“I played a part in a movie, wore cowboy duds and galloped down the road,” writes Bob Dylan in Newsweek‘s excerpt from his forthcoming autobiography, “Chronicles, Volume One” (Simon and Schuster). He’s talking about his performance as “Alias” in Sam Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (’73), for which there was “not much required” and about which “I was probably naive,” the poet-troubador writes. But here’s the real drill-bit excerpt, printed on the lower right side of page 56: “Sometime in the past I’d written and performed songs that were most original and most influential, and I didn’t know if I ever would again and I didn’t care.” Dylan said the same thing more profoundly in a song from Nashville Skyline: “Once I held mountains in the palm of my hand/and rivers that ran through every day/I must have been mad/I never what I had/until I threw it all away.”

MCN columnist David Poland’s recent take on the presumed potency of Mike Nichols’ potentially Oscar-worthy Closer (Columbia, 12.3) has been, I have to admit, one of his more astute calls. The fact that it’s said to play “a little cold” is an indication, he believes, that producers of other presumed Oscar-calibre films are a bit scared of it. “When people start lining up to smear a film this early, that film has some power,” he wrote earlier this week. “And that is why bad buzz can be a good sign.” My own view is that the Patrick Marber play it’s based upon is a little bit cold (i.e., it reads that way), but it’s also a devastating, well-cut diamond. The Godfather, Part II is a little bit cold also, but if Francis Coppola had warmed it up he would have totally screwed it up.

Will “security moms” be watching the first Presidential Debate on Thursday evening? Or have they pretty much made up their minds at this stage? The reason Bush is said to be leading in the polls right now is that these hinterland-residing, marginally educated swing voters (i.e., family women who are deeply concerned about domestic terrorism) believe Dubya will be studlier and more sheriff-y in preventing the next 9.11. But of course, if a perverse determination had been made by a sitting U.S. President to try and deliberately provoke another terrorist assault in the wake of the 9.11 attacks, it’s hard to imagine how this could have been done more effectively than by way of Bush’s Iraqi War policy. Is there any Middle East watcher anywhere who doesn’t believe that anti-American hatred levels over there are much higher now than they were before 9.11? And yet the security moms are inclined to re-elect Bush because he makes them feel safer. Got it. Couple this with the general tendency of swing voters to vote for a Presidential candidate based on “Dating Game” standards (does he seem like a nice guy? would you want to have a beer with him?), and all I want to do is go out and have a few beers myself. Make that several.

Correction on that earlier item about the authors of the new Rob Reiner-authorized script of Rumor Has it, the currently rolling not-really-a-Graduate sequel with Jennifer Aniston, Kevin Costner, Mark Ruffalo and Shirley Maclaine. The revisions on a recent draft are credited to Reiner, Andy Scheinman and Adam Scheinman. (I wrote earlier that actor Andy Scheinman was “apparently” a co-writer.) Valerie Breiman is also credited as a co-writer.

An extra-deluxe DVD package containing the 251-minute extended version DVD of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, due 12.14, will be sold with “a special set of specially-tanned leather restraining straps, two pairs of Clockwork Orange-style eyelid inhibitors, and a large bottle of generic eye drops,” according to an alleged copy of a forthcoming New Line Home Entertainment press release. The non-extra-deluxe package will have a suggested retail price of about $40.

Peter Chelsom’s Shall We Dance? (Miramax, 10.15) is not a Richard Gere-Jennifer Lopez romance-on-a-dance-floor movie. It’s a Chelsom-esque ensemble piece a la Hear My Song. It’s Gere, Stanley Tucci, Lisa Ann Walter, The Station Agent‘s Bobby Cannavale, Anita Gillette, Richard Jenkins…they’re all in it together. Lopez plays an intriguing but essentially support-level character for the first hour…no character deepening, no romantic intrigues with Gere, nothing. Then she and Gere start paying attention to each other at the start of the second hour…but they don’t become the movie. (Was her screen time reduced, as it was in Jersey Girl, when Miramax realized that her Bennifer-generated negatives were going through the roof?) Gere’s performance as an estate lawyer nursing a secret passion for after-dark ballroom dancing is assured and charismatic, and he gives off genuine dignity and delight when he dances — you can see it really turns him on. Tucci is a total live wire as Gere’s fellow office worker who’s also a nocturnal ballroomer. He’s so good you wish he had more scenes. (He did, actually, but they had to be sacrificed.) Pic was shot in Winnipeg, and Manitoba-native Len Cariou played Richard Gere’s boss, but his entire role ended up on the cutting room floor….too bad.

