Summit’s gradual Hurt Locker rollout is more or less patterned after the successful territory-by-territory, word-of-mouth-building expansions that resulted in big returns for Slumdog Millionaire and Gran Torino, reports Forbes‘ Laura Myers. She states that Kathy Bigelow‘s film “may become the year’s independent breakout by combining early box-office success with critical acclaim.”

But the proof will be in the chocolate pudding as the film expands to 93 siutations this weekend and then to 200 situations on 7.24. The key, of course, given the general laziness and scattered ADD mentalities out there, will be TV advertising. Word of mouth is well and good and vital for success, but you also have to grab people by the lapels and go “hey!”

In a N.Y. Times profile published today, David Carr writes that with the sale of Deadline Hollywood Daily to Mail.com, Nikki Finke “stands to make more than $5 million in the next eight years, and her deal could go as high as $10 million, according to one of the people involved in the deal who declined to be quoted citing the private nature of the negotiations.” So much for the $14 million sale figure reported by The Wrap on 6.23.

I love the following passage at the end of Carr’s piece, by the way: “If the deal works out, Ms. Finke’s probing phone calls will continue to panic the suits in Hollywood for some time to come. Without saying who it was, she gave a recent example of someone who ended up as a pelt on her wall. ‘I implored him to talk to me, and he did a little, but not enough,’ she explained. ‘He should have protected himself.'”

“If” the deal works out?

As with any subway map, you need to focus on the legend and proceed from there. Consider the partial images below and then click on the big version.

Best wishes and favoring winds to Anne Thompson and her plan to base Thompson on Hollywood on Indiewire starting August 1st. Her deal with SnagFilms and IndieWire CEO Rick Allen, according to a Paid Content story (which links to a Sharon Waxman Wrap story), says she’ll handle her own ads. She’ll of course receive promotion and visibility through the Indiewire hookup. My understanding is that Thompson was looking hard at the Indiewire thing a couple of months ago.

The most uncompromised aspect of Nikki Finke‘s 7.16 post about Bonnie Fuller‘s hiring by Mail.com Media Corporation (MMC) to run HollywoodLife.com is — of course, as ever — the reader comments. I was particularly struck by the following comment posted at 10:53 pm last night by “Stacy,” to wit:

“Egads…Bonnie Fuller? Queen of Tabloid Lies? That woman has zero conscience when it comes to lying about celebrities, making up stories based on the pictures, terrorizing her staff and making a mockery of the media’s first amendment rights.

“Fuller is a cat with nine lives. After American Media (i.e., Star, The National Enquirer, Globe) fired her I really hoped she’d fade into the woodwork and no one would hire her to taint their organization and turn young and impressionable “journalists” into lying scumbags like she did at Us Weekly and the American Media mags.

“But when all anyone cares about is the bottom line then Bonnie Fuller is the person you want. HollywoodLife.com can kiss morals, truth, verified and named sources and just plain old good taste on the ass and wave bye-bye.

“I can see it now. On Fuller’s first day HollywoodLife.com’s homepage will read, ‘BRAD BEGS JEN FOR SECOND CHANCE’ or ‘ANGIE DRIVES BRAD AWAY FOR GOOD!’ or ‘BRAD TELLS JEN, ‘I STILL LOVE YOU”. Just when I thought this fuckery was going to end, along comes Bonnie Fuller out of the woodwork. Bleh. That’s the unfortunate thing with cockroaches — they’ll survive a nuclear holocaust and the rest of us will be deader than doornails. Roaches outlived the dinosaurs and Bonnie Fuller will outlive her fellow cockroaches.”

Stacy needed a better kicker than the dinosaurs/cockroaches analogy. And the line about “this fuckery” coming to an end is a little simple-minded given that (a) the likelihood that mindlessly made-up tabloid stories about celebrity relationships would fade away is less than zero given that (b) the young under-educated females who lap this stuff up every week have certain emotional appetites, diseased philosophies and self-esteem issues that exist independent of Bonnie Fuller’s ravings and imaginings. But the point is made.

