Paris Hilton and her team have successfully pressured the Toronto International Film Festival into canceling all but one screening of Adria Petty’s Paris, Not France, a documentary about the celebrity heiress which “attempts to explore the Paris phenomenon and how it defines this moment in culture” and is also “modeled after the 1960s “it”-girl film Darling.” Though the film’s TIFF info page still lists three public screenings, TIFF documentary programmer Thom Powers confirmed to me that Paris will screen only once at the festival. “From my standpoint, of course, I wish we could do additional screenings,” Powers told me in an email. “But this is certainly a better option than not showing the film at all.”

Of course, the big question is why, and that’s something that no one seems willing to give up an answer for. As I’ve noted before, if it turns out that Hilton’s own life resembles the narrative of Darling, that might qualify as embarassing to a different kind of starlet (Orgies! Abortion! Glorified prostitution! Ennui!), but not Paris. As Steven Zeitchik joked when he first blogged about this, “the mind dances at what kind of footage can be seen so newly shameful to Paris Hilton, the enfant teribles whose entire reputation is based on shamelesness.” Zeitchik didn’t name his own sources, who apparently didn’t offer details as to what, exactly, rubbed the celebutante the wrong way. Publicist Mark Pogachefsky’s statement on behalf of the filmmakers is extremely vague: “For a variety of reasons - which we are unable to discuss - the film will only be screened once.  We are optimistic that the film will ultimately be released commercially, but we are not able to comment further.”

But I’ve got to wonder if there’s more to this than meets the eye. …Read more

California may have spent the last five years under the rule of a Republican movie star, but news that major industry players are anything but super-lefty liberals still seems to strike many as a surprise. Responding to a story in which it’s casually mentioned that Dennis Hopper is expected to attend the Republican National Convention, Defamer’s Kyle Buchanan writes, “Did we miss the memo that said the countercultural director of freaking Easy Rider was a Republican? We’d assumed his appearance in the right-wing Zucker film An American Carol was a strict paycheck gig…”

I’m not sure when the “memo” first went out, but Hopper has been a registered Republican for over 25 years. …Read more

It’s late August. Our brains have been fried by lust for Nastia Liukin Olympic spirit. We’re ten days away from the start of fall festival season/Oscar frenzy proper. For these reasons and probably loads more, we woke up this morning desperately in need of something to obsess over that would involve no brain power whatsoever.

And Thom Powers, in his infinite wisdom as documentary programmer for the Toronto International Film Festival, provided, by programming Paris, Not France, a documentary which purports to offer an exploration of “the businesswoman and the human being behind the public persona that is Paris Hilton…Modelled [sic] after the 1960s “it”-girl film Darling.” We’ve thus spent half the day digging up as much info on the film as we can find. Here’s what we know as of 2:04 PM, August 19, 2008:

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The Toronto International Film Festival sent out an email this morning with 15 attachments, and although many of them represent lists of films on the 2008 lineup which have already been made public, it’s still a *bit* overwhelming to have it all land in an inbox at once. 312 films from 64 countries, including 249 features. Where to begin?

If you’d like to look at the full lineup, indieWIRE has that–and please, do look at it, and tell me what you think I should see/report back on. I’ve made some notes about films from this series of releases that I’m excited about––whether out of name brand obligation (the new Coen Brothers, for instance), word of mouth (such as a number of films I’ve missed at other festivals) or pure morbid curiosity (ie: the Paris Hilton documentary Paris, Not France), after the jump. All film descriptons courtesy of TIFF.

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The Onion headline: MTV Movie Awards Snubs Director Jonas Mekas Yet Again. The fake-quote gem:

“It is a travesty that Mekas’ stark vision of elegiac melancholia has not been rewarded with the coveted Golden Popcorn statue,” Boston University film studies professor Ray Carney said. “His [1997] film Letter From Nowhere—Laiskas Is Niekur No. 1 should have easily walked away with Best On-Screen Duo, or Best Kiss, or at least Best Ass.”

Tee hee and everything, but there actually isn’t a huge gulf between Mekas’ most recent major project and the kind of thing you might see on post-Tila Tequila MTV.

