Mia!, can’t find a way to bend over for this film, it suggests that the U.S. critical consensus might be an issue down the road.

The British critics loved it. Of course, they usually roll over for British-produced films so you need to take their Nowhere Boy views with a grain of salt. Here’s the Telegraph guy, Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian, The Independent‘s Geoffrey Macnab and Time Out‘s Dave Calhoun.

With Hugh Jackman stating he’s not interested in hosting the 2010 Oscars, and the show’s new producers (Bill Mechanic, Adam Shankman) presumably aware that drawing younger viewers is a priority, let me repeat a truism voiced two years ago by Manhattan ad exec Shari Anne Brill, to wit: “Younger viewers live their lives pushing the envelope, breaking rules and bending rules. As long as the Oscars are perceived to have a certain rigidity, they’re not going to be relatable to young people.”

In other words, don’t hire another setttled smoothie. You don’t want your next host performing a 75 year-old Fred Astaire tune in evening finery — you want Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson (the most innovative/hilarious team to occupy the Oscar stage in recent years), or anyone for that matter with a post-9/11 fuck-all sense of humor and smarty-pants inclinations. I don’t care if Sarah Silverman‘s humor is of the LQTM variety — she’s da bomb. If the Vince Vaughn of the Wedding Crashers could host the show, the show would be instant gold. Suggestions? No more boomers, no more nods to boomer sensibilities…boomers are done.

No thanks to Matt Zoller Seitz for not sending me his latest video essay, a Zombie 101 tutorial; I had to hunt it down on Movie City News. One presumes he was inspired by the success of Zombieland. I know that George Romero‘s latest, Survival of the Dead, is still looking for distribution, and is showing next at the American Film Market.

“Ultimately zombie films aren’t about the zombies, which have no conscious mind and therefore no personality,” he begins. “They’re a collective menace — rotting emblems of plague, catastrophe, war, and other world-upending events. The films depict representative social types wandering amid the ruins of the civilization they once took for granted, trying to reconcile their pre-zombie moral code (do unto others as you would have them do unto you) with the harsh necessities of the present (‘If you’ve got a gun, shoot ’em in the head,’ a sheriff tells a TV reporter in Night of the Living Dead, adding, ‘If you don’t, get yourself a club or a torch. Beat ’em or burn ’em, they go down pretty easy’).

“If there’s no military, no police force, no law, no justice, and no hope, what’s the point of being decent as opposed to selfish? Might it be possible that, under such unimaginably awful circumstances, selfishness is decency? And if your mom is bitten by a zombie, at what point is it all right to stop treating her like your mom and reach for the 12-gauge? Dear Abby never had to ponder such questions. To quote the alternative title of a 1974 Werner Herzog movie, in zombie films it’s every man for himself and God against all. And as survivors sift through the rubble, weighing selfish imperatives against kinder, gentler impulses that might get them and everyone around them killed, the genre pulls off a nifty bit of creative jujitsu, defining civilization, morality, stability, and decency by depicting their opposites.”

L.A.Times/Gold Derby columnist Tom O’Neil has recalculated his Best Picture Oscar prediction poll with input from 16 pundits. Only The Hurt Locker and Invictus are supported by the whole crew. Precious and Up in the Air got 15 votes, two blew off Up and three blew off Nine. Ten voted for An Education and Avatar. And four have now joined me in supporting A Serious Man — O’Neil, Robert Osborne, Steve Pond and Peter Travers.

“Here’s why we’re here…because this little gray rock sells for $20 million a kilo. Their village happens to be resting on the richest deposit and they need to be relocated. Those savages are threatening our whole operation, we’re on the brink of war, and you’re supposed to be finding a diplomatic solution.” — Giovanni Ribisi‘s yuppie scumbag to Sigourney Weaver‘s Grace Augustine, a good-gal botanist, in a clip from the latest Avatar trailer. I saw this last night at the Chelsea Clearview before This Is It.

Giovannbi Ribisi, Sigourney Weaver in Avatar.

Having leafed through a print edition of Variety, New Yorker‘s Richard Brody reported today that Noah Baumbach ‘s Greenberg, a relationship drama with Ben Stiller and Greta Gerwig, and Sofia Coppola‘s Somewhere, which I know zip about but which costars Stephen Dorff, Elle Fanning and Michelle Monaghan, will screen at the American Film Market (11.4 to 11.11). I’m thinking I could wangle my way in if I was out there.