• Former New Line heads Bob Shaye and MIchael Lynne have announced their first project under their new deal at WB. They’ll adapt Foundation from Isaac Asimov trilogy about “a society that has figured out how to predict the future based on a method called psychohistory and sets up a foundation devoted to scientific research to protect itself and ensure its survival.”
• Jennifer Lopez will attempt to return to the thematic site of past glories, playing a preternaturally sophisticated servant who falls for her boss in The Governess, a new film for her Maid in Manhattan director Kevin Wade.
• New films from Darren Aronofsky, Jonathan Demme and Kathryn Bigelow will join the Coen Brothers’ Burn After Reading at the Venice Film Festival. And these are just the Americans––Barbet Schroeder, Hayao Miyazaki and Takeshi Kitano are among the international auteurs to show work in the competition.
• Meanwhile, due to “unforeseen events and personal reasons,” Anjelica Huston has backed out of a planned appearance at the Locaro Film Festival, where her film Choke will screen and where she was to accept a special award.
  

I’ve been in a really ominous mood all day. I thought it was just because the sky is grey and I’ve been been listening to this Belong EP, which basically sounds like a prolonged death rattle, but now that I’m reporting the second major story about people losing their jobs in the past couple of hours, I’m starting to feel like it’s not just me. The whole internet feels like the last scene of Madam Butterfly today––death now fills the air.

Anyway: the news. Warner Brothers has shut down its two remaining, dueling indie arms, Warner Independent Pictures and Picturehouse. Warner’s COO Alan Horn released a statement basically saying that the shell of New Line will handle all low budget fare going forward, and claimed to be “confident that the spirit of independent filmmaking and the opportunity to find and give a voice to new talent will continue to have a presence at Warner Bros.”

So. What about acquisitions? Will Warners be sending one of the ten New Line employees left standing to Cannes next week, or will they just cede that game to the other indie arms and focus on the cheap genre fare that the new New Line is allegedly committed to churning out? What about the WIP and Picturehouse movies already in the can and on the shelf––like Picturehouse’s remake of The Women, or WIP’s anti-climax waiting to happen, Towelhead? Your guesses are as good as mine. I’m just hung up on the fact that Funny Games was the last WIP release. Funny Games killed a studio!

• Swedish vampire buzz magnet Let The Right One In took the top narrative prize at the Tribeca Film Festival last night. Shane Meadows’ Somers Town walked away with consolation acting prizes for its two young stars, and the extremely narratively confused My Marlon and Brando inexplicably won the Best New Narrative Filmmaker award. More Tribeca wrap-up stuff later today.
• Variety says Iron Man “is looking like an ironclad winner” at the box office (for what it’s worth, the 8pm screening I went to last night was barely half-full), whilst Made of Honor, Patrick Dempsey’s return to headlining big-screen romantic comedies after a 20 year hiatus, hopes to “generate some counterprogramming coin.”
• Comedian/Microsoft pitchman Demetri Martin has been cast in the lead role in Ang Lee’s next film, as the closeted gay man who accidentally invented Woodstock.
• New Line has bought its first pitch since moving in with the corporate parents. Dan Mintner: Badass for Hire, a parody of films like Cobra and Predator, is being positioned as “an R-rated comedy in the spirit of Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle and Wedding Crashers, the kind of movie that ‘classic’ New Line was good at making and that the new iteration will be making as well.” Diablo Cody svengali Mason Novick will co-produce.

• Baby Mama had a big weekend. The Tina Fey comedy made $18 million dollars, beating Harold and Kumar’s take by about $4 million and easily enough for the top box office slot. Still, the stoner comedy more than made back its production budget in its first weekend, and that’s cause enough for Warner execs to take credit for handling their first post-merger New Line release successfully.
• The Hollywood Reporter says IFC is in “final negotiations” to distribute The Pleasure of Being Robbed, the Josh Safdie feature which has been the subject of much chatter since it was announced as the only American film to screen at the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes.THR’s Gregg Goldstein is calling this turn of events ” a final triumph for SXSW producer Matt Dentler,” who selected the film for his final Emerging Visions sidebar before departing for Cinetic.
• Idiocracy is not even mentioned in this Variety story about Mike Judge’s next project, a workplace comedy called Extract which is set to star Jason Bateman. Pay no attention to the political satire which spawned an energy drink even though the film itself was barely released––me want more Office Space!!!

