Please, please, please — not Gov. Tim Kaine for Obama’s vice-presidential candidate.

Bill Maher and Larry Charles‘ Religulous, the Lionsgate doc that will play at the Toronto Film Festival roughly two weeks hence but won’t open in theatres until 10.3, is now playing twice daily at Laemmle’s Claremont 5, about 20 minutes east of downtown Los Angeles. Here’s the link to the Yahoo page showing the current Claremont 5 listings, and here‘s the recording.

No reference to the crybaby musical genre — it’s just that the letters “clar” and “nt” were dark when the shot was taken.

The reason for the early booking is the Academy’s Rule 12, which states that to be eligible for a Best Documentary Feature “a documentary feature must complete both a seven-day commercial run in a theater in Los Angeles County, and a seven-day commercial run in a theater in the borough of Manhattan between September 1, 2007 and August 31, 2008.”
That means Religulous is probably playing in some out-of-the-way theatre in the Manhattan area also. No critics will be reviewing off the Claremont booking. Even though, it must be noted, N.Y. Times critic Manohla Dargis reviewed Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired off of a qualifying booking in a theatre in Yonkers last March.

Eleven or twelve years ago Robert Evans shared an unfortunate biological truth with me, which is that “when you get older your nose gets bigger, your ears get bigger and longer and your teeth get smaller.” This is what came back to me, in any event, when I read Elizabeth Snead‘s photo-comparison article about nose jobs.
Snead puts it thusly: “Ears and noses are made mostly of cartilage that may continue to grow as we age. So when a person’s nose is perceived by others to be getting smaller and more refined over the years, it raises question for the eagle-eyed star watchers.”
Cheers to Owen Wilson for holding back, standing his ground and not going with the flow.

I’m one of the many people in this town who are grieved to hear about manager Joan Hyler‘s traumatic accident last Friday night. She was hit by a car while crossing Pacific Coast Highway. She sustained “severe and multiple injuries” and lost a lot of blood. I called the UCLA hospital where she’s being cared for and was told to go to www.carepages.com — my first internet attempt to check up on someone in a hospital and wish them well. My best wishes to Joan. She’s always been a good egg and a kind soul.

In response to hopes that the recently finished W will show up at the Toronto Film Festival, HE talk-backer Rodrigo called this an unlikely scenario. He’s forgetting that W director Oliver Stone is a very fast editor (he whipped JFK together in near-record time). He also needs to be reminded of the production schedule of Otto Preminger‘s Anatomy of a Murder, which began shooting on 3.23.59, wrapped on 5.15.59 and opened on 7.2.59. It was later nominated for seven Academy Awards.

As one who’s reported on the shortcomings of movie-ad campaign decisions by Lionsgate marketing vp Tim Palen (such as Dane Cook‘s 8.12 complaint about the one-sheet for My Best Friend’s Girl) and voiced my own issues from time to time (like the gay-metrosexual ads for 3:10 to Yuma), I have to take my hat off and say “job well done” regarding those new W ads.

The slogan, in particular, is a bulls-eye: “A Life Misunderestimated.” (And it’s not finessed. About.com’s Daniel Kurtzman has reported that Bush said “they misunderestimated me” in Bentonville, Arkansas, on Nov. 6, 2000.) Crew Creative was hired to turn out the ads, but the final creative call always rests with the top in-house marketing guy.
Ad Age‘s Claude Brodesser-Akner is reporting that the W posters will be billboarded in Denver and Minneapolis during the respective Democratic and Republican conventions. The piece doesn’t make clear if the more swaggering poster image of Josh Brolin‘s Bush (look of calm and confidence, cowboy boots up on desk) will be used in Minneapolis while the more doofusy-looking one will be used in Denver, or if the posters are meant to be regarded side by side.
It would be great, of course, if W is on tomorrow morning’s list of the final Toronto Film Festival titles. Here’s hoping. W is opening on 10.17, or slightly more than a month after the festival concludes.
Sidenote: A page on Crew Creative‘s website takes credit for the much-maligned poster for My Best Friend’s Girl….whoops.

I’ve been looking at some of my old Mr. Showbiz columns for the last half-hour or so and was struck by this particular “What’s My Line? query. They were fun, these things. But a pain in the ass to select and transcribe.
Guy No. 1: Are you a beer drinker, sir, or would you like to share a martini with me?
Guy No. 2: A martini? Oh, that would be… I’d love a martini.
Guy No. 1: I think you’ll find these accommodating. They’re quite dry.
Guy No. 2: Don’t you use olives?
Guy No. 3: Olives? Where the hell d’ya think you are, man?
Guy No. 1: We do have to make certain concessions to [the situation we find themselves in].
Guy No. 2: Yes, but a man can’t really savor his martini without an olive, you know? Otherwise, you see, it just doesn’t…quite…make it. (Plop.)

Both The Atlantic‘s Andrew Sullivan and Daily Kos‘s “rickrocket” wondered aloud today about the origin of John McCain‘s “cross in the dirt” story, which the presumptive Republican candidate repeated yesterday during his Saddleback Church discussion segment. Sulllivan and “rickrocket” aren’t making firm claims, but they’re both noting that the story is remarkably similar to one recounted by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago (or perhaps in Burt Ghezzi‘s The Sign of the Cross — one or the other).

“I loved The Prestige but didn’t understand The Dark Knight,” Robert Downey, Jr. said to a Moviehole correspondent two weeks ago. “Didn’t get it, still can’t tell you what happened in the movie, what happened to the character and in the end they need him to be a bad guy. I’m like, ‘I get it. This is so highbrow and so fucking smart, I clearly need a college education to understand this movie.’ You know what? Fuck DC comics. That’s all I have to say and that’s where I’m really coming from.”

As the intensely despised Stars Wars: The Clone Wars opened this weekend to a kind of half-dud response ($15 million and change), and since it’s been called the absolute end of the road by many a longtime Star Wars fan, I thought it appropriate to rewind nine years and three months to the first major display of Star Wars prequel-mania.

I was off the boat like that after seeing The Phantom Menace, but to think that it took others nine years to come to the realization that bloated Beelzebub George Lucas had spiritually destroyed his own franchise while making money hand over fist is amazing. Nine years of holding on and keeping the faith, and for what?
I’ve scanned five pages of my Mr. Showbiz article, which ran in early May 1999 and which I called “The Fandom Penance.” Here are page #1, page #2, page #3, page #4 and page #5.

Here’s hoping or presuming that Enrique Rivero‘s Parque Via, which today won the top prize at the Locarno Film Festival, will turn up at the Toronto Film Festival. If it’s already been programmed or listed, great — I just haven’t found it yet. Which means nothing. Here’s Derek Elley‘s Variety review.

Parque Via helmer Enrique Rivero

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