There are many ugly and deplorable elements in U.S. society. The people who worship the ravings of Glenn Beck, for example. But sometimes, particularly after buying groceries at a supermarket, I find myself muttering that there’s nothing worse — nothing lower, shallower, stupider, and more spiritually rancid or pathetic — than the longings and imaginings and material aspirations of Fuller’s female readership.

Here is David Carr‘s dry-as-a-bone reporting about the MMC/Fuller announcement.

A fairly recent recording of an information/blistering critique line at the Diamond Cinema in Navan, Ireland — roughly 50 kilometers northwest of Dublin. The Diamond guy who recorded this clearly has issues with the champagne bottle scene. That or he’s a frustrated critic who needs his own film blog. Diamond phone #: 353.046.907.4755.

My all-time favorite saloon shoot-out, hands down. Will someone please save this film from public domain hell and figure out a way to remaster it and make it look as sharp and rich as possible? Bartender: “Mister, you really killed him.” Gunslinger: “Awww.”

The big bearded British guy in McCabe and Mrs. Miller — the hired assassin who carried an elephant shotgun around and wore big boots and a huge sheepskin coat and a huge wide-brimmed hat, and who was shot in the forehead with a single-shot derringer by Warren Beatty at the very end — has pushed off in real life. His name was Hugh Millais, and he was 79 years old. He was about 40 when he made McCabe.

And the verdict is…?

Here‘s an appreciation of Nicholas Ray‘s In a Lonely Place, which will play at Manhattan’s Film Forum from Friday, 7.17, to Thursday, 7.23. Editing by Matt Zoller Seitz, words and narration by Kim Morgan, adapted from a Sunset Gun post. Here’s Michael Joshua Rowin‘s L Mag review. The last DVD version (released in ’03) delivered a severe grainstorm — here’s hoping the situation has changed.

If this 7.16 N.Y. Times story isn’t a Michael Mann film, I’ll eat my Elph digital camera. Mann can save himself by pouncing on this one right away. If I were him I’d be all over it like a spider. I’d have a screenwriter hired and working on it as we speak.

“Last weekend, the arrest of a senior figure in a Mexican drug cartel known as La Familia led to a wave of coordinated attacks by the cartel against federal police posts and one military base, killing three federal officers and two soldiers,” N.Y. Times reporter Robert Mackey wrote today.

“The range and extent of the violence across the western state of Michoacan led one respected Mexican columnist, Ciro Gomez Leyva, to compare it to the Tet offensive during the Vietnam war. In a column headlined ‘El Tet michoacano y el principio del fin’ (‘The Michoacán Tet and the Beginning of the End’), published on Monday in the newspaper Milenio, Mr. Gómez Leyva wrote:

“In the drug war, July 11 seems like a sort of Tet offensive, the synchronized, Hollywood-style offensive by South Vietnamese guerrillas and the North Vietnamese Army against U.S. troops in late January 1968 that, despite being described as a military disaster, created the perception that Washington’s formerly invincible army would never win in Vietnam.”

One of the many things that make Cary Grant feel angry and humiliated in Bringing Up Baby is Katherine Hepburn‘s decision to refer to him as “Mr. Bone.” I thought of this because poor Jennifer Aniston must feel angry and humiliated by the tabloid media’s characterizing her as “Mrs. Bone” — i.e., a woman who rarely if ever sleeps alone, and who never seems to settle.

The best acting she ever did was in The Breakup, but after that, what? I don”t like submitting to tabloid chatter as topics of mosquito conversation in my head, but when I think of Aniston I really don’t think of her work. I think of her bouncing-ball personal life. The associative dramas in her life aren’t about performances but when if ever will she finally stop shopping around? She’s like a 21st Century incarnation of what Mary Astor and Tallulah Bankhead were known for in their day. Their excitable cavortings, I mean. Except Bankhead killed in Lifeboat and Astor had her Maltese Falcon performance to point to.

The fact is that even among those who’ve never so much as glanced at a supermarket rag Aniston’s rep is that of (a) someone whose prime artistic opportunity days are probably behind her, (b) who’s never going to make another Good Girl (which wasn’t that great to begin with) and (c) who, at age 40, is basically competing with Sandra Bullock for Sandra Bullocky-styled romantic roles and that’s all. The only thing she might be ale to do and really get rolling with again is another TV series.