• J.J. Abrams says he will “honor his contractual obligation to work as a director” on his upcoming Star Trek reinvention, but will also serve some time in the picket lines outside Paramount, where writers are apparently chanting things like “Who’s got more money than they can count? Paramount!” (There’s no indication as to who raised their pencil to write that one.) Also seen on picket lines yesterday: James L. Brooks, Tina Fey, and the writers of Lost.
• Meanwhile, Hollywood’s two most beloved presidential candidates both issued statements yesterday in support of the writers. Barack Obama characterized the fight as “a test of whether media corporations are going to give writers a fair share of the wealth their work creates or continue concentrating profits in the hands of their executives.” Hillary Clinton was, predictably, a little less acerbic in her criticism of those executives. “I support the Writers Guild’s pursuit of a fair contract that pay them for their work in all mediums,” Clinton said. “I hope the producers and writers will return to the bargaining table.”
• American Film Market is the last event where indie producers can close projects that will be wrapped before the SAG and Directors Guild reach their own pre-strike deadline in March, and so far it looks like slow going. Said Mark Urman of ThinkFilm: “Actors normally on a one on/one off indie/studio film schedule now are looking for big paydays in big, stupid Hollywood movies.”

There’s good news and bad news for Darren Aronofsky fans, reports Twitch’s Todd Brown from the American Film Market. The good news is that the filmmaker has overcome the financial disappointment of The Fountain to work again. The bad news is that he seems to have foregone personal projects for the time being in order to direct a movie about “a washed out WWF wrestler”, starring (gulp) Nicolas Cage.

Speaking, no doubt, for many, Brown says “the idea of Cage playing a wrestler fills me with immense dread of the existential, I think I’m about to begin a slow transformation into a cockroach variety.” But Brown also notes that the project bears the mark of Aronofsky’s personal production company, which would indicate that “this is not a for-hire job put on him from outside but something developed internally.” We shall see.

• American Gangster managed “the highest opening for an R-rated crime drama in history” this weekend, earning $46.3 million to Bee Movie’s $39.1 million at the box office. The animated film opened on almost 25 percent more screens than Ridley Scott’s love letter to a 70s drug kingpin. Meanwhile, Sidney Lumet’s Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead added 40 screens and saw its weekend take rise 440 percent. Julien Temple’s doc Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten scored the highest per-screen average of the weekend, with $10,193 on each of its two screens.
• David O. Russell will direct a “risque political satire” called Nailed, which he’ll co-write with Kristin “Daughter of Al” Gore. Jessica Biel and Jake Gyllenhaal have already been cast, but the Hollywood Reporter story gives the impression that the script has yet to be written. Which might be a problem, because…
• Last minute talks were unable to head off a strike. Movie studios are not so worried … yet. Enough preparation was done pre-strike to ensure a more or less full release schedule for 2008; the immediate problem, is that with late night shows expected to shut down until there’s a new WGA contract, stars and filmmakers will have to find a new venue for cheap promotion.
• The American Film Market “has gotten off to its slowest start in recent memory.” The biggest deal of the event so far: Sony agreed to fully finance and handle most distribution for Peter Jackson’s District 9.

• It’s t-minus 16 hours until the all-but inevitable WGA strike, but the studios aren’t sweating as much as you might think. According to this story in Variety, the majors and indie arms have been preparing for this all year, and everybody has at least 5 solid scripts that they could put into production without the consultation or aid of a WGA member. Quoth an unnamed “veteran industry player”: “For now, it’s a television strike, not a movie strike.”
• Meanwhile, while New York indie players are generally optimistic that the strike will have little immediate negative impact on their productions, there is a fear that if the strike continues through January, it could make for a manic buying season at Sundance. “Because,” says Tom Quinn of Magnolia,  “If you can’t fill your slate with enough production titles, you’ve got to go out and get finished films.”
• Speaking of buying, the weakened dollar is making it a lot easier for foreign buyers to attend the American Film Market, which gets underway tomorrow in Los Angeles.  But the exchange rate is unlikely to spark irrational spending; as one foreign sales guy tells the Hollywood Reporter, “a lot of what’s at the AFM is very bad U.S. product — a lot of bad horror films and such.” That comment was presumably in regards to the finished films in the market; as Gregg Goldstein reports, this year’s market for as-yet-un-produced properties is full of star studded projects.
• David Wain is directing Elizabeth Banks, Paul Rudd and Seann William Scott in an untitled comedy about “party-hearty energy-drink salesmen forced into the roles of big brothers to fulfill a community-service obligation who end up bonding with their assigned kids.” Rudd and Wain wrote the script with Wain’s longtime collaborator, Ken Marino.