Can anyone see the logic in Miramax publicists restricting invites to press screenings of Shall We Dance? in the face of a massive sneak preview showing in theatres coast to coast last night (i.e., Saturday, 9.25)? Especially considering that the film is frequently heartening and spirit-lifting and is obviously going to win over the just-entertain-us crowd? It may not have critics doing cartwheels, but I’m a hard-ass and I had very few problems with it.

The latest title of that currently filming not-really-a-sequel-to-The Graduate romantic comedy under director Rob Reiner is (drum roll…) Rumor Has It. (Not a bad title. It was previously called Otherwise Engaged, which I also like.) As soon as he was hired in mid-August to replace director Ted Griffin on the Jennifer Aniston-Kevin Costner-Mark Ruffalo film, Reiner brought in North co-writer Andrew Scheinman to do a page-one rewrite of Griffin’s script. Scheinman, producer of several Reiner-directed films from The Sure Thing (’85) to Ghosts of Mississippi (’96), is apparently co-writing with his brother Danny, whose IMDB resume includes only acting jobs. Most of Griffin’s script has been wiped off the hard drive. The new script still uses the basic premise (Aniston’s relationship and/or impending marriage to Ruffalo is put on hold while she explores her identity and that of her grandmother, played by Shirley Maclaine, who was apparently the real-life model for the Mrs. Robinson character), but this is just being used as “a way in” to the new script and new sensibility, which is totally Reiner-Scheinman’s.

Legendary words from Alec Baldwin….seriously: “Movie marketers are taking actors and they’re kind of inserting them like suppositories into the cavities of the moviegoing public. The business is so kind of self-referential now. There’s a whole kind of industry now about the forensics of the business, so to speak, that wasn’t there 20 years ago.” So what’s a site like Hollywood Elsewhere in this rear equation? Not a lubricant…that’s E.T., People, Entertainment Weekly, etc. I don’t think I’m even wearing the plastic gloves.

Any talented 20-something web designers out there living on a trust fund with a little extra time on their hands? Two regular columns a week plus WIRED every day plus editing the other columnists plus assembling each page with jpegs and whatnot…I’m losing it. This isn’t whining — it’s fact. You could be from Botswana…I just need some help.

The first words…the first sound…in I Heart Huckabees is a rapid-fire obscenity spew from the mouth of Jason Schwartzman. It’s brash, funny…sets the tone. But it was probably borrowed. John Malkovich’s character in the original 1987 Circle Rep production of Lanford Wilson’s Burn This made his entrance with the very same bit. Did David O. Russell (then 29 years old) ever catch a performance?

Critical reactions to The Motorcycle Diaries have been mostly admiring (like mine), but the political legacy of the real-life Che Guevara is taking bites here and there. Daily News critic Bob Strauss complains that it’s “a feel-good movie about a guy who helped to establish the Castro dictatorship in Cuba, for which he killed many and ordered the executions of many more.” And Salon‘s Paul Berman laments that “the cult of Ernesto Che Guevara is an episode in the moral callousness of our time. Che was a totalitarian. He achieved nothing but disaster. [He] was a mainstay of the hardline pro-Soviet faction in Cuba. Che presided over the Cuban Revolution’s first firing squads. He founded Cuba’s ‘labor camp’ system…that was eventually employed to incarcerate gays, dissidents, and AIDS victims.” Yikes…