I’ve been sent two more reports of Jesse James dissing by Warner Bros. distribution execs — one from Las Vegas Review Journal critic Carol Cling, another from Salt Lake Tribune critic Sean Means.

Cling says she received an e-mail from Phoenix-based Allied Advertising (which handles screenings etc. for the Las Vegas market) two days ago, saying he/she had just heard that The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford “will be opening this Friday! If possible, I would like to set a press screening, but I think it may be too late…let me know if there’s still time.”

Cling’s account of what happened after this is confusing (to me anyway), but the bottom line is that she couldn’t work in the James screening or a review of Andrew Dominik‘s film by her Tuesday deadline.

“Now I’ll have to check out Jesse James on my own time,” she says. “Not that I mind, but this is exactly the kind of movie that needs critical support, and the studio seems to be doing everything they can to subvert that.”

Means wrote today that The Assassination of Jesse James “is getting good reviews, scoring a 73 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and an A in Entertainment Weekly. It’s got Brad Pitt in it, for heaven’s sake…so why is Warner Bros. giving it the shaft?

“The movie, is slated to open this Friday in more cities, including in the Salt Lake City area. That was news to Salt Lake critics, who were informed Monday morning by Warner Bros.’ regional representatives in Denver. Those reps, God bless ’em, have scrambled to set up a press screening so the Salt Lake critics could see and review the film.

“Alas, their efforts seemingly have been sabotaged by the studio, which can’t seem to find a print available for a pre-screening. At the moment, there’s hope for a Thursday late-morning screening — almost too late for most papers’ deadlines — but nothing confirmed.”

Plus the Newark Star Ledger‘s Stephen Whitty has linked today to the mishegoss and threw in some comments.

In a piece that reviews all the recent pop-music docs, dramas and biopics, N.Y. Times columnist David Carr mentions Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story (Sony, 12.21), the mock biopic in which John C. Reilly plays a Johnny Cash-like musician.

Carr says that “one of the surest signs that a trend is under way is that it has become worthy of parody,” and this Judd Apatow-produced, Jake Kasdan-directed satire “riffs through many of the genre’s tendencies.”

The article makes it clear that Carr has been shown a Walk Hard clip and heard a few songs from the film. (Probably the same clip and song selection being shown to L.A. journos tomorrow.) Apatow tells Carr in a phoner that music biopics are all cut from the same cloth.

“A small-town person grows up amidst a tragedy in his family, becomes a star, cheats on his first wife, goes into rehab, falls in love, cheats on his second wife, then sobers up again, experiences a final triumph and passes away peacefully or dies horribly,” Apatow said. “We all know these stories from VH1’s ‘Behind the Music,’ and even though we know what to expect, we still love watching them.”

We do, huh?

The reactions to yesterday’s report from Pheonix writer/critic Henry Cabot Beck that Pheonix critics are being denied a chance to see The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford indicate that local Warner Bros. distributors are giving Andrew Dominik‘s film the bum’s rush in fairly uniform fashion around the country. As Arizona Daily Star critic Phil Villarreal remarks, “It’s the Assassination of Jesse James by the Cowards at Warner Bros.”

The Oregonian‘s Shawn Levy has written about not getting a chance to review it in time. Villarreal and Houston-based critic-blogger Joe Leydon have also reported that Warner Bros. reps are either not screening it or screening it late. The whole James effort is clearly half-hearted. One reader claimed “they’ve yet to even announce a release date for Montreal, and we’re one of the Top 10 markets in North America!”

I wrote Warner Bros. reps this morning about speaking with WB distribution president Dan Fellman about these numerous complaints.

As Levy wrote, “I can only respond with scorn to the spectacle of Warner Bros. treating their film with such dismissiveness and disdain. This was a film that received lots of publicity before its release and had a $30 million production budget (plus prints and ads — which, let’s face it, don’t cost as much when you dump the movie like this) . The reviews have been favorable from both critics and audiences. IT’S GOT BRAD PITT IN IT, for pity’s sake. Yet Warner Bros. sneaks it into Portland. With this butterfingered, half-hearted, dead-brained stealth release, they’re making their film impossible for audiences to find.”

Villarreal said that “the same situation has happened in Tucson, where I’m the morning paper’s critic. I was asked yesterday afternoon if I was interested in seeing the film on short notice, said yes, then heard nothing back.”

Having no doubt heard from numerous irate female producers and representatives of various big-name actresses over Nikki Finke‘s 10.5 report that Warner Bros. is “no longer doing movies with women in the lead,” production president Jeff Robinov has told Variety‘s Anne Thompson that he’s not only “moving forward with several movies with women in the lead,” but is also “offended by rumors of his cinematic misogyny.”

