Taken early this afternoon at Robert De Vine‘s Anatomorphex modelshop, the highlight of today’s InFilm tour.

Obviously something amphibious, a little Creature From the Black Lagoon-y.

Sigmund Freud.

Hard to put a name to it.

Tom Cruise lifemask.

Yesterday morning’s rip of Deadline Hollywod Daily‘s Nikki Finke by MCN’s David Poland was brutally phrased, to say the least. “Fact is, whether I like it or not, Nikki is the Niche Winchell in this tiny little world of show business insiders,” Poland said. “She lies often, gets it wrong almost as often, but always thinks she is truthful and right. And I do believe that she really does believe that. Such is the nature of the sociopath.

“The glory of the professional, morality-free gossip is that burnt bridges mean little, since there is always someone else there with a can of gas and some matches to hand you…since you are so happy to take it, spread it, and light it.

“But this is a small town. And when the gossip is too exposed — when everyone is paying attention — the dynamics of how people use gossips change. The price of getting caught feeding the monster gets higher and higher.

“The advantage that Walter Winchell had — aside from an era with a slower news cycle — a national consumer platform. His smears really could damage the public image of talent. Not so much Nikki. She is more the ugly mean girl with money in showbiz high school.

“And I don’t mean that as a comment on Nikki’s looks. She is a perfectly nice looking woman. What I mean to say is that she is the kind of mean girl who uses the power she gathers from someone else’s power (in high school, her parents’ money…in Hollywood, targeted information from powerful people) to feel better about herself by hurting others and feeling powerful in her own right as a result.

“And the people who gather to feed this manipulation? Weasels. Every one. Unless it is your job to service someone else’s bad behavior — in which case, you have my sympathy — if you feed the cycle, all the while snickering about how you can control The Nikki, you are a small as the tool you use.”

I feel like a Tryceratops watching King Kong and that huge Tyrannosaurus Rex duke it out in Act Two of King Kong. It starts around the 4:25 mark.

“My goal was to make a film that was just as funny as my other two films, but which also dug a lot deeper and was not afraid to be more emotional,” Judd Apatow has told Roger Ebert. “We didn’t put anything in the film just to be funny — it also had to get at the truth of this type of situation. It was very scary because I am so used to letting the laugh count guide me as to whether or not the movie is working well. Sometimes this movie is working really well when there are no laughs. That’s new for me. I prefer to hear noises from the crowd wall-to-wall to make me sleep better at night.”

Apatow also says he’s always had “a good ear for writing in the voice of the comics I was writing jokes for, but it took me decades to believe my own point of view would be interesting to people. I could never believe that comics would allow me into their world. The hard part about writing this movie was the fact that the comedians I wrote for were very nice to me. Nothing dramatic ever happened.”

There’s a startling declaration in Paul Bond‘s 7.27 Hollywood Reporter story about Jeffrey Katzenberg‘s home-video 3D remarks last Friday. The DreamWorks animation honcho said that 3-D TV is “so far beyond” what it was just nine months ago, and that “monitors are shipping now and will be in stores by early next year.” But that’s not the popper.

Katzenberg said consumers will have to wear special glasses when these TVs arrive but — here it is — “autostereo displays will negate that need ‘in a handful of years.'”

In other words, by 2015 or thereabouts stores will be selling quality-level 3-D TVs that you won’t have to wear glasses for. I don’t want to think about the cost of these TVs, and you know that quality issues will be bothersome for at least a couple of years. It always take a while to iron the bugs out.

Sharon Waxman‘s things-are-looking-pretty-scary-at-Universal piece on The Wrap reported that Uni execs “unsuccesfully lobbied” Funny People director Judd Apatow “to cut the film by a half-hour.” This is surprising or startling? Aren’t suits always pressuring directors to cut their films? My point is that sometimes urging this isn’t wise for the film’s sake, and that this was one of those times.

Update: It’s understood by everyone except for Asian and Eastern European cave-dwellers that Adam Sandler plays a self-centered comedian in the film — i.e., a guy with a personality/attitude problem. Any idiot knows that 98% of movies that deal with this sort of thing always resort to some kind of “third-act wake-up” element. It’s great when you come across the occasional exception (such as Martin Ritt‘s Hud) but everyone knows about the 98% rule…hello? Nonetheless, some have complained about the following graph so here’s a spoiler warning…okay? The same whiners might also want to slam Roger Ebert for calling his Judd Apatow interview piece “Apatow on How To Learn Nothing From a Near-Death Experience.”

I realize I’m in the minority, but I had hardly any problems with Funny People ‘s final third. For me it satisfies because it delivers the Big Payoff. By this I mean the two big revelations about Adam Sandler‘s character — that (a) even a brush with death hasn’t modified his selfish-prick tendencies and yet (b) he has the capacity at the very end to at least recognize this shortcoming and to try to make amends with someone he’s hurt and pushed away.

For me it’s almost a Vincente Minelli/The Bad and the Beautiful -type ending. You obviously have to know this film and the ending to get what I’m saying.

I’m writing this because I really hate what that Waxman paragraph is implying, which is that Funny People is a problem movie facing an uphill box-office struggle. Not that she’s necessarily wrong but I hate the act of spreading poison pollen about a film that really doesn’t deserve it. A tough time with the lowbrows may be in store, but Funny People is an ascerbic, funny and relentlessly honest film that is quite personal and revelatory on Apatow and Sandler’s part.

And while I realize that Waxman wasn’t gunning for Funny People per se, the import of that paragraph in her story is emblematic of what creates an iffy/downbeat buzz in advance and helps to bring about a negative result.

