Journal pal: Haven’t seen anything in the column about The Black Dahlia. Have you seen it yet? Me: Uhm, yeah, but I haven’t worked out a timing arrangement as to when I can write about it. But you know…it is what it is in that extremely talented, visually audacious way that De Palma specializes in. I can at least give it up for Josh Hartnett — he’s holds his end up — but I have to hold my water about the rest. Journo pal: Got it.

The Envelope‘s Tom O’Neill envisioning Peter O’Toole winning a Best Actor Oscar for his performance in Venus, which is a notion I toyed with on or about May 9th after hearing about test-screening responses to Venus.
Once again, if MPI Home Video, that deplorable, ass-dragging outfit that has been delaying a release of a restored DVD of Becket for two and a half years, would release it sometime before Xmas or at least by January, it would (a) be catching the movie-pulse zeitgeist at precisely the right moment and (b) Academy voters would be reminded what a travesty it was that O’Toole’s performance as Henry II didn’t win Best Actor Oscar in March ’65 — Rex Harrison took it for his acting in My Fair Lady. And the sense that 41 years later it’s finally O’Toole’s time to take an Oscar home would be that much more acute.

It breaks my heart to pass this along, but a guy in the business who knows other people is telling me that Werner Herzog‘s Rescue Dawn has been seen and that the word isn’t very good. I’m mincing words — he says it’s pretty damn bad. Obviously this is just one observer writing what he’s writing, but he claims he’s expressing some kind of general consensus. I can only cling to a hope that this is cynical distributor talk and that the guy just isn’t seeing it.
“I’m a huge Herzog fan, but this one is really terrible,” he wrote earlier today. “People behind the scenes are just stunned. Companies are looking at it out of courtesy and respect for the man — but this movie is a joke. There’s nothing right about it — everything from Christian Bale‘s performance to horrible editing, structure and pacing. There’s no drama. The action scenes are ludicrous…flat. A few here tried to defend it while watching it, but no one could make it to the end without finally admitting it was a total trainwreck .
“I don’t know if you’ve seen a copy yourself, but I’ve noticed heavy coverage on your site and wanted to give heads up. It’s worse than straight-to-video. Now if they shot a behind-the-scenes documentary (as you know, the shoot was a fiscal and political catastrophe) well, they might have something to salvage.
“The film has been seen by others, and it sounds as if everyone feels the same. Rescue Dawn will be hard-pressed to find a large U.S. distributor. The cat will be out of the bag soon enough, even without the Toronto screenings. The post-production nightmare is even worse than reported. Herzog has yet to be paid, and there’s all sorts of finger-pointing over unresolvable issues with the film.”

If the guy who hired you gets whacked, you’re probably in trouble also…especially if the big guy who ordered the hit on your recently-departed boss is in one of those irascible, muscle-flexing, I’m-still- the-honcho-even-though-I’m-83 moods, which seems to be the case with Viacom chief Sumner Redstone.
By this usually reliable logic Paramount chairman Brad Grey, according to many of the journos who get all regularly hyperventilate about Hollywood hires and fires, is about to get capped just like Joey Gallo at Umberto’s Clam House. Wait a minute, wrong analogy… Gallo didn’t know it was coming. How about whacked like Burt Lancaster‘s “the Swede” in The Killers? And you know that if Grey is a goner, so is Paramount production president Gail Berman.
I’ve never found executive shuffles terribly exciting, but if you want to read what everyone’s saying — the list includes Hollywood Wiretap’s Tom Tapp, Variety‘s Chris Gardner, Hollywood Reporter columnist Anne Thompson, and N.Y. Times reporters Laura Holson and Sharon Waxman — have at it.

Apologies for not jumping on the Brad Grey-is-toast story earlier, but for me the Toronto Film Festival began this morning with a screening of Mon Colonel, a very assured and pared-down Costa-Gavras moral drama set in mid ’50s Algeria. Laurent Herbiet, formerly an assistant director, directed, but it’s mainly a Costa-Gavras show — it resembles State of Siege and Z in some ways, and Costa-Gavras produced and co-wrote it with Jean-Claude Grumberg .

It’s about an ethical conflict between a young French lieutenant (Eric Caravaca) and a ruthless Colonel (Olivier Gourmet) who are engaged in fighting a war of terror against Algerian rebels in 1956. The film is quite pungent, alarming and penetrating with all kinds of echoes and fingers pointed at U.S. attempts to battle insurgents in Iraq. It has a moralistically matter-of-fact tone, most of it is composed of black-and-white flashbacks, and the legendary Charles Aznavour comes in for a riveting cameo performance at the finale.
Costa Gavras co-produced with the Dardenne brothers. The film is an adaptation of a 1999 novel by Francis Zamponi. It was principally filmed in Paris and Algeria from February to April of ’06.
I picked up my press pass an hour or so after Mon Colonel. And then I went home and took a nap for some reason. I wasn’t tired exactly. I think it was the notion that there won’t be any decent sleep for the next 10 days and I might as well get some now.

