Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is supposed to be among the new and slightly delayed crop of HD-DVD titles from Warner Home Video, and I’ve recently heard a conspiracy theory about the recently-issued regular-format DVD of this title from some staffers at a popular Los Angeles DVD store. The resolution on this DVD isn’t especially great…a little soft and unsatisfying, as if the people who mastered it didn’t really give it their best shot. (DVD Talk‘s Holly Ordway has written that it “looks good, but not as good as I expected, given that it’s a high-profile release…the main issue that I noticed is that the contrast feels a bit ‘off’…in a number of scenes, the contrast feels too heavy, so that we lose detail in dark areas of the scene, and in others it seems like there’s not enough contrast.”) And the theory going around is that Warner Home Video has sorta kinda allowed this second-rate DVD to go out in this fashion so that the HD-DVD version will look all the better. I don’t buy this — I don’t think Warner Home Video executives have it in them to be this baldly conniving about it…there’s no room in a big corporation for Snidely Whiplash-type scheming of this nature…but it’s indicative of the anti-corporate paranoid culture we live in that rational, level-headed DVD-loving clerks are telling each other this story and half-believing it.
The new HD-DVD players are purchasable but the first generation of HD-DVDs from Warner Home Video, which were supposed to be out 3.28, are on hold for two or three weeks. Due to some technical bureacratic bug manifestation…what else? (With every new product there are always has cockups and delays…has it ever not been so?) “To be honest, the outlook is tenuous,” said WHV division president Ron Sanders. “We’re still coming out with an initial slate, but we may be a week or two later…we just don’t know.” The cheapest Toshiba HD-DVD player so far is the HD-A1, whcih is selling for $499.99 at Amazon.com. Toshiba is also offering a souped-up model, the HD-XA1, for $799.99.
“The Sopranos [has] sustained itself through sex, violence and some very effective, at times Luis Bunuel-ish black humor,” says N.Y. Press and Newark Star-Ledger critic Matt Zoller Seitz on his “A House Next Door” blog. “More a curdled social satire than a straightforward gangster story, it is arguably the most cynical long-running series of all time, a show in which nearly every scene depicts characters being confronted with the choice between selfish expediency and a higher good, and invariably choosing Option A. From Tony and Johnny Sack (Vincent Curatola) to Carmela and the kids to the FBI agents investigating the family and the various politicians and business people swirling around them, Chase’s characters rarely make choices out of altruism, a sense of cosmic rightness or simple kindness.”
“I am a liberal. And I make no apologies for it. Hell, I’m proud of it. Now fire away.” So says George Clooney in a Huffington Post piece that went up Monday, 3.13…which reads, of course, like an elaboration of his Oscar night comments after winning the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Syriana. My favorite passage: “In 2003 a lot of us were saying, where is the link between Saddam and bin Laden? What does Iraq have to do with 9/11? We knew it was bullshit. Which is why it drives me crazy to hear all these Democrats saying, ‘We were misled.’ It makes me want to shout, ‘Fuck you, you weren’t misled. You were afraid of being called unpatriotic.'”
All this hot copy generated by Sharon Stone about Basic Instinct 2 (Columbia, 3.31)…daring nude scene this, totally full frontal that, etc. Example: “By the time the film is released, I will be 48 and I wanted to do the nudity in a way that’s quite brazen. I wanted [Catherine Trammell] to be very masculine, like a man in a steam room, and I wanted the audience to have a moment where they realize she’s naked and then realize she’s a fortysomething woman and naked.” Whatever…barring a major God miracle, this movie is certain to be a Michael Caton Jones ickfest from start fo finish. What’s interesting is to compare these two trailers for it — an ample-nudity gymnastic-sweat trailer out of England that makes it look like pure tedium, and a much more sophisticated and classier preview now sitting on the Sony/Columbia website, one that suggests it might be half-tolerable due to the supporting player contributions of Charlotte Rampling and David Thewlis, both of whom are ignored by the cheeseball British trailer. That said, I have no particular interest in David Morrisey as Stone’s costar in this piece of shite. He’s a good British actor…knows his way around an odd line or a tough scene…but he’s not Stone’s sexy equal. His eyes are too small and his pale freckly face is a bit soft and puffy. Sorry, mate, but nope.
A very astute and satisfying analysis of last Sunday’s Sopranos opener (you know…the big shocker with Tony taking a bullet in the gut) by MSNBC’s Andy Denhart.
Another “web rumor” that Variety‘s Nicole LaPorte dismissed or made light of in her 2.5.06 piece (“Showbiz rumors tapped in web: online gossip goes haywire”) that condemned the willingness of showbiz websites to run unchecked rumors and thereby creating all kinds of havoc…another one of these merit-less rumors appears to have a little merit after all. That is, if today’s L.A. Times story about a possible merger between the ICM and Endeavor talent agencies, written by Claire Hoffman, is to be given any weight. The gist is that Endeavor partner Patrick Whitesell and ICM co-owner Suhail Rizvi — who’ve been close since the early ’80s when they were teenaged tennis-playing pals in Iowa Falls, Iowa — have been talking about following the pattern of recent Hollywood mergers (Paramount buying DreamWorks, Disney buying Pixar, the WB and UPN networks blending to form the CW) and trying to sculpt a deal by which ICM and Endeavor could become one combined super-agency. “In one oft-repeated scenario, the buttoned-down ICM could buy Endeavor, which has cultivated a renegade image that attracts younger and more cutting-edge talent,” Hoffman writes. “Or ICM could buy UTA, which is strong in television. Or William Morris, eager to smack down the A-list powerhouse CAA, could buy Endeavor or UTA. Or Endeavor and UTA could merge.” Spokespersons are denying or clamming up, but “in private, many in Hollywood say that talks are underway and that big changes may be on the horizon” for these firms.