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With news that a memorabilia collector has purchased a Marilyn Monroe “sex tape”, we now see the old starlet meets new starlet trend coming full circle. As if Lindsay Lohan’s aping Marilyn in her recent New York spread and Mamie Van Doren’s recent nipslip weren’t enough to show us both that today’s darlings are nothing compared to yesterday’s and that the media’s crucifixion of Lohan, Britney, Paris and the rest ignores the fact that actresses have been comfortably wild since before most paparazzi photogs were born, now we have an historical artifact that seems to validate Paris Hilton’s breakthrough via her sex tape “1 Night in Paris.”

Unfortunately for Paris, in her being validated, we also learn that in the 1940s, fellatio was perhaps a surer step to real movie stardom than it is in the 21st century. Of course, I also think that if Marilyn were alive and just starting out today, she would have enough talent to circumvent the “casting couch” and still become a bigger star than Paris. In the context of today, though, she probably wouldn’t become nearly as iconic nor would she have appropriated the same dumb blonde image. So, it’s difficult to tell where she’d fit in.

• The strike may not be legally over, but in an industry desperate to return to some sense of normalcy, this is apparently the sound of a fat lady singing: The WGA’s still needs their members to officially vote on the new AMPTP deal, but TV showrunners are nonetheless expected to return to work today, with regular writers back in the office on Wednesday. More in our frame of concern, the Oscars will go forth with writers and without picket lines.
• Meanwhile, writers seem to generally think the prolonged strike, which will net them each about $1500 per streamed television episode, was “worth it,” nevermind the losses incurred by those crew members who lost their jobs, or the hit taken to the Hollywood economy as a whole. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the strike is responsible for up to $2 billion in local losses.
• Fool’s Gold easily beat holdover Hannah Montana at the box office this weekend, with a respectable $22 million. Meanwhile, the Paris Hilton-starrer The Hottie and the Nottie, which garnered some of the best bad reviews I’ve read in a while (why did they even screen it for critics?), earned a disastrous $234 on each of its 111 screens.
• Berlin deals: Arthouse Films has acquired Christina Clausen’s doc The Universe of Keith Haring; the Jason Statham crime pic The Bank Job sold release rights to various distributors in 40 territories.

Actor/game show host/former Nixon speechwriter Ben Stein published a love letter to the soon-to-close Hollywood eatery Morton’s in Sunday’s New York Times. A splooge sample:

My wife and I and all of our friends are devastated. I guess we’ll eat seaweed at Mr Chow. But as far as I know, there now is no Hollywood-center-of-power cafe. Mr Chow would be the closest, especially for the music business. Yet for television and movies, it’s a sad, sad time. For those of us who considered Morton’s as much of a home as our own kitchens, it’s tragic.

Dana Harris had a markedly different take, writing up the closing on Variety’s The Knife blog in May:

But have you been to Mortons lately? I don’t think we’re going to be missing much. Nothing is wrong with the restaurant, but beyond its storied reputation, there isn’t much right. The booths are comfy and the servers are pro, but the menu is as dull and innocuous as its French-vanilla walls.

The two paragraphs above seem to reveal an evolution in the notion of Hollywood public space.

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• New indie production/distribution company Elephant Eye is teaming with Palm Pictures to produce Craig Zobel’s follow-up to the Gotham-lauded Great World of Sound. Zobel co-wrote Turkey in the Straw with Barlow Jacobs, who wrote and starred in one of my favorite underseen films of the year, Low and Behold. The Hollywood Reporter says the project is expected to have a higher budget than Sound and to “include more A-list stars.”
• Following in the illustrious footsteps of Clint Eastwood and, um, Ben Affleck, Martin Scorsese’s next project will be based on a Dennis Lehane novel–this time, it’s Shutter Island. Scorsese will once again direct lil’ buddy Leonardo DiCaprio in the lead.
• Sidney Lumet will receive a Career Achievement Award from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association at their annual awards gala in January.
• Marc Graser reports on how the Southern California wildfires are impacting Hollywood life. You’ll take some comfort in knowing that although flames threatened to shut down productions in Santa Clarita and half of Los Angeles’ luxury hotels are booked full of Malibu refugees, “Paris Hilton’s home just steps away up the beach was unaffected.”