I’ve always thought that the word “chimerical” alludes to shamanry and hocus-pocus. Websters says it means “unreal, imaginary, visionary, wildly fanciful,” etc. Either way I can’t say I’ve used it with any regularity in daily conversation. Nonetheless, Slate‘s Kim Masters has used it to describe the Writers Guild’s alleged victory (i.e., “big win”) over the producers.
The just-about-concluded WGA strike was punishing but, in the words of Michael Clayton director-writer Tony Gilroy, “clearly necessary.” He tells N.Y. Times reporter David Carr (a.k.a. “the Bagger”) that writers and directors “have our nose in the tent for real for the first time” and that “we would never be in [this] position”without the strike. “Anybody who says the strike was a bad idea is dead wrong.√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√Ǭù
Carr notes, however, that the strike “was bad for writers in the short term. The delays caused by the strike prompted the studios to ask themselves a fundamental question about the need to finance all manner of pilots for a traditional upfront extravaganza followed by a traditional introduction in the fall. That system, fairly unchanged through the years, has historically been lucrative for writers.
“Emboldened by the strike, the studios severed existing contracts with writers, successfully turned over more of their prime-time schedules to reality programming and vowed to hold the line on filming new shows for next season.”
L.A. Times “Big Picture” columnist Patrick Goldstein,meanwhile, has declared that one of the biggest losers o the strike was teh HFPA and the Golden Globes.
“Does anyone remember that Johnny Depp won a Globe a few weeks ago?,” Goldstein asks. “Strip away the red carpet, the movie stars and some reliably antic behavior at the ceremonies and what do you have? An award show that no one in Hollywood paid the slightest attention to. Reduced to a 35-minute press conference by the refusal of actors to cross WGA picket lines, the Globes were revealed to be what they’ve tried so hard to disguise, a collection of awards concocted by 83 obscure foreign journalists, not an actual Hollywood institution.”

Defamer‘s Mark Lisanti has resigned his post and will be gone as of Friday. He doesn’t say why, of course. The burnout factor is pretty high with this kind of work. I would love to grow HE’s audience by contributing to Defamer in some modest but daily way (there have been discussions along these lines) but…but…but….a voice is telling me such a move would shave two or three years off my life. But maybe not.

Penn Jillette, the bigger, longer-haired and more garrulous half of Penn and Teller, tells a hilarious story about how a Hillary Clinton joke went down within the last couple of days. Great way to start the day off. I laughed, I convulsed.

I’ve been my usual sloppy and lazy self in attempting to catch the the Oscar-nominated live action and animated shorts. So far I’ve seen exactly one animated entry — Josh Raskin‘s I Met the Walrus. It reminds me a bit of portions of the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine, which may be deliberate because it’s based on an actual tape-recorded chat with John Lennon during his 1969 bed-in for peace in a Toronto hotel. It played at Sundance and the Santa Barbara Film Festivals, and, for what it’s worth, has HE’s seal of approval to point to.

Sen. Hillary Clinton “has to win both Ohio and Texas comfortably, or she’s out,” an unidentified Democratic superdelegate tells N.Y. Times reporter Patrick Healy in a piece that will appear in tomorrow’s (Tuesday, 2.12) edition. The source adds that the Clinton campaign “is starting to come to terms with that.” Campaign advisers have also “confirmed this view,” Healy writes.
Clinton and her advisers “increasingly believe that, after a series of losses, she has been boxed into a must-win position in the Ohio and Texas primaries on March 4, and she has begun reassuring anxious donors and superdelegates that the nomination is not slipping away from her, aides said Monday.
“Mrs. Clinton held a buck-up-the-troops conference call on Monday with donors, superdelegates and other supporters; [although] several of them said afterward that she sounded tired and a little down, but determined about Ohio and Texas. And these donors and superdelegates said that they were not especially soothed, saying they believed she could be on a losing streak that could jeopardize her competitiveness in Ohio and Texas.”

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Yesterday The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil talked to yours truly and Envelope contributor Pete Hammond about Oscar matters. I advanced my Russian-Chinese Communist suggestion about fixing the over-the-hill membership problem and discussed a possible Michael Clayton score in one of the categories. Hammond talked about the Academy’s “dirty little secret” (i.e., a lot of members don’t watch the nominated movies, or watch them all the way through) and the topic of possible upsets.

Just as serious weaknesses and fissures are showing up in the Hillary Clinton campaign and N.Y. Times reporter Patrick Healy is about to run a story saying that Clinton aides are voicing concerns that the nomination is “slipping from her grasp,” Jack Nicholson has stepped up to the plate with some kind of radio or phone pitch on behalf of HRC’s candidacy. Sounds like it was recorded specifically to assist on Super Tuesday. If so, why wasn’t it leaked earlier?

The people running the charitable trust of Lord of the Rings creator J.R.R. Tolkien sued New Line Cinema Corp. in Los Angeles court today for allegedly cheating it out of at least $150 million from the blockbuster movie trilogy, which has earned about $6 billion. The plaintiffs pointed to a 1969 contract with the studio that held the original rights to the work [stating they] were entitled to 7.5% of gross receipts from the films and related products, “less certain expenses.”

