Women’s Wear Daily‘s subscriber-based website has one of the dumbest web-search engines currently operating, so there’s no finding Jacob Bernstein‘s profile of Deadline Hollywood Daily‘s Nikki Finke, which apparently went up within the last day or two. (Media Bistro‘s Kate Coe sent me the text, but there’s no link on her site to the original piece.)

Bernstein’s article seems throughly researched and reported, although I’m sure Finke will have a beef with it one way or the other. She comes off as smart, headstrong, dogged, hot-and-cold, obsessive — a tough cookie in a tough town.

Significant Finke quote #1: “It’s not my fault these people do what they do to each other. It’s not my fault they make stinky movies. I just report it.” Quote #2: “Would I like to cure Hollywood? Yes.” Quote #3: “My problem, it’s a tragedy actually, is that I’m a Cassandra. I’m a canary in a fucking coal mine.” Quote #4: “I’m not good with bosses. And I love what I do now. I love this website. It’s the most fantastic and freeing thing in the world. I make my deadlines. I decide what I write. I have total control.”

Left coasters may be unaware that Bernstein, a WWD columnist (it’s hard to be rock-sure with WWD’s idiotic site refusing to spit out information), is the son of Nora Ephron and Carl Bernstein.

Michael Wilson and Barbara Broccoli, the caretaker producers of the 007 films who are regarded industry-wide as stooges and “stoppers”, are apparently back to their tricks by trying to take the brutish edge off of Daniel Craig‘s James Bond character in Bond #22, which Marc Forster will direct. Take a moment to slap yourself hard on the side of the head. Craig’s rough brutish edge is precisely the thing that made Casino Royale feel fresh and revitalized.

“They just want more gags,” Craig says in the 7.13 edition of the Daily Express, referring to Broccoli-Wilson “The next one’s going to be a lot funnier…Octopussy and Pussy Galore-style style gags. They’re all great names, but that’s the thing — the Bond jokes will be flipped on their heads.”
Wilson-Broccoli’s dislike of a non-Roger Mooreish, blunt-weapon Bond was indicated when director Roger Michell decided against directing Casino Royale due to “creative differences.” This translated into Michell wanting “an element of cruelty [in the Bond character]…certain things he does should be questionable…I think you should go, ‘Fuck, that’s not nice”, and Wilson-Broccoli being against this, as I reported in this ’06 story.
In my review of Casino Royale last November I noted that “the whole shaken-not- stirred, sexual-smoothie-in-a-tuxedo, Walther PPK stud-with-a-quip thing has been thrown out the window, finally and praise God. The influence of producers Michael Wilson and Barbara Broccoli is finally dead, dead…and ding-dong to that! Wilson-Broccoli have naturally been trying to sell the notion they were four-square behind this new incarnation, but don’t buy it. They’ve been the invisible-car bad guys — stooge caretakers — since they grabbed the reins in the mid ’90s. The startling coolness of this new film happened in spite of Wilson- Broccoli, not because of them.
Broccoli-Wilson own (or co-own) the franchise and can’t be fired. So, as I’ve suggested in the past, the best thing to happen to the Bond films would be a compassionate kidnapping. Wilson and Broccoli wouldn’t be killed or harmed, but would be gently seized and flown to, let’s say, a remote location in Southeast Asia and made to live in a huge guarded villa. They would be given every last comfort of home — high-def flat panels, private gyms, gourmet meals thrice daily, wifi up the wazoo, sexual slaves at the snap of their fingers — but they wouldn’t be allowed to leave the compound for the rest of their natural lives or exert the slightest influence upon the Bond series ever again.

“Destined to be better remembered for its grisly billboard imagery than for its relatively tame torture-porn tropes, Captivity is a thoroughly nasty piece of work that nonetheless earns credit for generating modest suspense after a predictable but effective plot twist around the 50-minute mark. Pic likely will be a nonstarter as a theatrical item — given the recent B.O. performance of Hostel: Part II, the subgenre may be in at least temporary decline — but devotees of such disreputable product may pony up for an unrated DVD edition.” — from Joe Leydon‘s 7.13 Variety review.

The hilarious final scene from “Sorry, Harvey,” the Entourage episode (#46) that aired a few days ago. Maury Chaykin‘s “Harvey Weingard” character (based on the old Harvey of the mid to late ’90s) first appeared in an ’05 episode called “The Sundance Kids.” The next Entourage episode (#47) wil focus on the posse’s visit to the Cannes Film Festival.