The Toronto Film Festival begins tomorrow at 9 am with Jeff Garlin‘s This Filthy World, a documentary about filmmaker John Waters.

Anne Thompson reported earlier today that there’s a faint chance that Werner Herzog‘s Rescue Dawn, an action drama of sorts about an American pilot (Christian Bale) who escapes from a POW cap in the early days of the Vietnam War, may not make not make its scheduled dates at the upcoming Toronto International Film Festival due to last-minute post-production snags. In Telluride a distributor told Thompson that “he had screened and liked the movie, but the film was so tied up with multiple producers and accounting issues” — the cause of many of these problems being the finagling of producer and L.A. club owner Steve Marlton — “that it would be difficult to negotiate a sale.”

Variety‘s Todd McCarthy is basically saying “I don’t think so” as far as Steve Shainberg‘s Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus (Picturehouse, 11.10) is concerned. I’m sorry but that’s the gist, more or less. That and an apparent observation that Nicole Kidman, playing Arbus with brunette hair coloring, gets naked in it.

Variety‘s Nick Vivarelli has run a quote from “one French industryite” in response to the Venice Film Festival showing of Oliver Stone‘s World Trade Center. The quote is that the film is “disgusting …it was as though George Bush directed the movie.”

I scoffed when I heard that a woman from one of the entertainment news shows had flipped over Emilio Estevez‘s Bobby (Weinstein Co., 11.17). And I’ve written a couple of pieces expressing doubts about the likelihood that it’ll be good-good-good. (Here’s one.) But now a fellow journo-columnist has seen it and likes it a lot, and Variety‘s Deborah Young has given it a pass out of Venice so okay, maybe.
I can’t help having an attitude about it (I keep hearing that Estevez quote from John Ridley’s Esquire piece — “Checkmate, asshole!”), but at least I have higher hopes for it than, say, All The King’s Men.
This Mike Collett-White Reuters piece about Bobby‘s debut at the Venice Film Festival errs, however, in saying the film is Estevez’s “first feature film in 10 years.” He directed, wrote and starred in Rated X, his Mitchell Brothers movie, six years ago. It was a Showtime movie that didn’t go out theatrically, but it would have gone in theatres if the right distribution deal had come along. I think it’s wrong to say it wasn’t a feature — it was shot as one, and was orginally intended to be seen in theatres…it just happened to wind up on Showtime.

Darren Aronofsky‘s The Fountain had some rough going at the Venice Film Festival. Somebody wrote that it’s a yea-nay, hot-or-cold proposition, so presumably others will come along who felt as I did after catching it in San Diego in late July.
I called it “the most beautiful and best-crafted cosmic head-trip movie since I don’t know what. 2001: A Space Odyssey? Fight Club? The first half of Altered States?” And I said that “for a movie with Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz playing three characters each in three different eras (the 1500s, the present and the 24th Century), it’s remarkably easy to sort through and make sense of.
“You have to let The Fountain seep into you like any great book or perfectly brewed cup of tea, and you have to seep yourself into it also, but it’s an extraordinary place to go to and then return from….like a planet unto itself. It’s one of those films that takes a little seasoning to appreciate. Anyone who’s ever tripped on anything will definitely respond, mature educated types will like it more than typical 20-something hormonals, and women will probably like it more than guys who watch football and smoke cigars and drive SUVs.”

It was 9:30 pm and Viacom CEO Tom Freston was in a good mood, sipping a beer and playing pool and applying chalk to the tip of his stick when all of a sudden…whack! Someone clobbered him with the blunt end of another pool cue. Freston’s eyes rolled into his forehead, his legs gave out and a second later he was on the floor and out cold. The upshot is that the poor guy’s out of a job. Freston’s former boss, the always assertive Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone, made the call because of “a weak stock price and increasing questions about the company’s online strategy,” according to a Wall Street Journal report. The 83 year-old Redstone replaced Freston with “personal adviser” Philippe Dauman; he also rehired a former lieutenant, Thomas Dooley, as exec vp and chief administrative officer. The shakeup “bore striking similarities to a similar executive overhaul at Viacom in 1996”, the Jounal story says.