L.A. Times reporter Thomas Mulligan saves the best part of his story for the last paragraph, to wit: “In addition to $150 million in compensatory damages and unspecified punitive damages, the trust seeks to terminate New Line’s rights, which would bring The Hobbit to a halt.”
So give us some! (tromp, tromp). So give us some! (tromp, tromp). Hummm, good!…hummm, good! So give us some! (tromp, tromp). So give us some! (tromp, tromp).

“To me, Roy Scheider‘s passing has far greater reverberations than the untimely demise of Heath Ledger,” New York Press critic Eric Kohn wrote this morning. “It signals the loss of a major artist whose fully developed body of work remains wholly distinct from the formulaic trajectory of so many leading men.

“He was refreshingly believable as the hardened police chief vainly attempting to guard an unsuspecting town from the monstrous creature lurking off shore in Steven Spielberg‘s 1975 classic. And yet Hollywood formula didn√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢t sit that well with him: You could find him as a pimp in Klute and Gene Hackman√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s withdrawn sidekick in The French Connection, but never a one-man army or incredulous hustler.
“The Jaws sequel was his sole miscalculation, but he followed it up with All That Jazz, Bob Fosse√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s surrealist musical that remains potent to this day. The vibrant movie concludes with the show-stopping ‘Bye Bye Life,’ where Scheider√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s Fosse-like character bodes farewell to a troubled existence with a mixture of excitement and melancholia. It could be played at the actor√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s funeral.”
The Jaws sequel wasn’t Scheiders’ “sole miscalculation” but screw it…let it go.

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In today’s broadcast of The View, a back-from hiatus Barbara Walters had some advice for Hillary Clinton in lieu of her letter to NBC News president Steve Capus suggesting that David Shuster should be whacked for his “pimped out” comment: “Sometimes you say something unfortunate,” Walters said. “You apologize, [Shuster] is getting suspended, he apologized, MSNBC apologized. Drop it already! It’s okay. He made a mistake.”
Detecting the subtext? Walters would have never addressed Clinton in this fashion (i.e., calling her high-strung and lacking wisdom and restraint) if HRC wasn’t widely regarded as being on the ropes in the Democratic primary battle. Nobody will acknowledge this (cue angry retort from mutinyco), but a female politician getting shit from The View means it’s the beginning of the end.

Mark Harris, author of the just-out “Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood” (Penguin), told me a week or so ago I’d be getting a review copy. But nothing turned up and I figured I’d been blown off, especially when I read Janet Maslin‘s 2.11 N.Y. Times review online. But just as I was tapping this item out a Fed Ex guy knocked on the door and handed me a package with Harris’s book inside. Timing!

I’ll get around to writing a reaction later this week. In the meantime, the first four graphs from Maslin’s review:

“In the same year and even on the same planet, five crazily diverse films became nominees for the Academy Award for best picture in 1967. At its April 1968 ceremony the academy chose among an instant-classic vision of the brand new Generation Gap (The Graduate), a painfully dated Hollywood dinosaur (Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner), a fierily innovative, mythic outlaw tale (Bonnie and Clyde), a walking lecture on racial prejudice (In the Heat of the Night) and a budget-busting musical full of animals (Dr. Dolittle). The last of these, stinker that it was, appropriately had to be filmed on sets with drains patrolled by workers wielding brooms.

“It seemed to be a boom time for the movie business. When Variety, in 1968, printed its list of all-time top-grossing movies, a third of them were 1967 releases. And yet, as Mark Harris explains in a landmark new film book, ‘Pictures at a Revolution,’ the whole industry was poised on the brink of irrevocable change.
“Mr. Harris sifts through the evidence with reportorial acumen and great care, conjuring up the social and cultural history of a lost world and drawing on sharp new interviews with many of its major players. Forty years after the fact, people like Dustin Hoffman, Mike Nichols, Arthur Penn, Warren Beatty, Sydney Pollack, Robert Towne, Robert Benton, Lee Grant and Buck Henry sound as if they’re still making sense of 1967’s tidal wave.

“‘Pictures at a Revolution’ can take its place alongside top-shelf film industry books like ‘Easy Riders, Raging Bulls,’ ‘Final Cut,’ ‘The Studio’ and ‘The Devil√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s Candy’ for qualities all of them share: the big-picture overview, the nuts-and-bolts understanding of exactly how films evolve from the drawing board to the screen, and gratifying antennae for all forms of Hollywood-related horror stories.”

There’s a remastered, double-disc, bells-and- whistles Bonnie and Clyde DVD coming from Warner Home Video on 3.25 for $39.92. A remastered presentation from the original elements (I never thought the previous DVD looked in any way degraded), a History Channel doc called “Love and Death: The Story of Bonnie and Clyde,” a 3-part Making of Bonnie and Clyde doc, Warren Beatty wardrobe tests, two deleted scenes (The Road to Mineloa and Outlaws), trailers, a 36-page hardcover book of behind-the-scenes photos, and a 24-page reproduction of the original 1967 press book.

The absolute best Bonnie and Clyde website (“best” meaning the one with the most sources, the most detailed histories as well as the most explicit gory photos of the bodies of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker after the ambush massacre on that country road in Louisiana) is Frank R. Ballinger‘s Bonnie and Clyde’s Texas Hideout. My favorite quote is an eyewitness to the final shooting saying that Bonnie Parker “screamed like a panther” as the bullets tore into her. (Panthers don’t scream — they yowwwwl.) The site has been running since ’97.