“That’s what I’ve been tellin’ ya….there ain’t no freakin’ french fries”…Jack Nicholson as the voice of Jack in the Box. (Thanks to “the Bagger” for the link.)

A 1.15.07 N.Y. Times piece by Katherine Seelye and Richard Siklos quotes Time, Inc. executives saying that “while Time Inc. remains profitable, with margins of about 18 percent, it is witnessing a downturn in print advertising revenue and increasingly fierce competition from the internet .” One result, expected to happen later this week, is that “more than 150 people” are going to lose their jobs, including a big chunk of editorial staffers, as party of of a general cost-cutting move.
A friend who works at Time Inc., is going through “torture” waiting to find out if he’s going to be one of them. People in the office are on pins and needles…”going into each other’s offices, shutting the door and weeping,”
The general pruning process “is prompting big changes to the standard newsweekly formula of many correspondents contributing to heavily processed articles at magazines like Time and People. People magazine has one of the last vestiges of the classic newsmagazine reporting structure, in which several correspondents send files to a writer in New York, where stories are fact-checked by yet another department.” [Note: I remember it well!] “The new model, which is standard at most news organizations, will be for one person to report, write and fact-check the article.”
“Time Inc. is taking other steps to save money. Within a year or two, most of the company√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√¢‚Äû¬¢s corporate offices and magazines at the Time-Life Building in midtown Manhattan will have moved to lower floors so that the more valuable upper floors can be leased out. Time magazine is shutting some of its bureau buildings overseas, including in Paris, although it expects to maintain √ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√Ö‚Äúlaptop√ɬ¢√¢‚Äö¬¨√Ǭù correspondents, who can work from home.
“They’re amputating in order to save the patient,” said an executive at a competing publishing company.

The Golden Globe Awards will air tonight on NBC starting at 8 pm and run about three hours. I’m hoping to be in a favored position somewhere in the Beverly Hilton complex (I think) and posting as it all happens in actuality, which is to say starting at 5 pm Pacific, If my plan fails I’ll just be chasing after the winners on a category-by-category basis like everyone else (Oscarwatch.com‘s Sasha Stone is pretty fast on her feet in this regard), but without the particular observational eyeball stuff.

I’ll definitely be going to four or five of the post-Globes parties — Paramount/DreamWorks, Weinstein Co., Warner Bros./InStyle, 20th Century Fox, Universal. And I’ll try and throw in observations and photos as I move from event to event. Maybe…if there’s easy wi-fi. At the very least I’ll post all this stuff when I get home tonight. Or tomorrow morning.

“Independent bloggers can laugh all they want about the imperious posture of the mainstream media, but I and others at the N.Y.Times have never been more in touch with readers’ every robustly communicated whim than we are today. Not only do I hear what people are saying, but I also care.
“Sometimes I wonder whether I care to the point that I neglect other things, like, oh, my job. Tweaking the blog is seductive in a way that a print deadline never is. By the time I am done posting entries, moderating comments and making links, my, has the time flown. I probably should have made some phone calls about next week’s column, but maybe I’ll write about, ah, blogging instead.” — from David Carr‘s weekly N.Y. Times media column (1.15), this one titled “24-Hour Newspaper People.”

Fox411’s Roger Friedman wrote yesterday that The Departed director Martin Scorsese “got a big surprise Friday night and scored an upset victory at the Critics’ Choice Awards in Santa Monica…it was Scorsese’s best showing ever at an awards show and a legitimate one at that. He joked to the crowd: ‘It’s the first [film] I tried to make that has a plot.'”
But of course, Scorsese winning a Best Director trophy from critics groups has been a foregone conclusion for many, many weeks. How can one call it an upset when this happens?
Friedman also says “this big win for The Departed puts a slight dent in what looked like a sure Oscar win for Dreamgirls.”

Last night on SNL, Jake Gyllenhaal briefly made two legends soar in the same instant — the gay Dreamgirls thing (can’t decide if this was an Oscar-campaign assist or a futher tear-down) plus the old Brokeback Mountain gay-cowboy mystique. Hilarious-perfect. In one fell swoop he won instant forgiveness for Jarhead and upped the anticipation levels for Zodiac (Paramount, 3.7)

Park City/Sundance Film Festival weather projection for Thursday, 1.18 through Saturday, 1.20: Partly cloudy. Highs in the upper 20s. Lows zero to 5 above.

I can’t think of any journalist who’s been a more impassioned Dreamgirls fan that The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neil, so it’s significant that he wrote yesterday, “Surrender, Dreamgirls fans — The Departed is now officially ahead for the Best Picture Oscar. When the top Critics’ Choice Award went to The Departed on Friday night, it was the last bit of evidence I needed to change my prediction.”
O’Neil’s conclusion was fortified “a day earlier when I heard a third academy member over two days tell me that they planned to vote for The Departed. The only other film they even considered was Little Miss Sunshine. They liked Dreamgirls, even admired it, but they didn’t flip over it, didn’t feel it was their movie — not one targeted to old straight white geezers.”

Some kind of A to Z rundown of 2007 movies, the precise rhyme and slant of which I don’t quite get. Most of the films are listed alphabetically, but not all. Maybe there is no rhyme or slant.

“How do you light a man on fire, blow seven others to bits, choreograph a gun battle with 20 shooters, discharge 400 special-effects squibs, shatter a panoramic hotel window, separate an FBI agent’s torso from his waist, then show a neo-Nazi to his seat — which happens to be a chain saw — all in mere minutes?” So reads Sheigh Crabtree‘s opening graph in her 1.14.07 L.A. Times piece about Joe Carnahan‘s choreography of a big final sequence in Smokin’ Aces (Universal, 1.26). Show a Nazi to his seat which happens to be a chainsaw….?

Directed by Francis Lawrence (Constantine) and co-written and co-produced by Akiva Goldsman, I Am Legend (Warner Bros., 12.14.07) “is testimony to the unexpected durability of Richard Matheson‘s 1953 novel,” writes Lewis Beale in the N.Y. Times.

“It’s a taut, realistic chiller about a post-apocalyptic world in which germ warfare creates a biological plague that turns humans into bloodsuckers.
“The idea was born, says Matheson, now 80 and living in the Los Angeles area, ‘when I was a teenager and saw Bela Lugosi in Dracula. I thought if the world was full of vampires, it would be more frightening than just one, and I explained vampires in biological terms.’ In the book, some vampires have developed a pill that keeps the disease in check and allows them to live relatively normal lives. This element now plays as an AIDS metaphor, though the book was written 30 years before H.I.V. was even identified.”
One nagging question: I Am Legend‘s premise is different from any generic roving-zombie film in what way exactly? It’s an old idea….a tired one, even. And the fact that Lawrence is directing should give everyone pause. Constantine convinced me he’s in the realm of Stephen Sommers badness. Constantine, remember, got a 46% positive Rotten Tomatoes rating.

Alec Baldwin‘s directorial debut The Devil and Daniel Webster, which I did some reporting on in late October, will finally be released after five years of collecting dust….but not theatrically. “Page Six” says it’ll show up on Starz on Demand with a new title (Shortcut to Happiness), and, like I wrote several weeks ago, with Alan Smithee (or some such pseudonym) credited as director. The drama stars Baldwin, Jennifer Love Hewitt and Anthony Hopkins.