I’m hearing that West Side Story song in my head…”Who knows? Could be…it’s only just out of reach, down the block, on a beach, under a tree.” The non-musical Laporte wrote on 2.5 about a rumor that “ICM was in talks to buy Endeavor…ICM chairman Jeff Berg and Endeavor partner Ari Emmanuel worked hard to tamp the flames…Berg even wrote a staff memo denouncing the rumor…the memo, naturally, wound up on Defamer.”
I’m told that another reason Universal president Ron Meyer is looking to pair his distribution and marketing vp Marc Schmuger with David Linde in the studio chairman (i.e., production chief) job vacated by Stacey Snider is that Schmuger’s talent relationships aren’t so much under-nourished as strained with certain producers. Particularly with Imagine co-chief Brian Grazer, who “was leaned on by Schmuger to release Cinderella Man last summer rather than last fall, and it didn’t work out and the result is that Grazer feels Schmuger basically ruined the reception for his movie, so there’s no love there.”
Everyone has now seen the first episode of the new season of The Sopranos, which means they finally know about the Big Thing that happens at the end. And sure enough, there’s a guy who’s found a way to be pissed off about that episode #4 sound clip I ran on 3.8.06 because it had James Gandolfini’s voice on it. “If I hadn’t trusted your fucking asshole self, I would honestly be wondering if Soprano producer David Chase didn’t have the balls to kill Tony,” writes Josh Massey of Atlanta. “Now there’s no mystery between this week and next. So this all boils down to a very basic ‘fuck you.'” To which I replied, “There are 12 episodes this year and then the final eight airing in ’07, and you think maybe David Chase might ‘have the balls’ to zotz Tony Soprano and put him in the ground within the first two or three episodes? What kind of Vietnamese heroin are you injecting, how much a bag, and what’s your dealer’s Vietnamese cell phone #?”
The ten year-old ties between Paramount Pictures chairman Brad Grey and indicted wire-tapper and onetime private investigator Anthony Pellicano are a bit clearer and more detailed due to a Page One story in Monday’s N.Y. Times, written by David Halbfinger and Allison Hope Weiner. The story is mainly about past acrimonious relations between (a) Grey, a big-time talent manager before being hired to run Paramount, (b) his former client Garry Shandling (whom Grey managed and also collected a fat fee for producing Shandling’s “The Larry Sanders Show”) and (c) former actress Linda Doucett, who briefly co-starred on “Sanders,” was engaged to Shandling in the early to mid ’90s and fell into (or maneuvered herself into) a position to collect money from the show, Grey and Shandling over this and that touchy matter. The long and the short, as indicated by the Times story, is that Grey may have hired Pellicano (or had his attorney Bert Fields hire him) to lean on Doucett over matters of money and testimony. (Read the Times story for the details.) Grey has been interviewed by the FBI and testified before the grand jury investigating Pellicano, and his lawyer “has said Grey has been repeatedly assured that he was not a subject or a target of the investigation.” In a “terse” statement released Sunday afternoon by Paramount spokesperson Janet Hill, Grey told the Times that he had been “casually acquainted with Anthony Pellicano” but “had no ‘relationship’ with Pellicano until my attorney, Bert Fields, hired him in the Garry Shandling lawsuit.” He also said that “the fact remains that I had no knowledge of any illegal activity he may have conducted.” Fields “also has denied knowing of Mr. Pellicano’s illicit activities,” the story said.
Sharon Waxman is reporting in the N.Y. Times that Universal president Ron Meyer is about to appoint the studio’s distribution and marketing vp Marc Schmuger to fill the departing Stacey Snider‘s job as president of production…half of it, that is. Schmuger, presumed by Meyer to be not fully up to speed on relationships with the talent community, may wind up sharing the new job, according to speculation, with either Focus Features co-president David Linde or Sci-Fi Channel and USA Network topper Bonnie Hammer. L.A. Times reporters Lorenza Munoz and Claudia Eller are hearing it’s basically Schmuger-Linde… forget Hammer. They’re also reporting that “Meyer’s first choice for the job was Universal’s former co-production head Scott Stuber. But Stuber, who has a rich producer’s deal at the studio with partner Mary Parent, was not interested in returning to the executive ranks.”
Hooray for Dave Cullen and the Ultimate Brokeback Forum for landing a story in Monday’s N.Y. Times about the full-age ad they paid to run in Daily Variety last Friday (3.10) lamenting Brokeback Mountain‘s having lost the Best Picture Oscar to Crash. The UBF-ers raised more than $24,000 — the ad cost $15,435. Variety president-publisher Charles C. Koones told Times writer Stuart Elliott that Brokeback “really touched a chord with certain audiences…there are those in Hollywood who feel it was robbed.”
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