On top of my riveting encounter last Sunday with Asger Leth’s Ghosts of Cite Soleil, a doc about a sympathetic Haitian thug who fancies himself as a hip-hopper in the midst of political chaos, there are suddenly two other docs on the radar screen about bottom-rung hip-hoppers struggling in a tough environment. East of Havana, which was produced (i.e., paid for) by Charlize Theron and shown just recently at South by Southwest Film Festival, is a portrait of Cuban rappers that’s allegedy pretty damn good. It’ll be discussed by HE‘s SxSW correspondent Moises Chiullan in a column piece running tomorrow. The other is Australian director George Gittoes‘ Rampage, “an exploration of hip-hop’s musical innovations in a Miami ‘hood” that recently played at the Berlin Film Festival and then at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. I’ve just received a DVD of it and I’ll be having a look this evening and then a discussion with Gittoe about it sometime this weekend.

The apparent yanking of Wednesday’s re-run of South Park‘s “Trapped in the Closet” episode (i.e., the one that vivisected Tom Cruise and Scientology as a whole) isn’t the first time Viacom and Comedy Central have censored an episode from Matt Stone and Trey Parker‘s animated show. According to this 12.29.05 Sarah Hall E! News story, Viacom pulled a 12.28 rerun of an episode called “Bloody Mary” that offended the Catholic League. In an email to fans following this occurence, Comedy Central said the episode was not included in the South Park marathon “in deference to the [Xmas] holidays…we have not permantly shelved the ‘Bloody Mary’ episode from future airings due to outside pressure…nor will we exclude it from future DVD releases.”

MCN columnist Gary Dretzka‘s report about bigger theatre seats and implied American obesity levels doesn’t just raise intriguing questions — it could serve as the starting point for a comedy skit. Dretzka wrote from Showest that “representatives of seat manufacturers confirmed [during the festival] that the width of the average chair has expanded from around 18-20 inches, to 22-24 inches. Since volume is important to exhibitors, it’s logical to think that this adjustment was made necessary for reasons other than pampering their customers’ rear ends.” But how did this obviously major business decision (think of the revenue downscalings due to fewer seats per theatre) come to pass? Presumably theatre owners were getting complaints from their tuba-sized customers about the seats being too small, but how many (are there statistics?) and for how long a time? At precisely what point did the Jabba-sizing of America reach red-alert proportions as far as theatre seats were concerned, leaving exhibitors backed against the wall with no choice but to invest and accomodate?

Paramount Pictures chief Brad Grey “has been compromised in the industry’s eyes” by last Monday’s N.Y. Times story about his past ties to indicted wiretapper Anthony Pellicano, writes “Deadline Hollywood” columnist Nikke Finke in her L.A. Weekly blog, but where’s the beef? “Yes, the FBI has interviewed Grey…yes, he’s testified before the grand jury investigating Pellicano. But is there or is there not a Pellicano tape [with Grey on it]? Did he or did he not sign something before he could get the Paramount job saying he had no knowledge of Pellicano’s wiretapping? The Times story doesn’t begin to answer these questions. Either Brad is squeaky clean or…he’s up to his eyeballs in it, or the truth lies somewhere in between.” With the help of Grey’s former partner Bernie Brillstein and possibly other sources, however, Finke passes along three tasty hors d’oeuvres: (1) “When Grey was still the head of Brillstein-Grey, his successful talent management and production company, he and the William Morris Agency pitched HBO about doing an original series with the working title Hollywood Dick based on Pellicano’s life and work… with Pellicano included in the pitch as a consultant”; (2) Brillstein confirming to Finke that “the location of the old Brillstein Co., the forerunner to Grey’s firm (and where Grey was mentored from 1986 until 1991, when he became a 50-50 name partner) was just two doors down the hallway from Pellicano’s office in the same 9200 Sunset Boulevard building”; and (3) Brillstein “said he was shut down when he tried to contact one of the Times reporters, Allison Hope Weiner. ‘When I called her and said, ‘Is there anything I can do to help you?’ she said, ‘No.’ I could have given her some facts she didn’t have.'”

“At midnight, I turn into a wolf.” — “Lawrence Talbot,” played by Lon Chaney, Jr.. “Yeah, you and 20 million other guys.” — “Wilbur Frey,” played by Lou Costello. From Robert Lees, Frederic I. Rinaldo and John Grant’s script of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), which was also about the boys running into Dracula and the Wolf Man.

