The L.A. Film Festival kicked off last night with a screening of The Devil Wears Prada at Westwood’s Village theatre. It seemed to go down pretty well with people I spoke to at the after-party, including the tough critics. A tidy, not-quite-pat, cool-mannered studio flick about a tough job and a tough environment. Everyone seemed to love Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci‘s performance, and felt that lead Anne Hathaway and Adrien Grenier held their own.

Waiting in the third-class “peon” rush line alongside the Village theatre last night.

It was the usual mob scene before the show began with a lot of traffic pile-up, dozens of SEM goons everywhere, and journalists being handed peon-level blue tickets that meant they had to wait in a kind of rush line on the side of the building. (I was one of them.) You had to pay for popcorn and drinks in the lobby, which is unusual for a premiere, but the food-and-drink at the outdoor after-party was ample and delicious.
(a) SEM security goon outside Village theatre — Thursday, 6.22.06, 7:20 pm; (b) Same position,couple of minutes later Thursday, 6.22.06, 7:25 pm; (c) MPRM publicist whom I won’t identify unless she tells me it’s cool, approaching theatre entrance; (d) An employee of high-powered publicist Mickey Cottrell named Pollyanna (l.) and Islander star-producer Thomas Hildreth; (e) Floral arrangement outside entrance to Village theatre balcony.

David Edelstein‘s 6.19.06 review of Nicholas Jarecki‘s The Outsider , a facinating and (to me) touching doc about maverick filmmaker James Toback (Black and White, Fingers), has the following comment: “Jarecki doesn’t get into Toback’s considerable inheritance, which does make maverickdom easier.” I’ve always seen Toback as a jocular existential wise guy flying by his wit and his balls and his ability to charm and seduce. But family money…?

Most of the critics are indicting Adam Sandler‘s Click on charges of ruthless sentimentality in the latter stages. Will this matter to the fan base? Never! But how can any fair-minded person not be moved or at least struck by these damning words from Rolling Stone‘s Peter Travers, one of the biggest bend-over quote whores in world history? “I have a soft spot for [Sandler’s] low-comic high jinks, including Happy Gilmore and even the unfairly maligned Waterboy,” says Travers. “But Sandler has a sappy side that makes me puke. I damn near choked on Click.” Wait a minute…either you puke over something or it makes you choke. You can’t do both.

The fact that director Bryan Singer said on “Sunday Morning Shootout” a while back that the cost for Superman Returns is over $250 million makes the $263 million estimate calculated by Entertainment Weekly‘s Jeff Jensen seem more reliable than the $209 million estimated provided by the Wall Street Journal‘s Kate Kelly. A big chunk is due to costs run up by previous would-be Superman directors Tim Burton ($25 to $30 million), Brett Ratner (between $12 and $20 million), and McG (between $12 and $20 million).It’s all in a pretty good sum-up by Hollywood Wiretap‘s Stephen Saito.

I got 11 right in this Ann Coulter-Adolf Hitler similar-quote quiz. Coulter’s prose style is a little simpler and less turgid than Hitler’s, and she doesn’t go for antiquated debating-society political terms like “bourgeoisie”.

There was a slight rigamarole in late April (or was it early May?) when Variety reported that Woody Allen‘s Scoop would be released in the late summer and one of my Focus Features pallies kept saying, “That’s news to us.” Anyway, it’s official: Allen’s comedy, a London-based runaround about a young reporter (Scarlett Johansson) and an older, somewhat suspicious man of wealth and schwing (Hugh Jackman), will open on 7.28 in the top 100 markets, at a running time of 96 minutes.

L.A. air-hockey fools will probably want to jot this down: Eric Anderson‘s The Way of the Puck, which I wrote about with affection and enthusiasm a little over two months ago, is being screened at the Speakeasy on Sunday, 6.25, at 7 pm and 9 pm. The address is 4607 Prospect Avenue in Los Feliz. (What exactly is a “Mt. Hollywood Underground”?) The admission is $7 general, $5 for members.

Two late-inning observations should be be kept in mind as you’re reading Claudia Eller‘s summary of “The Man Who Heard Voices: Or, How M. Night Shyamalan Risked His Career on a Fairy Tale,” which appears in today’s (6.23) L.A. Times.

The book, which Gotham will be putting in stores on 7.20, is Night’s traumatic first-hand memoir (as told to Sports Illustrated writer Michael Bamberger) about how his longtime relationship with Disney execs and particuarly production president Nina Jacobson went south last year over Jacobson’s blunt criticisms of Shyamalan’s script of Lady in the Water (Warner Bros., 7.21). At a 2.15.05 dinner attended by Shyamalan, Jacobson and Disney distribution chief Dick Cook at a Philadelphia restaurant called Lacroix, Jacobson reportedly said to the director, “You said [the script] was funny — I didn’t laugh. You’re going to let a critic get attacked? They’ll kill you for that. Your part’s too big — you’ll get killed again. What’s with the names? Scrunt? Narf? Tartutic? Not working, don’t get it, not buying it, not getting it…not working.” The two aftermath thoughts are (a) Shyamalan’s confession to Jacobson during a March ’06 breakfast meeting at the Hotel Bel-Air that Shyamalan “had realized that ‘it wasn’t Nina’s fault that she didn’t get the original Lady script, it was Night’s fault'”, and (b) a comment that Jacobson passes along to Eller about “the inherent difficulties of the ‘patron-artist’ relationship”, to wit: “Not seeing eye to eye on a particular piece of material doesn’t have to be the end of a relationship. It may not always be easy to have an honest exchange, but in order to have a Hollywood relationship more closely approximate a real relationship, you have to have a genuine back and forth of the good and the bad. Different people have different ideas about respect. For us, being honest is the greatest show of respect for a filmmaker.” I know how much it hurts to have people tell you that what you’ve written isn’t any good, but very few people in this town practice a policy of honesty between colleagues, as Jacobson advocates. Hers is a rare, mature, right-on way of going about it. The final perspective will be at hand when WB starts showing Water to critics, probably within the next couple of weeks.

There’s a relatively new introduction piece on the official WB Superman Returns site…funny.

The Devil Wears Prada costars Stanley Tucci to Anne Hathaway: “What do you expect? You’re flinging those melons around like it’s harvest season.” Flinging! A couple more items like this and “Page Six” is out of the doghouse.

Whoa, whoa…Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest runs two hours and 35 minutes, give or take? A cartwheeling fluffball mascara-and-attitude romp should run a minimum of three hours, I should think. If I were Jerry Bruckheimer I would add an overture, an intermission, and entr’acte and exit music.

“I’m beginning to wonder if Pirates is not only going to blow everything out of the water this year, but if it’s going to take the three-day record from Spiderman. I didn’t go to the screening last night, but I sent my girlfriend and she reported that it’s not only incredible, but that it had the junket audience applauding as well. If Jerry Bruckheimer, Gore Verbinksi and Johnny Depp can do that to the hard-core critics and cynics, think what it’s going to do for the civilians.” — Journalist colleague. Wells reply: You’re probably right about Pirates blowing everything out of the water, etc., but junket journalists have never been my idea of “hard-core”. They talk very cynically in private, but they tend to be generous in the presence of talent and publicists, so I don’t know how much stock you can put in their applaudings.