Warner Bros. honcho Alan Horn, producer Joel Silver, production prexy Jeff Robinov

Thompson’s story, which went up last night at 7:30 pm, didn’t mention Finke or her column, alluding instead to “recent reports in the blogosphere.” In fact there was one report (Finke’s) and some reaction pieces.

In fact, what Robinov has told Thompson doesn’t specifically dispute what Finke reported, which I took to mean that Warner Bros. is now thinking twice about greenlighting movies in which women are the absolute stand-alone leads, particularly films in the action realm. The various projects Robinov mentioned to Thompson all have strong parts for women, but none that fit this precise definition. (Robinov saying that he’s “still seeking the right script and star for a Wonder Woman feature, which has been in development for a decade” is well and good, but earnest intentions and $1.50 will get you a bus ticket.)

My riff last Sunday voiced a suspicion that Robinov probably didn’t say what the sometimes strident and simplistic Finke reported, speculating that “Finke’s interpretation of what Robinov actually said (or may have said) probably misses certain shadings and qualifications.”

I doubt that Finke made up Robinov’s alleged statement or sentiment out of whole cloth. He probably expressed disappointment about the revenues brought in by three recent WB female actioners — The Brave One, The Invasion and The Reaping — and perhaps voiced some offhanded remark to an agent or a producer about femme-topped action films that he’s since come to regret.

Robinov made a strong case in Thompson’s piece about making (or intending to make) movies with strong female roles, but he didn’t name any current or hoped-for projects in which women are the clear and unchallenged lead (as, say, Jodie Foster is in The Brave One), and certainly none in the action genre, which is generally thought to be a male-driven thing both in front of and behind the camera, and in terms of moviegoers.

Robinov reminded Thompson about the Wonder Woman character being a prominent player in The Justice League and that Silk Spectre “leads” in Alan Moore‘s Watchmen. He also mentioned female co-stars in the upcoming Speed Racer and Get Smart.

Robinov said Warner Bros. is definitely still making chick flicks and hetero romantic comedies. He mentioned a Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants sequel, an adaptation of the Nicholas Sparks novel Nights in Rodanthe with Diane Lane and Richard Gere, a fish-out-of-water comedy about female students called Spring Breakdown, and a romantic comedy called Fool’s Gold with Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey.

Robinov also said he would “happily” make Nikki Caro and Charlize Theron‘s North Country again (even though it bombed), and that he wanted to produce Peter Jackson‘s The Lovely Bones, which is about a young girl, and the Sex in the City movie.

I said last Sunday that “sweeping statements of any kind are unwise” and that “they usually make the speaker sound stupid or short-sighted.” MCN’s David Poland was quoted by Showbuzz, a CBS News website, as saying that what Robinov “may have said out loud to an agent was probably indiscreet and stupid” and that “you probably shouldn’t cut yourself off from any genre or niche and say we’re not doing that anymore.”

Read more

Yesterday Brian DePalma and Magnolia’s Eammon Bowles debated the issue of certain grisly photographs of Iraq casualties having been removed from the end of DePalma’s Redacted due to concerns about legal vulnerability. The discussion happened at a N.Y. Film Festival press conference held yesterday afternoon. Movie City Indie’s Ray Pride has posted good information about this, including a statement from Bowles.

This old JFK anecdote about bad advice he got for years from Sen. George Smathers reminds me that in politics as well as Oscar forecasting, there are some predictions you automatically disregard.

Three serious adult dramas are opening against each other wide on 10.19 — Ben Affleck‘s Gone Baby Gone, Gavin Hood‘s Rendition, and Susanne Bier‘s Things We Lost in the Fire. And a fourth — Terry George‘s Reservation Road — is opening limited the same day also.

Four films fighting over the same over-25 audience is a form of public suicide. Bier’s film is easily the best of the bunch, but even with this advantage you have to figure at least two or three of these films will take a hit.

And I mean especially with the strong likelihood that the under-25 empties will make 30 Days of Night, a Josh Hartnett-starring horror film, the weekend’s biggest opener.

A well-employed screenwriter wrote earlier today to point out an angle in the stories about the likely WGA strike that no one’s mentioned. “I’ve been making most of my living over the last few years as a script doctor / punch-up person,” he wrote, “and many of the movies now hurriedly wrapping or being rushed into production will not be able to handle the usual studio-mandated reshoots that inevitably occur after test screenings if a strike is on.” The punch-up guys will have their hands tied, and producers will be caught between a rock and a hard place.

Partly as a result of a certain online journalist making a call last week to Paramount Studios which led to the “sting” arrest of Roderick Davis, the 37 year-old Cerritos resident who tried to peddle hundreds of stolen photos from the shoot of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull for $2000 bucks, director Steven Spielberg hosted a small “thank you” lunch and set visit today for a small group of fanboy web journalists at Universal studios.