The story about Dimension’s abandoning of All The Boys Love Mandy Lane was given to me an hour ago. The announcement obviously came a little late, but the film’s been bought for domestic distribution by Marco Weber‘s Senator Entertainment, Inc., a production and finance company based in Berlin and Los Angeles with an established relationship with Bob and Harvey. Dimension will handle the home video distribution. Okay, but what persuaded Dimension to sell Mandy Lane in the first place? Halitosis?
Mandy will be the first film that Senator will release in the U.S. It’s also financing/producing Fireflies in the Garden with Ryan Reynolds, Willem Dafoe, Julia Roberts and Emily Watson under director Dennis Lee, and is also on pre-production of The Informers, an adaptation of Brett Easton Ellis‘s book to be directed by Gregor Jordan (Buffalo Solders, Ned Kelly, Two Hands).

There’s something vaguely therapeutic about this routine. I listen to it every two or three months. And it wouldn’t be funny if millions didn’t understand that a lot of people out there are in the grip of an obsession, and that they’re compeletely powerless against it. No controlling it, no taming it….slaves under the whip. Doesn’t sound very funny at all, and yet…

I’ve been hearing stuff about the Bill Maher-Larry Charles anti-religion doc for a few months now, and I wasn’t invited to see the “sizzle reel” in Cannes two months ago. (No journalists were — only buyers.) But now Lionsgate has bought the domestic distribution rights, and the plan is to release it sometime “next spring.” Wait…eight or nine more months? One of these guys is an ass-dragger. Why don’t they take another year?

Bill Maher, Larry Charles

Charles (the Borat helmer) “followed Maher all over the world as the irreverent host of HBO’s Real Time With Bill Maher interviewed people about God and religion,” according to Michael Fleming‘s 7.12 Variety story. Here’s Maher ranting about religion during his stage show, and a Real Time discussion about how Islam “is not a religion of peace.”

This already famous shot of Jessica Alba for Good Luck, Chuck (Lionsgate, 9.21) is so much better than the mock Lennon-Ono one-sheet I posted yesterday, I’m surprised there’s even the slightest uncertainty.

Gawker is reporting that Hollywood-based N.Y. Times reporter Sharon Waxman will “definitely be joining the Metro desk” under editor Joe Sexton — i.e., moving to New York City — “when her book leave is over later this year. “A single source” told Gawker that Waxman will be on “the religion beat.” Contacted in Cairo where she’s doing research on a book about antiquities, Waxman told Gawker she “[has] no comment because Gawker has not shown itself to function by accepted journalistic rules.” I called Sexton a couple of hours ago and haven’t heard back. I called two others within the organization who might have helped clarify, but no replies from them either.

“The dynamic between celebrities and their audience is shifting,” Variety‘s Anne Thompson wrote in a 7.12 posting. “The critics and the media no longer have the last word. Thanks to evolving technology, moviemakers and stars have new weapons to not only promote their projects directly to moviegoers, but to fight back against what they perceive as misinformation. They are taking advantage of their internet fanbases to promote their projects, skipping the marketing middlemen and interacting directly with the people who buy tickets. Fan sites offer them valuable feedback about what their audiences like and dislike. But they also offer an opportunity to set the record straight. And sometimes, change the world.”

The amazing thing about this motorcycle accident footage is that one of these guys gets right up and runs away, like he’s the T-1000 in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, and the other guy (the one with the red helmet) staggers up and then half-hobbles away, obviously dazed and hurting. If this was depicted in a film they’d both be dead or groaning on the pavement — no way would anyone run from the scene after being in a head-on slammer and then doing a one-and-a-half-gainer in the air. Reality trumps fiction nine times out of ten.

Calling, calling, calling around to try and understand why Bob Weinstein‘s Dimension only yesterday decided to pull the plug on the 7.20 release of All The Boys Love Mandy Lane, a kind of Ten Little Indians/ Cabin Fever-ish slasher film with Amber Heard, Anson Mount, Michael Welch, et. al. A Weinstein Co.publicist told me that no alternative release date has been set.

Amber Heard

There have been indications over the least two or three weeks that Dimension wasn’t working all that hard at promoting this unrated, 88-minute film. When a distributor decides on a release date change it’ll usually be announced a month or more in advance, but suddenly yanking a film eight days before the announced release date with no substitute date mentioned is pretty much without precedent. There was an L.A. screening last Tuesday (7.10) that I missed; the two screenings that were scheduled for next week (Monday, 7.16 at the ESP Culver Plaza Theatre, and Tuesday, 7.17 at the Clarity) have been cancelled.
All The Boys Love Mandy Lane was first shown at last September’s Toronto Film Festival, so it can’t be a matter of the film being unspeakably bad. My first thought when I heard the news was probably the same as everyone else’s, to wit: the current down cycle in torture-porn/slasher films gave the Weinstein brothers the willies, and one of them woke up at 3:30 ayem a week or two ago and said, “We have to yank it and shelve it until further notice! We’re hurting as it is, and we can’t spend any p & a on a genre film that no one wants to see right now.”
There’s an interesting story here but something tells me I’m not going to nail it this afternoon.