How to craft a Varietybox office trend story: line up your greatest hits of disingenuous statements from past stories (Juno–the little movie that could! Cloverfield dropped 68% in its second weekend, but that’s not so bad–even if it wasreally 72%!); find either wildly optimistic or severely apocalyptic structuring rubric to make these old chestnuts seem, uh, less old; repeat.
Speaking of Cloverfield, Paramount, apparently turning a blind eye to the film’s lack of staying power, has offered director Matt Reeves two new jobs, including a Cloverfield sequel. He’ll also direct The Invisible Woman, “a Hitchcock-style thriller that probes the mind of a former beauty queen who turns to a life of crime to protect her family,” from his own script.
Paul Haggis is setting up a production shingle at Tom Cruise’s Scientology rec center studio, United Artists.
From the Dear God, I Guess It’s Really Happening file: Dennis Quaid and Channing Tatum have been cast in the lead roles in Stephen Sommers’ G.I. Joe movie.
From the Dear God, Why Are You LETTING It Happen file: Starz is turning Paul Haggis’ Crashinto a miniseries. “This deal fits well with Starz’s strategy of making TV series out of presold movie commodities,” says Starz’ VP of programming, although as far as I can tell, this’ll be the movie net’s first original scripted drama as well as their first pillage of a “movie commodity.”
United Hollywood passes along the news that, mere hours after making a side deal with the WGA that will allow them to legally employ writers, United Artists has made a tentative deal with Paul Haggis to adapt a children’s fantasy book series called Ranger’s Apprentice. United Artists was the first studio to make such a deal (although Lionsgate and the Weinsteins reportedly have similar pacts in the works), so I guess this makes Paul Haggis the first screenwriter to legally get a job in the midst of the strike.
It’s legal, but is it kosher? An interesting fight has broken out in the comments on the United Hollywood post. On the one hand, this looks like a victory for these WGA side deals: the first studio to put a pact together nabs a name brand screenwriter and puts him to work on a franchise film within a matter of hours. But the very quickness of the deal has some wondering: was Haggis doing more than picketing over the past ten weeks?
Talks resume today between the writers and the studios. The WGA’s chief priority is to “get a better proposal on the table”; the AMPTP seems most concern with stepping up their game on the PR front.
Viacom is starting to hedge on earlier indications that they’re all but ready to unload Dreamworks. At the UBS Global Media Week & Communications Conference, Viacom’s Philippe Dauman talked sweetly about Steven Spielberg, whilst potential Dreamworks buyer Jeff Zucker of NBC/Universal focused on how his own company “is on a great trajectory, and we feel great about that.” Great.
Anne Sweeney, co-chairman of Disney Media Network and president of Disney-ABC Television Group, has been named the most powerful woman in entertainment by The Hollywood Reporter. For her achievements, she gets to eat breakfast with John Travolta and Queen Latifah. Yay, girl power!
Paul Haggis and writing/producing partner Robert Morescu have filed yet another lawsuit against Crash producer Bob Yuri, claiming he still owes them “$4.7 million in adjusted gross receipts for the film.” This is at least the fourth lawsuit to have followed the film’s 2006 Best Picture win, and you’d think it all would have been preventable––if anyone should know the ins and outs of inane misunderstandings, it’s the guys who wrote Crash.
The hands-down quote of the day comes from David Cronenberg. The filmmaker was recently asked how he felt about Paul Haggis naming his “race relations are hard” Oscar winner Crash less than a decade after Cronenberg released his own film, about car crash fetishists, with the same title. According to IMDB, there were at least five films called Crash before Cronenbeg’s, but his, based on a J.G. Ballard book of the same name, was certainly the most well-known. And according to the New York Post, Cronenberg thinks Haggis plagiarized on purpose:
I’ve told [him] that he was a [bleep]hole basically for doing that. And so have many other people. It’s very disrespectful, not only to me, but to J.G. Ballard, who wrote the book . . . I made my movie . . . in a very respectful way. Haggis just co- opted the title, and he knew what he was doing.