Universal Studios lot (foreground)

The group included CHUD’s Devin Faraci, “Quint” from Ain’t It Cool and, I’ve been told, a rep from Slashfilm and Dark Horizons. I’m not sure if Latino Review‘s Kellvin Chavez (who flew out from NYC for the meeting) and IESB.net’s Robert Sanchez attended, but I’m told they were invited at one point.

Spielberg, currently directing Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, was presumably looking to bond with these leading web journos and foster allegiance in case another stolen-photo incident occurs down the road.

The luncheon/set visit was almost cancelled yesterday because “too many people found out about it,” I was told by two sources. The invited parties were “supposed to keep it to themselves…they shot themselves in the foot.” A guy involved in the back and forth told me yesterday that “some people have gotten their butts very hurt over [this] whole thing, and Paramount is dealing with sites complaining about not getting invites.”

Here’s Quint’s story on AICN about the meeting. a story about Transformers 2 that was sourced directly to Spielberg by way of Devin Faraci was posted a little while ago.

I wrote yesterday about the above-described online journalist who made the call, etc., but I took the story down because the journalist called to express concern that Davis’s accomplice (or accomplices) might possibly take revenge for providing information that led to his arrest. I’ve never written about a criminal matter before, but I decided yesterday that if there was a one-in-a-hundred chance that some kind of payback might be visited on this journalist or his family (a scenario out of a bad TV episode) I didn’t want to be involved.

L.A.’s Standard Hotel

I had called this journalist last weekend to encourage him to write a detailed piece about the episode and maybe even sell it to some large, well-paying print publication. It’s got everything, after all — a threat to the profile of a much-awaited film, a big-name director (Steven Spielberg) and big movie stars (Harrison Ford, Cate Blanchett, Shia Lebouf), stolen property, and a secret sting operation arranged in collusion with authorities.

The guy was contacted seven or eight days ago by Davis with an offer to sell the stolen Indy 4 photos or a lousy two grand. A couple of sample photos were sent to prove that Davis had the goods. The online journalist quickly notified Paramount publicity about the offer, they called the L.A. Sheriff’s office and a “sting” meeting was arranged to to happen last Tuesday afternoon at the L.A.’s Standard Hotel. (Note: I was told by a Paramount source that the FBI was involved.)

A story about the theft and arrest ran on IESB.net last Tuesday, saying that “the thief was apprehended by LAPD and the FBI” even though, according to L.A. Times reporter Richard Winton, it was an L.A. Sheriffs operation.

The story wrote that the sting happened “with the help of a member of the online press [who] had been offered the stolen property. Sources tell us that an undercover sting operation was set in motion late last night,” the story reported, “with the help of the unnamed member of the online press.”

“A meeting between the alleged thief and the unnamed online reporter was set up for 4:00 pm at the Standard Hotel on Sunset Blvd. The sting went as planned and the arrest was made. The IESB has been told that the alleged thief was in possession of the stolen property.”

A 10.4 L.A. Times story about the bust by Winton and Andrew Blankstein said that lawmen “e-mailed the suspect, saying they were interested in purchasing the photos,” alrhough it made no mention of Sanchez. The feds rented a room, Davis showed up and tried to talk business…surprise, busted, cuffed.

Both Winton and the online reporter told me they’d beebn told that Davis had an accomplice or accomplices, and that this said parties are on the loose.

More interesting details, I’m sure, have yet to be revealed. I just hope it gets written up thoroughly some day, and written well.

It doesn’t feel right somehow when guys like Benicio del Toro go on Oprah and do the old turn-on-your-love-light routine. He did it for Susanne Bier‘s Things We Lost in the Fire, which Paramount is opening on 10.19, but the guy in this photo and the guy he plays in the film are so different it’s weird. His real-life personality is another planet also. I’ve never seen Benicio smile like that ever.

Pheonix-based entertainment journalist Henry Cabot Beck wrote earlier today to report that “here in Arizona it was announced yesterday that despite The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford opening this Friday in Phoenix, it’s been decided at the last minute not to screen it for critics.

“It was touch-and-go yesterday for about an hour with the talk being that they might screen it tonight (Tuesday) with a one-day notice,” he adds. “Depending on how this shakes out, this could mean that Jesse James has become the most lauded, worst-treated movie of the year.

“Everybody’s split on the picture, but some feel that Andrew Dominik‘s film is one of the best of the year. I fall a bit over into that camp. A Brad Pitt picture with some Oscar buzz, a couple of amazing performances — even if you don’t like the movie overall — and they’re treating it like a one-weekend horror turd.”