I know — I sound like an Apatow publicist or propagandist.

Let’s say that perhaps Universal suits did want him to cut 30 minutes from the film’s final section. The point, as I understand it, is that Funny People was a creative gimme for Apatow. It was basically one of those “okay, I’ve made everyone a lot of money and now it’s time for me to make a growth-arc movie which may not kick box-office ass but will do reasonably well” type deals. Name-brand filmmakers have to make growth-arc films from time to time or they’ll go stale and flat.

It’s just unfortunate that Apatow’s growth-arc flick is being released in the midst of one of Universal’s most disappointing box-office streaks in a long while.

It’s doubly gloomy that NBC-Uni honcho Jeff Zucker admonished top Uni execs with these words: “Easy-to-digest concepts and wish fulfillment is in vogue. That’s not our slate. And the choices have been too costly. You’ve got to fix both those things.” In other words, put on your shallow hats and lower your standards.

Waxman reports that tracking indicates it may earn $20 million this weekend.

Screen International reported last Friday that Beeban Kidron, director of the endlessly-delayed, obviously problematic Hippie Hippie Shake, has left the film over disagreements with Working Title, the film’s producer. The film’s screenwriter Lee Hall, Kidron’s husband, bolted sometime earlier.

The counter-culture drama about Oz editor Richard Neville (Cillian Murphy) and his girlfriend Louise Ferrier (Sienna Miller) began shooting nearly two years ago, in September 2007.

The Screen Int’l story said that Working Title “has scotched rumors that Hippie Hippie Shake is to go straight to DVD, saying that it is scheduled to be released next February on over 100 prints.”

The rep of this poor misbegotten film has gone from intriguing to worrisome to there-must-be-something-wrong to massive fartbomb. I’ve been wanting to see it all along because of alleged “sexual content, strong dialogue, graphic nudity and drug use throughout.”

Only in Waxmanworld and Finkeworld (and among their orbiting buzz-feeders) does anyone care which NBC/Universal suits have been/might be/will be fired, or who got the news first. All right, people care somewhat but not that much.

When things aren’t going well the people at the very top of the pile start thinking about who to whack. I’m sorry for those whose heads are now in jeopardy — it’s obviously traumatic — but suits have to live with the threat of being suddenly discharged just as John Dillinger had to live with the possibility of getting cut down by G-Men. “We have spoken these words, Starbuck, a billion years before these waters rolled.”

“Who the hell knew that Tony Soprano could be so damn funny?,” writes MCN’s Noah Forrest in a piece called “10 Reasons [Why] You Must See In The Loop.”

James Gandolfini is “playing an Army General who is serious about trying to stop this war at all costs and even more serious about his job. He’s a man who is put in a dicey predicament, the only man in the film who actually knows the real cost of war. And he’s reluctant to sign based on false pretenses that might involve a lot of troops being killed. But he’s also sharp as hell and quick-witted, and Gandolfini smiles just enough to bring the right amount of levity to the proceedings.

“Basically Gandolfini’s character is supposed to be the Colin Powell of the story, a good man in an untenable situation. Except in this case, he’s got a wicked and dry sense of humor. There’s a scene that Gandolfini and Peter Capaldi share, [with] so many wonderful insults thrown back and forth that I couldn’t stop myself from smiling the whole time.”

“I’d like…let’s see, one latte with skim milk to go and a Mountain Gorilla, black, for here. Thanks.” The woman at the Urth Caffe counter tried to block me from taking this photo, putting her hand in front of the iPhone. I said, “I can take any photo I want of anything I want…sorry.”

For the next five days I’ve agreed to observe and report on the InFilm program, which bills itself as a kind of Hollywood education experience for high-end tourists. The InFilm people are looking to spread the word around, and I thought it might be interesting to learn perhaps a bit more about the visual effects industry, which is the focus of this week’s get-around.

Taking an InFilm program Hollywood tour costs between $2500 and $3000 a pop. I’ve never heard of an operation like this, but it’s the sort of thing I’d probably go for if I had money to burn and didn’t have the social and informational access to the film industry that’s part of my Hollywood Elsewhere day-to-day.

The InFilmers are figuring that $2500 to $3000 isn’t too much to pay for a classy film connoisseur’s experience — for people who really and truly care about movies the way others care about Catholicism or whatever. It’s an informational way to blow dough, in short, for particular people who don’t see themselves as run-of-the-mill tourists.

That said, I’m not sure that this morning’s activity — a visit to the Academy’s Margaret Herrick Library, where I spent hundreds of hours researching articles during my print journalism days of the ’80s and ’90s — is going to broaden my horizons.

But later today we’ll be dropping by Digital Domain, which I’ve never once visited in all my years in Los Angeles. On Tuesday we’ll be visiting Anatomorphex, and then Rhythm & Hues the following day. Visits to Legacy FX and Full Scale Effects will happen on Thursday.

Suite #310 at West Hollywood’s Le Parc hotel

I was introduced to the InFilm program by Brazilian film critic, scholar and educator Pablo Villaca, whom I’ve known on an online basis for a few years.

I ran into Pablo yesterday afternoon at the Le Parc hotel, where InFilm is putting us up, and since he’s never been here before I took him a ten-cent tour of West LA, Santa Monica, the Ocean Park beach area, Bel Air, Beverly Hills and West Hollywood.

Anyway, that’s the deal for the next five days — a high-end tour of the local FX industry. I’ll carve some time out here and there to file whatever, and I’m going to keep up with screenings and whatnot in the evenings.