• Matt Dentler, whose name has become synonymous with the SXSW Film Festival’s ascendancy over the past several years as both a studio launching pad and a platform for no-budget American indies, is leaving the festival to take a position on a new digital rights wing at sales agency Cinetic. He’ll be replaced at SXSW by Janet Pierson who, with husband John, repped for sale some of the biggest indie success stories of the 90s, including Roger & Me and Slacker. For the full details behind these moves, check out this story at indieWIRE.
• Time Warner has fired roughly 450 of New Line’s 500 employees, as part of their move to fold the long-independent speciality division fully into the corporate beast.  The news has been expected for awhile––so much so that, after the requisite mourning, David Poland’s already looking at mini-studio’s demise as an opportunity to lessen urban blight.
• The Academy has announced some key dates for the 2009 Oscar calendar. Most of note: nominations will be announced two days later than is traditional, in order to give the presidential inauguration on January 20 some breathing room.

• Are real celebrities now taking self-parody cues from an unusually trite episode of Entourage? The same morning that Paramount announces a major acquisition for producer Brad Pitt and the production company Pitt started with former wife Jennifer Aniston, Aniston announces that she’s starting her own production company! Through which she’s going to make movies  “about distinct characters that embody something relatable and relevant about human nature’s double-sided coin of vulnerability and mettle.” Anything you can do, I can do better! Even if you maybe married the homewrecker you knocked up whilst trying to rebuild New Orleans with your multi-culti band of orphans!
• Richard Brenner, described as Toby Emmerich’s “right-hand man,” will stay on at the new New Line as president of production.
• Variety has a raft of release dates for fall Oscar hopefuls, including Sam Mendes’ Revolutionary Road, David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and Ron Howard’s adaptation of Frost/Nixon.

• Bob Iger says Disney’s Hong Kong thene park had a rough second year because his researchers drastically under-estimated how long it takes to eat lunch. “There were longer lines to eat than to ride Space Mountain.” Oh, and iTunes makes money.
• Warner Brothers is trying to coax New Line’s Toby Emmerich to take a newly-created position as head of the pared-down, independent studio. WB wants to refashion New Line into a boutique producing half a dozen films a year at no more than than $50 million each. Variety says this could throw a wrench into a few proposed New Line projects, including (obviously) The Hobitt, and (not so obviously) a sequel to Wedding Crashers. Adjust that 2005 film’s budget for inflation and you’re up to just over $43 million; are we to assume that the remaining seven million is to spent on keeping both Fred Claus and Drillbit Taylor on retainer?
• The Hollywood Film Festival is adding the Hollywood Trailer Awards to their October slate of festivities.  Yeah, I know–I spend a week in Texas, and this is all I can come up with on my return? Blame the cold I picked up somewhere on the journey home. Or, hell––just blame Variety.

• The Chinese censors have reportedly placed a media ban on actress Tang Wei, due to her sex scenes in Lust, Caution.  This means she can’t attend award show or appear on television, and the nation’s print media has been ordered to pull all feature stories about her.
• Anne Thompson eulogizes New Line, with help from John Waters, who recalls, “They were the first ones to mix art and exploitation, which is where I was coming from.”
• A Sopranos producer is writing a “NASCAR drama” for Gary Ross to direct at Universal. Ross seems particularly excited about depicting a sport that people actually care about: “I used blow-up dolls for crowd scenes in Seabiscuit, but that won’t be necessary in a sport where there are 150,000 fans in the stands every Sunday.”

• ThinkFilm has announced their acquisition of Azazel Jacobs’ Momma’s Man, for theatrical release after its New York premiere at New Directors/New Films next month. We reviewed the film (which I love) when it premiered at Sundance, and also interviewed Azazel.
• Joan Cusack is playing Isla Fisher’s mom in a romantic comedy about a New York magazine journalist with a lot of credit card debt (ah, romance). Before you ask, “Wait, does that even make mathematical sense?”––yes, it does. If Joan gave birth when she was 14. Eight years before playing a teenager in Sixteen Candles.
• Speaking of fuzzy math, I don’t understand these figures at all.  Turner Broadcasting (TBS, TNT, etc) has picked up broadcast rights to a number of films that will theoretically be released by New Line and Picturehouse later this year. Variety says, “The coin involved in Turner’s purchase…[comes] in at a high end of about 11% of the eventual domestic box office gross of the four New Line pictures.” How do you calculate eventual gross on films that have not only not opened, but which lie in limbo because their ostensible distributor no longer really exists? According to this story, Warners execs have just started screening films on New Line’s leftovers, and questions like “What pictures will ultimately make it to the slate, and when will they be released?” have yet to be answered. Isn’t the eventual gross of, say, The Women remake heavily dependent on whether or not Warner Brothers gives it the full push as if it were one of its own, or, conversely, dumps it in September when all their “real” fall films are opening at Toronto?

