“Could Paramount Pictures lose Steven Spielberg and the DreamWorks studio it bought just 20 months ago for $1.53 billion?,” Business Week‘s Ron Grover asked in a 7.19 piece. “It’s entirely possible. People close to Spielberg say he is vexed that Paramount has treated his team shabbily and grabbed credit for DreamWorks productions. If Spielberg were to leave, says a person familiar with the situation, he could take several of his hitmakers and the DreamWorks name with him.”

Hairpray “isn’t noxious like Dreamgirls, but it isn’t nearly good enough,” declares N.Y. Press critic Armond White. “Based on John Waters‘ 1988 satire of civil rights-era nostalgia, this movie-musical adaptation makes the same mistake as the 2002 Broadway incarnation — it domesticates Waters’ parodistic anarchy into general-audience silliness. All of Waters’ ideas about social conventions, race and sex rebellion are flattened; the characters representing subversive ideologies are broadened into caricatures.”

The N.Y. Post‘s “Page Six” team is reporting that the producers of Poor Things, a Lindsay Lohan flick about a couple of women who befriend and then kill homeless guys in order to collect their life insurance (i.e., a kind of avaricious 21st Century Arsenic and Old Lace), has pulled the plug. One stated reason is because “Lohan’s antics in Las Vegas over the weekend have scared the bond companies” — will she go back to boozing and passing out in cars? — and this has resulted in the funding for the film collapsing.
I’m hearing otherwise. A guy involved in Poor Things says fears of Lohan resuming her unstable off-set behavior wasn’t the thing. It was cancelled, he says, because the producers couldn’t raise enough foreign sales dough. However, Lohan’s name was the selling point that failed to generate sufficient interest, so it may have been her fault after all. If this guy is telling the truth, I mean.
A Lohan friend told “Page Six” that the actress “had nothing to do with that movie shutting down. It was a mess to begin with. They randomly fired Channing Tatum for Giovanni Ribisi, and then financing fell through because producers spent money like water. It was only supposed to cost $4 million; Lindsay was being paid nothing for that role.”

In a 7.20 piece about a three-venue retrospective in Manhattan called “The Mistress and the Muse: The Films of Norman Mailer,” N.Y. Times critic A.O. Scott confesses to a lurid fascination for the famous fight scene between Mailer and actor Rip Torn in Maidstone, an experimental film that Mailer directed in the late ’60s and which was given some kind of release in 1970.

The fight scene is one of the finest ever captured on film because it’s the most clumsy and embarassing. The aggression — biting, strangling, wrestling, growling — has a crude, flailing quality. The emotional current between Mailer and Torn is part childish and part animalistic, and altogether bizarre. This is what real fights in the real world look like, and I’m trying to think of any instance in which Hollywood has choreographed a fight scene anything like it.
In Maidstone, says Scott, “Mailer describes what he is doing — whether he’s speaking as himself or as Kingsley is not clear, and perhaps moot — as pursuing ‘an attack on the nature of reality,’ a slogan that could fit much of the art of the time.
“In any case, reality took its revenge, or called Mailer’s bluff, in the person of Rip Torn, an actor in the film who assaulted Mailer with a hammer as D.A. Pennebaker’s camera rolled and the novelist’s children screamed in terror. Real blood was shed — Mailer nearly bit off his assailant’s ear — and schoolyard obscenities were exchanged as if they were ontological brickbats.”
The film “captures something essential in Mailer — his reckless bravado, his willingness to court ridiculousness and the loss of control. Very few artists today, in any medium, exhibit this kind of crazy passion, and that’s too bad.”

“The Chicago Film Critics Association has attracted scads of attention and even more sympathy this week for its boycott of films released by 20th Century Fox,” the Reeler‘s Stu Van Airsdale has written.
“The notoriously press-hating studio pushed back its previews of The Simpsons Movie to all-media screenings a few nights before the July 27 release; this was the last straw for the group led by Chicago Daily Herald critic Dann Gire, who sent word to Fox publicists that he and his colleagues would no longer contribute features or profiles about Fox films.
“Reviews, evidently, are exempt. The Los Angeles Times and Radar Online, among others, laid out the ‘problem’ over the last few days: Fox’s hostility to online media, where coverage and reviews leak at a rate that studio reps feel compromise their control, is no longer acceptable, particularly when that hostility extends to print critics, whose convenient sense of outrage defers only to their enduring sense of entitlement.”