Did he, though? Could Haggis have really thought that the titular confusion would *help* his movie? I guess there could have been a cunning plot afoot, but I don’t want to give Haggis too much credit.
At Steady Diet of Film, Erin has a great post about two not-so-great film recommendations that came her way via form emails from John Kerry and the ACLU. Particularly alarming (to me, anyway) is Kerry’s endorsement of Paul Haggis’ In The Valley of Elah. In the portion of the email that Erin excerpts, Kerry essentially uses rhetoric to fight rhetoric. Elah is not “an ‘anti-war’ film,” he says (his fear quotes, BTW), because that term is too “too cheap and easy and clichéd.” “No,” says Kerry. Elah “is a film about soldiers and families.” Nothing easy or clichéd about that!
God, I miss the heyday of Prince. But this is not about me: I offer you this clip of the day, from Purple Rain–in which Prince breakdances, vogues and licks his lips at his girl in the crowd, all the while lipsyncing “I Would Die 4 U” whilst wearing high-waisted leather pants and the puffiest man-blouse I’ve ever seen–in honor of Jeffrey Wells. Today on Hollywood Elsewhere, Wells challenged any critic who disagrees with him to a deathmatch. Sort of.
I would like to challenge any film critic or blogger who strongly disagrees with me about the excellence of In the Valley of Elah (particularly in the snobby-ass, Paul Haggis-hating, nyah-nyah manner in which Slant’s Ed Gonzalez has recently expressed himself) to a bare-knuckles, John L. Sullivan-styled fist fight. I really and truly would be willing to bleed and get bruised and maybe knocked down over this. I know what I know and right is right, and I for one would be willing to stand up and go to the mat to defend my cinematic principles.
Now, at this point, you’re thinking, “Alright! Critic on critic violence!” And then, “So why’d Karina match this blurb up with a Prince video? Has she lost it? Let’s see some shirtless Brad Pitt!!! “
Hold your horses. Check out Wells’ very next paragraph:
If I wasn’t such a wuss, I mean. Saying I’d “like” to challenge an Elah hater to a fist fight doesn’t mean I’m doing that. My knuckles would get all swollen and I wouldn’t be able to type for a few days, and then where would I be? I haven’t been in a fight since the seventh grade.
So obviously, he’s not really willing to go to the mat for Haggis at all. I’m not doubting Wells’ Elah love; in fact, I admire his deliberate use of masculine posturing as misdirection. It makes his puffy man-bloused statement of passion seem all the more sincere by comparison.
Posting will be light today and Friday while your dutiful blogger does some traveling. Speaking of travels, news/rumors are starting to spread regarding which fall festivals are expecting appearances from which Indiewood star directors. indieWIRE says Wes Anderson’s Darjeeling Limited has been set to open the New York Film Festival. The Coen brothers are also expected to make an appearance at Lincoln Center, with their Cannes hit No Country For Old Men. According to Anne Thompson, Joel and Ethan will first hit Toronto, where they’ll probably run into Shekhar Kapur, who will be in town unveiling his Elizabeth sequel, The Golden Age. And according to Jeff Welles, Paul Haggis will be making the Canadian sojourn, too–this time with “investigative thriller-slash-broken-heart drama” In the Valley of Elah.
That still leaves a number of indie-arm fall flicks with no set festival premiere. Namely: Love in the Time of Cholera, Margot at the Wedding, and my personal hype-magnet of the year, P.T. Anderson’s There Will Be Blood. While we’re waiting for more news, you can watch the trailer for the Coens’ film above.
How to craft a Variety 
From the Dear God, I Guess It’s Really Happening file: Dennis Quaid and Channing Tatum have been cast in the lead roles in Stephen Sommers’ G.I. Joe movie.
The hands-down quote of the day comes from David Cronenberg. The filmmaker was recently asked how he felt about Paul Haggis naming his “race relations are hard” Oscar winner Crash less than a decade after Cronenberg released his own film, about car crash fetishists, 