• “From the grave of Queer Cinema emerges the gay zombie movie, in the form of German-Canadian co-production Otto; or, Up with Dead People,” declares Matt Riviera. His aim is to defend Bruce LaBruce’s latest “intentionally bad film” from critics who refused to engage with it. “I wonder if some of the folk who didn’t get Otto simply missed the second layer of satire beneath the obvious metaphor of capitalist, consumerist societies turning today’s youth into zombies (kids who feel ‘dead inside’).”
• Jeffrey Wells reminisces about his brief stint as a publicist for New Line: “I grew up under the domain of an alcoholic dad, and can tell you that I felt the same disturbed, frazzled, self-loathing aura. But at the same time I was relieved that New Line wasn’t a chilly corporate place.”
• At Big Media Vandalism, Odienator offers a recap of Black History Mumf.
• “4:43p Scarlett Johansson gets married. Tells Anne she is scared about tonight (cause of the sex, in case you’re slow)…4:45p Scarlett’s husband says “lie down.” That’s it. Wow, sex was awesome back then.” Ricky and Alex at 23/6 live blog The Other Boleyn Girl.

• The New Line Fallout continues: Sex and the City: The Movie (we can link to the trailer now! But we can’t embed it! Because the intern responsible for uploading trailers to YouTube has probably already been fired!) and Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay are amongst the upcoming films facing release limbo in the wake of news that 75% of the former standalone studio’s staff is expected to be fired. Variety says Warner Brothers’ consolidation plan in the months ahead is “reminiscent of what happened to Disney’s Miramax arm after the Weinstein brothers departed in 2005,” which doesn’t bode well for the fate of the films: in the fall of 2005, Disney dumped 10 Miramax films in 10 weeks with little fanfare, and even star-propelled projects like Proof and The Libertine couldn’t recover from the insult.
• Semi-Pro managed to come in at number one at the box office this weekend with just $15 million. The Other Boleyn Girl debuted on a third of the screens but made over $2k more on each of them, proving that, even in the darkest economic times, there’s always a market for implied lesbianism.
• Speaking of implied lesbianism: Ellen Page has dropped out of Sam Raimi’s Drag Me To Hell, which will begin shooting two weeks later than expected.
• indieWIRE reports that the Tribeca Film Institute and funding organization Renew Media are merging “to create one institution dedicated to innovation in film and media, the enrichment of audiences and the promotion of education, understanding and creativity through the media arts.” The new org will be headed by Renew’s Brian Newman.

• Oh, good: Indiana Jones and the Dorian Grey-ing of Harrison Ford Into Shia LaBouf will premiere at Cannes! Maybe. No one’s seen the thing yet, but according to Variety, “The cast, which includes Harrison Ford, Shia LaBeouf and Cate Blanchett, have already been notified to pack their black-tie outfits for the French Riviera’s red carpet unspooling even though the fest has yet to confirm its official lineup.” Because celebrities pack suitcases 10 weeks in advance.
• Theatrical exhibition conference ShoWest will confer a special “Freedom of Expression Award” to Ang Lee and James Schamus, for releasing Lust, Caution with an NC-17 rating instead of cutting the film to get an R. National Theater Owners president John Fithian is inexplicably trying to push studios to revitalize the NC-17 market, even though even Lust, Caution made just under $5 million domestically, and in fact was a super-hit in China…where it was cut to appease the censors.
• Semi-Pro, which opens today, suddenly bears the dubious distinction of being the final release from New Line before the studio is subsumed into the clusterfuck that is Time Warner. It may not exactly send the studio out with a bang: although the comedy is said to be “tracking well among males under 25″ it’s nonetheless expected to “open well lower than Ferrell’s most recent films.”

Variety reports that Time Warner is getting rid of New Line heads Bob Shaye and Michael Lynne and is absorbing the “indie” into the general Warner Brothers machine. Nikki Finke has the full press release.

I don’t have anything to say about this, other than that NO ONE should be allowed to start a headline with the phrase “Toldja!”––even if they did, in fact, tell us.

• Informal strike talks are still slogging on––Robert Iger from Disney and Peter Chernin of News Corp will rep the AMPTP today––but without a set deadline for “officially” going back to the table, there are fears that the WGA will drag this out until June, when SAG’s contract expires, so that they can basically shut down Hollywood together until some time in the fall.
• The tech world is freaking out over Microsoft’s offer to buy Yahoo for $44.6 billion in cash and stock, which kind of takes the thunder from another Yahoo story from several hours before that story broke: former Warner Brothers chief Terry Semel announced he was leaving his position on the board at Yahoo. Earlier this week, Nikki Finke spread a rumor that Semel would soon leave Yahoo and possibly take over as head of New Line.
• Disney is releasing the 3D concert film Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour theatrically for one week only beginning today. The tween sensation is expected to beat the box office competition, which includes the Jessica Alba horror film The Eye, which was withheld from film critics.