How much of the current 20th Century Fox-vs.-internet critic hoo-hah is about simple communication skills, or a lack thereof? The thorniest relationship problems have a way of disappearing like that when this or that combatant decides to apply a little charm and openness and friendly back-pats. And yet I’ve long noticed a curious reluctance on the part of certain Fox publicists to being responsive and friendly (as opposed to be polite or “correct”) and talking frankly about things — the upper-crusters believe they’re too good to actually talk to writers who don’t work for Newsweek or the N.Y. Times — and returning phone calls.
These tendencies, I’ve found time in the past, are usually rooted in the personality of this or that senior executive. Frosty butch-boss publicists are unfortunately a fact of life in this town. You have to get over them or get around them or placate them or something, but they’re not going to go away. I could name five or six of the worst ones right now, but what would that get me? It’s usually best to just ignore them and do your work, and then six months down the road you’ve forgotten what the fight was about and so have they and it’s back to business as usual.
What’s happed in the Fox situation is that hissy-fitters have poisoned the well by refusing to return calls or be truthful (I was apparently lied to about Chicago Film Critics Assn. boycott being a non-starter) or communicate quickly about this or that, and many journalists have become irate about this and now there’s a “situation.” Needlessly. And yet once these things start, it’s hard putting out the fires.
Right now everyone hates Big Fox (although Fox Searchlight is totally cool …they’re not in this in my book) and online critics all over the country are voicing complaints, writing pieces about these complaints and pledging solidarity with the Chicago Film Critics Assn. boycott on features about Big Fox and Fox Searchlight films. “Twentieth Century Fox is on the edge of an internet publicity crisis,” L.A. Times reporter Gina Piccalo has written.
This will all go away sooner or later. It always does. Besides, who cares about Babylon AD, Starship Dave, Alvin & The Chipmunks, Alien vs Predator 2? These are all instant dumpers in my mind. The only one that looks good is Doug Liman‘s Jumper…maybe.

“Rupert has confirmed to me that we will have Page 3 girls…but in a concession, they will be dot drawings” — a Wall Street Journal staffer indulging in gallows humor under the shadow of Rupert Murdoch‘s looming purchase of the newspaper, as related in a 7.19.07 N.Y. Times story by Richard Perez-Pena.

Leslie Hill, a member of the Bancroft family who has opposed selling the Wall Street Journal to Rupert Murdoch, is depicted in a poster hanging in the paper’s offices.

Okay, it’s official: director Rod Lurie intends to get his own movie about the Joe Wilson-and-Valerie Plame affair — a roman a clef that will costar Vera Farmiga, Kate Beckinsdale, Edie Falco, Matt Dillon and Alan Alda — into theatres before Warner Bros. and producers Akiva Goldsman and Jerry and Janet Zucker write, shoot and release their version, which, if it happens, will be based on Plame’s memoir, Fair Game.

Vera Farmiga; Valerie Plame

Goldsman and the Zuckers once looked like Wilson-Plame front-runners, but no longer. It seems fair to say that they asked for this situation by dragging ass. If they’d only gotten going they could have been in production by early fall, which might have conceivably scared off the other guys. But with Lurie now locked into shooting Nothing But The Truth come October, Goldsman and the Zuckers are stuck with sloppy seconds.
Am I alone in presuming that Farmiga will be an excellent Plame-like figure? She’s the closest thing we have to being the new Meryl Streep, after all. It’ll all work out (probably) as long as Lurie doesn’t insist that she dye her hair blonde.

A few months ago I read Peter Buchman‘s two Che Guevara scripts, The Argentine and Guerilla, that Steven Soderbegh will begin turning into moving images starting on 7.25 in Spain. I’m bringing it up because Catalina Sandino Moreno has joined the cast of both films. Emiliano de Pablos‘ Variety story doesn’t say which character she’ll be playing, but pretty much everyone on the Che side of the battle in Guerilla winds up dead.

Obviously political and terse and rugged, Buchman’s scripts are about how living outside the law and fighting a violent revolution feels and smells and chafes on a verite, chapter-by-chapter basis. They’re about sweat and guns and hunger and toughing it out…friendships, betrayals, exhaustion, shoot-outs and trudging through the jungle with a bad case of asthma. What it was, how it happened…the straight dope and no overt “drama.”
If Soderbergh does right by what’s on the page, The Argentine and Guerilla (which Focus Features will open within weeks of each other in 2008) will have, at the very least, a Traffic-like impact. The films will almost certainly be Oscar contenders, and you have to figure that del Toro, playing a complex, conflicted hero who ends up dead (i.e. executed in a rural schoolhouse by a drunken Bolivian soldier), will be up for Best Actor. The Guevara role is too well written (nothing but choice, down- to-it dialogue from start to finish) and del Toro is too talented an actor — it can’t not happen.

Warner Bros. No Reservations (7.27) is sneaking nationwide on Saturday night, which obviously means that studio strategists believe it will sell itself. You could also take the hard-nosed view and say it hasn’t been tracking all that well and they need to do something to wake people up. I know they wouldn’t be showing it if didn’t work, so maybe there’s reason for a little uptick.