I’ve made no calls and done no digging on this…zip…but “Hollywood Interrupted” investigative reporter Mark Ebner has written on his blog that “sources from inside Paramount and South Park Studios report that parent company Viacom pulled Wednesday night’s scheduled repeat of the previously-aired South Park episode called ‘Trapped in the Closet’.” (The show goes on at 10 pm Pacific, 9 pm Central.) The reason, Ebner reports, is that Tom Cruise, who is mocked pretty heavily in the episode (along with the Church of Scientology), threatened to cancel all publicity for Paramount’s Mission Impossible: 3 if Comedy Central aired it. This is apparently the first time that the South Park creators have been officially censored in their long history with Comedy Central. Ebner says Viacom officials have “reportedly ordered Douth Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker not to discuss the reason why their episode was cancelled.” (If this part of the story is true, how the hell are Matt and Trey going to keep mum about this? Is Viacom going to put them under forced sedation?) The South Park boys “are said to be angry,” writes Ebner, “but will probably get revenge with the manner in which they deal with Scientologist Isaac Hayes’ departure from the show”…whatever that means. All this alleged heavy-ass censorship, and yet the “Trapped in the Closet” episode is viewable on the Comedy Central website (or at least a portion of it is) as well as on Ebner’s “Hollywood Interrupted” blog.

Benicio del Toro as the Wolf Man…down with that. But you know what gets better and better with each viewing, if you take out the final 20 minutes? Mike Nichols’ unforced and sophisticated Wolf…what was that, 12 years ago? The more I think about it, the more I think it might be my all-time favorite, simply because it’s the most adult. The del Toro pic has 7even‘s Andrew Kevin Walker writing it. I’m not sure what that means.

“If a script isn’t new or daring in some way…subject matter, plot turns…if it doesn’t push the envelope nobody wants to make it because they’re afraid everyone’ll be bored because they’ve seen it before. But once they greenlight an envelope- pusher they always get nervous because they start worrying that Middle American popcorn-munchers won’t want to see it.” — Seasoned producer to Hollywood Elsewhere columnist during a cell phone conversation last night (3.14) around 10:10 pm after a screening of Spike Lee’s Inside Man (which isn’t, by the way, a daring envelope pusher but is satisfyingly nervy and different as far as Manhattan bank-robbery movies go, and is a lock to appeal to Middle Americans everywhere).

Okay, so George Clooney didn’t actually pour himself a cup of coffee, turn on his laptop, sit down and bang out that column he ostensibly wrote for the Huffington Post…which was recently de-posted. Here’s Arianna’s explanation about how it went down.

In this Time Richard Corliss piece about the battle between celluloid and digital photography, director Michael Mann (Collateral, Heat) argues that digital is “capable of a chromatic subtlety that film can’t match.” Collateral, Mann claims, was “the first photo-real use of digital…[and] in the nightscapes in Collateral, you’re seeing buildings a mile away. You’re seeing clouds in the sky four or five miles away. On film that would all just be black.” Mann used the same digital process to shoot his big-screen version of Miami Vice with Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx.

MSNBC’s Dave White giving props to actress Vera Farmiga for “making them all finally pay attention. I had no idea who Farmiga was until [I saw] Down to the Bone where she played a deadpan drug mom, struggling to keep both food on the table and sober, only to lose her job by admitting that her performance at her grocery clerk√¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢√É‚Äû√ɬ¥s job was enhanced by cocaine. And she’s got a clear-eyed resolve that Anthony Minghella and Martin Scorsese both must have noticed because she’s about to work with both of them.” No biggie, but what White really means is that Farmiga has already worked with Scorsese on The Departed and with Minghella on Breaking and Entering, and that both will open later this year.

An excellent defense of V for Vendtta by David Poland in his Hot Button column. “V for Vendetta is, simply, a wake-up call. The film is not about terrorism, though it is about terror. The film is not about threatening civilians to make a political point in any way. It is about threatening a state that has lost control of itself, absolutely corrupted by absolute control. But for control to be absolute, the people must remain asleep. It is, perhaps, instructive that the extreme right wing — which I never realized had a representative in Newsweek‘s Jeff Giles — feels compelled to pull out all kinds of rhetoric to kill the movie.”